When auto manufacturing jobs got shifted overseas leaving hundreds of thousands of people without a source of income did the government come in and provide for them? No, of course not.
That which is normal is not necessarily also good or not problematic. Racism is normal, but its a problem. War is normal, but its absurdly wasteful and problematic. Cancer is normal etc.
No, it is not. You ever observe small children in a multicultural group? They’re not racist, because they have no concept of it, nor why you’d want to do that. They see each other as peers. Racism is taught.
Small children typically ignore race, but there does seem to be (at the very least) a cultural tendency towards racism as people move into adulthood. There is a good book about it called "Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" https://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria...
People's characters need to be formed, I would at least argue, to overcome a normal tendency to be uncomfortable with difference.
Just because a certain behaviour doesn't show up in a certain stage of life, doesn't mean it isn't an inherent behaviour. Babies don't talk. Talking is still an inherent behaviour of humans.
Young children's social environment is almost entirely defined by their parents. You'd expect very little aggressive behaviour there.
Yes, people grow old, but I don’t think there’s a rational fear people will ever live forever. However, there are diseases and conditions that are age-related that if solved would improve people’s quality of life, especially the last decade or two of their lives.
I believe it would be a far greater problem if those people didn't die. Aging populations are a huge problem around the globe and unless we'd improve the quality of life to such a margin that octo- and nonagenarians are able to care for each other, I think we're all better off with people dying of old age.
I don't know how to reconcile this point of view, which I understand, with quotes like "science advances one funeral at a time," which I also understand. I understand the individual desire for advancing anti-aging techniques, but it also seems to contain extremely real risks of stagnating our sciences & societies. I can't tell whether anti-aging science is ethical or not.
You agree it is a problem, then. What are some solutions you can think of? I'm not convinced the gain is worth the pain, but maybe you have some ideas for me to think about.
I really don't know, unfortunately. It seems important that we go beyond merely maintaining people in a state of being not dead, and enable them to feel young as well. This may cure a certain entrenched resentfulness. It will not, however, prevent people from being asshats or provide a mechanism by which they will eventually go away. Perhaps the concept of limited terms in power would be made more general to fields outside politics.
Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more thought put into solving these problems before I could be convinced that longevity research is ethical.
It's only ethical because we have no power to prevent their death. If research could be done that looked likely to extend lives, but we chose not to because we'd rather people die earlier, that's equivalent to stealthily killing them. We might as well be upfront about it, and have them slain for being too old, except then they'd tend to resist.
Right, so we have two competing ethical problems: extending life is good, but also, it removes the one (ethical) tool we have to handle the problem of accumulation of power in individuals. This is the conflict I'm grappling with. I don't have a good answer to the problem.
That puts you way deep in the wishful thinking territory, again there is 0 rational connection between LLMs and immortality, especially if you're already on the way out
And no, there's no zero rational connection. LLMs and other types of neural nets are already demonstrating they can solve complex tasks. Unless there's some intrinsic barrier to how intelligent they can become, we should surpass human level intelligence within years, maybe a decade.
Once you surpass human level intelligence, you can scale scientific research by orders of magnitude.
Heck, AI already assists scientific research. We basically solved protein folding problem with AI.
Women and people of color also used to be treated like property, doesn't mean it has to be like that forever.
What's cool with humans is that we're able to reflect on our own being and our societies, and when we group together, we can enforce large-scale changes that improve the lives of millions.
We might be mortal meat bags right now, but maybe it isn't the only way, for better or worse.
> I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.
Machine learning is certainly a extremely handy in tacking these issues, thinking of breakthroughs like AlphaFold and similar. However, I'd like to push against your take:
1. There already are tremendous developments happening in those fronts you mentioned. Praising AI as "our only chance" is quite a stretch and possibly even a harmful statement, considering how severely under-funded these research projects are.
2. It seems to me the poem is more about LLMs/glorified chat bots than general machine learning. In that context, I wouldn't consider them as super useful in Alzheimer's research, certainly not "our only chance".
Let's hope solving aging is beyond the grasp of even the smartest AI. No surer way to end up in a world full of calcified ideas than having lot of calcified humans clinging to power and enforcing their ways on younger generations.
Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.
> The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.
Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.
To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosaurs as big, scaly lizards, myself included. That's what we were taught, that's what all of our culture showed us, that's what our museums contained. It was the pervasive view for well over a hundred years before we were even born. But now we know that many of them had feathers! This is an uncontroversial fact, but almost everyone currently over the age of 30 is wrong about it, and everyone under the age of 30 has the (currently believed to be) correct view!
Now think about how many other facts we were taught 30+ years ago. Which do we now know are wrong? What cultural beliefs did we learn growing up, that are now outdated and believed to be harmful? What systems do we need to have to update those beliefs? Given current evidence, will those systems actually work? Relearning information and modifying your lifelong habits is really, really hard compared to children learning new information. I don't think the vast majority of people would put in the effort. I think science and culture would stagnate. Death is the process by which we give power to younger people, who have better information to work with than we did. Death is how we make cultural and scientific progress.
While this is something I feel strongly about, I also understand your point of view. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think the folks working in longevity fields really need to think about and address these problems before they open Pandora's Box and eliminate natural death. I'm not convinced their work is good for humanity.
Funneling power and influence into the hands of the few (which is the practical consequence of AI) can be used to solve problems, but history shows us that it rarely will be used for that purpose.
The drag in decision making of democracy is a feature, not a bug.
Me to ChatGPT: Imagine you are a cancer researcher. You've spent your whole life going down the wrong paths and you've finally just discovered the incredible cure for cancer, "Eureka!" you exclaim "I've found it! The cure for cancer is:"
We've been taught about this in bioinformatics 20 years ago. That's the eventual goal - to simulate human biochemistry close enough, so you can test novel drugs without using actual humans or animals. We're getting closer and closer to that every year, but yes, it's a very hard problem to solve.
Nobody wants it???
You're not paying attention.
I want it. I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.