David Lucas, commenting on a posting at my place sparked by the fact that a relative of mine by marriage is celebrating her hundredth birthday today, pours cold water on the likelihood of serious life extension much beyond a hundred:
I believe increased life expectancy is due to decreased rates of death, initially in childhood, later on in mid-life and now in tackling old-age diseases. There is remarkably little growth in people living significantly beyond 100-110.
The future pattern is likely to be most people living to around 100 and then dying of multiple organ failure.
Which I find bleak, but convincing. You read about occasional people of long, long ago living into very old age even by our standards, even as you wince at the tales of multiple infant death, then and later. The statistics of how medicine and food and hygiene have affected life expectancy until now are surely just as Lucas says.
But does that mean that it will always be like this? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe medical magic will trundle slowly onwards, from stopping half the babies dying, to stopping half the surviving adults dying with the onset of middle age, to stopping three quarters of the wrinklies from dying well before they are a hundred, to keeping everyone alive even longer, by means now not known about. Or perhaps now known about but not yet widely bothered about, because now too difficult and expensive, and crucially (to use a morbidly appropriate adverb), too uncomfortable.
In other words, the reason nobody now lives beyond about a hundred and ten is basically the same reason that nobody, two hundred years ago, ever travelled faster than a galloping horse. The techies just hadn’t got around to repealing this seemingly fixed law of nature. And then, one day – puff-puff – the techies got that sorted, and a few people did start travelling at twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred miles per hour, quickly followed by nearly everybody else who could afford it.
We’ll see. Well, I probably won’t see, but we as in humanity as a whole may.
And if people ever do routinely live to be four hundred or more, what will be the results of that? A crate of Tesco Viagra for whoever can come up with the most surprising yet likely consequence of mass super-longevity.
Surprisingly enough, a psychic, Edgar Cayce, claimed that the Atlanteans could live for hundreds of years. He also made another claim, which might relate to how they filled their lives- regular sex changes! Some lineages, in an effort to have karmic balance in one lifetime, would have souls incarnate as girls, and stay women whilst they married and raised children, and then change sex and be male, perhaps marrying someone new, or both changing together! This might be something that long-lived individuals could explore.
This is both right and wrong at the same time. It is true that the human body, as it stands, cannot be kept together much longer than about 100 years. If nothing else changes we can expect Life Expectancy at birth to climb towards that number. Statistically some would live considerably longer so we’d have more folk at 120, 130 perhaps even at 150.
But then for the wrong part. The presumption here is that we do not gain the ability to make repairs at the cellular level. Once that happens, the game changes. Life expectancy then goes up such that death will primarily be caused by fatal accidents. I have heard that number puts us easily out into the half millenia range; over that time frame, with increasing nanotech and abilities to reconstruct and back yourself up, existence rapidly rises to… whatever you want it to be.
Unfortunately I don’t share your optimism. The human genome is orders of magnitudes more complicated than an internal combustion engine. And while we’re extracted the genetic code, we have no more idea what it means than a chimpanzee has an understanding of Shakespeare.
From here.
One word – Zardoz!
It depends what you mean by ‘life’. A likely answer is that observed by Luis Wu – boredom.
Presumably we will be much more wealthy in the future than now so I don’t think the tired old non issue of resources will be an, well, issue.
The sex change thing is used in the Iain M Banks Culture novels, where it is something some of the characters do from time to time. This presupposes that some technology beyond that required for longevity is in existence however, and muddles the issue.
If super longevity happened today and nothing else changed I think drug use and hedonism in general will increase. Whoever got bored of being drunk until the morning after? This may of course shorten our lives.
Also, of course, if nothing else changed we would also have to work for a living so this would keep us occupied.
Somebody (some famous German?) said that without death there is no sense of urgency and nothing would get done.
I think David Lucas is right. Talk about huge life extension is science fiction. There is not one grain or iota of hard fact in it. Just dreaming.
Biology is just mechanics. Complicated mechanics, but mechanics nonetheless. It can be arbitrarily re-engineered. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first immortals will be born this century. Certainly next century. And immortality is a game-changer.
I don’t think there’ll be much “life extension”. Ageing more slowly is a rather inferior goal, and probably just leaves us with the misery of longer periods of old age. Who wants to be a pensioner for a century or two? Not me. The desirable goal is not to live longer. It’s to stay young. That is what mankind has always dreamed of, after all.
It’ll be ghastly to be in the last generation of crumblers, of course; greying and wrinkling and sagging as people just slightly younger than you bask in eternal youth.
Medicine as a disicipline will cease to exist. There will be no disease, no gradual breakdown, no clogged arteries and cancer to bring us down. There will be no need for us to vex ourselves over how to pay for these things, because they will not need paying for. And when life is a golden vista stretching eternally into the future without limit and without fear, the last excuses for socialism will fade away. Nobody will be prepared to spend endless millennia as a serf, and the current one-shot nature of life will evaporate. There will no longer be the breakneck panic to get it right or have wasted your life. Because, to quote Gerry Rafferty-
If you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time
-and you’ll have as many next times as you like. Liberty will finally come to all.
The future will be awesome. It sometimes makes me very sad that I won’t be there. To have been born so close to the days of wonder, to be aware that they are almost within reach, but to have just missed them… that’s annoying.
Jacob, I think it’s very, very unlikely that we won’t find out someday how to eliminate ageing, as long as we don’t go extinct somehow.
But I would agree, that it is mostly wishful thinking when people predict that we’ll reach this point in 20 years (which is conveniently in a time just before they are likely to start losing their good health.)
On the possible issues: we’ll have a real malthusian problem on our hands when that happens – assuming we don’t learn to colonize the universe before or at the same time. Of course it’s not a big enough problem to make it not worth it, but you’d have to introduce policies that keeps the population constant or only growing very slowly.
I think you’d have ‘childhoods’ that are even longer than now, because it’s not that urgent to ‘grow up’ and have a family before it’s too late. Or you’ll have people doing a job for 30 years and then going back to university to learn and do something differently. I don’t think there are that many people who’d do the same job for hundreds of years, unless it’s very interesting.
Another interesting policy might be, that people over -say- 150 are ‘wise elders’ and not allowed to do politics anymore or teach at university, to prevent society from becoming too conservative. (Outdated ideas don’t change that often – they die out, which wouldn’t happen in that society.)
I’ve actually made several false starts at a Utopian graphic novel. But futurism is hard; my attempts to realistically characterise how immortals in the post-scarcity economy will live inevitably devolve to “The Now, with flying cars”.
Ian B: “To have been born so close to the days of wonder, to be aware that they are almost within reach, but to have just missed them… that’s annoying.”
I’m sure there’s a twist on the Doomsday argument that suggests you’d be most likely to exist at a time when humans are able to live forever. 😉
Chuckles thinks we’d be bored. The rationalist Harry Potter thinks otherwise:
Jorad-
I don’t think there’s much hope or economic sense in trying to “cure” people of ageing. Anyone alive now hoping for immortality or significant life extension is going to be disappointed. It’ll require re-engineering the genome, and that means creating eugenic foetuses. Retro-fitting is surely a vastly complicated- probably effectively impossible- undertaking, and what’s the use? Just let the old flawed models die, and breed the next generation as the new gods.
Those of us already alive to discuss it are doomed. And me, I’m already middle aged, bald, greying, expanding laterally and significantly less fit than I was in my salad days. Damned if I want to hang around for eternity in this god-awful state.
Ian B: any particular reason why aging can’t be reversed?
This discussion reminds me of another question I asked here not long ago, about the immediate (as in next few decades) prospects for space travel. That time I was being David Lucas, pointing out that for the foreseeable future, we are not going anywhere very interesting. For America, Australia, India and so on in that argument, read: ending infant mortality, mending bones, curing regular illnesses. But there are no more such places on the immediate horizon.
As with going anywhere interesting in space, immediate prospects for serious life extension look bleak, but who knows what the more distant future might enable us to do? Just because something is “science fiction” doesn’t mean it can’t ever happen.
Rob, I just think it’d be very, very difficult compared to eugenics and not worth it to develop such a technology when you’ve only got one group (those currently alive) to use it on, then it becomes useless. You’re going to have to treat every cell in the body. Retrofit the DNA, or something? Very hard. Eugenic redesign is relatively easy by comparison.
Much of ageing is breakdown and loss. My hair cells are gone on the top of my head. You’ll have to give me new ones. My cells in general have gone through many divisions and are now not shiny new like they were. It’s going to be much easier to prevent general physical degradation than repair it.
I do find the existence of that baby who never ages in the USA absolutely fascinating. Although parts of her body are ageing- her bones get older for instance- they don’t develop into child, teen, adult forms. That does suggest strongly that there is indeed some “ageing plan” in the body in terms of development of form; and if so that should be fairly easy to arrest by genetic redesign. The susceptibility to wear and tear though, that’s a big problem and it’s going to need new genetic/cellular machinery to overcome. I can’t see that being easily retrofitted. It might be possible with enormous effort, but it probably just isn’t worth it or economic.
Wow, I wonder what could be triggering smitebot in this harmless discussion? Strange.
Brian, while I await my other comments being unsmitten-
I think immortality is going to be a prerequisite for serious exploitation of space. Terraforming becomes worth doing once you can wait around to see the results. Nobody mortal wants to commit serious resources now to a result that will only have utility to our distanct descendents, who are strangers to us. Star travel on any scale only gets worth doing when you can live long enough to get there.
In general, we’re just not productive enough at the moment anyway to sustain serious space development. We’re still too primitive. I’m sure it’ll happen, but it doesn’t make much sense at the moment. It’s a bit like people in the mid 19th century trying to dig a channel tunnel for horse-drawn wagons. They were just too early.
Preventing aging occurring at all by reengineering the human genome would probably never work. The same mechanisms that cause aging are involved in allowing us to develop in the first place.
The concept of effectively freezing aging (reversing it is several orders of magnitude more difficult) is not entirely science fiction though. We know how to do it, and it doesn’t involve directly screwing with the genome, but lack the means to do so currently.
One technology that shows promise, as already discussed, is nano. As soon as we have machines that can both enter a cell without destroying it and are smart enough (or have connectivity outside the body) to be able to understand the lineage of a particular cell then control of aging becomes essentially an automated exercise.
I think when most people talk of “preventing” ageing we mean, stopping it at some preferred point. Nobody wants to trap the entire species as day old babies.
By the way, I saw Aubrey de Grey, an expert on the science of ageing, on a BBC show last night. And he was superb: funny, incisive, and he seemed to get his message across well in the face of any natural snideness. Excellent.
Here is the iPlayer link(Link), for those interested.
IanB
Could it have been the word youjenix? I have respelled this to try to avoid the same fate. The ways of this particular bit of Samizdata are mysterious to me also.
More seriously, as you say, space travel and life extension are directly connected.
How about hibernation? I recently read somewhere that medieval farm peasants used to hibernate during the dark winter, there being literally nothing for them to do, except consume as little as possible of their own produce.
I don’t know what happens to aging during hibernation. Does it proceed as per normal, or is it slowed at all?
IanB
I read recently that one of the driving forces of the British Industrial Revolution was that people were already living longer, and hence more devoted and patient savers, wanting to think more long term. Thus caused lots of capital to become available for big and time consuming infrastructure projects that had earlier not been there.
Ergo, life extension might drive space exploration in that way too. Even people who themselves don’t want to do it might still want to pay for it, provided only there was some profit at the end of it all.
I think Ian B has already been upgraded and turned into an optimist along the way 😉
In answer to Brian’s question:
Well clinical immortality will finish most (all?) conventional religions. “In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life” carries very little weight for someone who already has it. So I’d predict new religions because paradoxically clinical immortality will mean that violent or accidental death bereavements will become truly horrendous. Perhaps that will totally change interpersonal relationships. It might seem paradoxical but I suspect clinical immortality with the prospect of still being run over by a hoverbus tomorrow will give us a more mayflyish view on others.
Side point: I wonder how it would influence participation in dangerous sports or warfare.
Anyway, it’s not gonna happen because the Greens won’t allow it. the future is going to have a distinctly Amish feel to it at best. I’ll probably be Soylent Green by then of course. Green policies will kill the billions they need to kill to return us to the state of nature (whatever that is) of their idealised idyll.
And they’ll get away with it. the famines, the disease outbreaks will all be blamed on Global Warming. They’ll be like medieval preachers when the plague’s in town blaming it all on our sins and demanding we repent. They always demand that. The sins may vary but they still always demand that whether it be abstaining from graven images, various sexual practices, having a hamburger, flying without paying your indulgences to the Goreacle… It is always the same. Throughout all recorded human history. Always the same litany of puritanism calling itself morality.
You think I’m wrong? Green can’t be defeated with graphs and equations and empirical measure – it’s way beyond that – it’s a belief system in and of itself. I feel terribly sorry for genuine environmentalists who have seen their work hi-jacked by professional doom-mongers and charlatans. Green only uses science as window dressing. To use a religious metaphor it is it’s “bells and smells”. Or it’s totem poles that shall take the form, no doubt, of giant hockey sticks or windmills or something “sustainable”.
If we as a species are saved at all it shall come from India or China for they have not yet become as decadent and complacent as us. If Gaia grants me to live to old age. I expect that in my dotage we’ll have hypersonic tour shuttles flying out of Calcutta to look at “The English”* and maybe buy something I whittled. “Oh, how quaint!”, Mr Patel will say, “these Europeans still make things with their hands!” His young daughter will be awe-struck, “You mean they don’t use nano-replicators daddy!!!”
We are screwed so let Heaven exist though our place be in Hell because they deserve it and we don’t. Decadence isn’t just wine and poppies you know? It can also be absurd hair-shirtism and horrendously misplaced guilt about “having too much”. Well the Indians and Chinese don’t have that because they see grinding poverty all the time. We had that once so we had an Industrial Revolution. All I can hope for is that their’s is as magnificent.
“Mission Control Delhi – this is Titan Base, the Krishna has landed”.
*Intended
Brian, I think one of the problems with discussions like this is that we’re extrapolating the Now, and the technologies of the Now. It’s like, in Victorian times people imagined the future would have lots of amazing steam engines, and in the 1950s they imagined atomic automobiles and cigarette lighters. I think it’s very hard to imagine the as-yet unimagined. Nevertheless, allow me to try 🙂
When I’ve been musing about the unwritten utopian graphic novel, my own prediction is a merging of biology and technology. In that paradigm, it’s imaginable that the body will incorporate technological elements- not in a crude Cyberman way, but at the cellular level- and that will basically give complete control over biology. I imagined a scene in which my protagonist, who has- cliche cliche- woken from cryogenic post-mortem suspension, is given his body’s user manual.
Using a simple panel of giant, sparking rheostats, powered by a small atomic pile, our future person is able to reconfigure their cells by wireless. He may choose to become shorter or taller, or change his skin color, and so on; not instantly, the cells have to be reprogrammed and divide/apoptise to create the new form.
But this also means that one could, for instance, just shut the whole body down and put it into a suspended state. It might do this automatically if severely damaged. (In another scene in the novel, the female lead is caught in a bomb blast; the emergency services merely cut off the head, which is in suspension to protect the brain, and take it off for a new body to be grown on it).
This is all pure science fiction of course, but answering your point about hibernation, I would envisage such a capability in our “hyper-humans”. And atomic cigarette lighters too, of course, on the dashboards of their flying cars.
Sorry to ramble, I love this subject.
Brian,
Greater life expectancy also meant a greater accumulation of skill and knowledge. WRT space: how many of the Apollo engineers are still with us?
Not to worry Nick, Greenism is just the last desperate, choking gasp of Civilisation 1.0. It won’t last forever. Always remember, we are living very near the start of the human story, not at the End Of History.
It’s our job as Libertarians to inagurate Civilisation 2.0. What a grand adventure we are part of!
Biology is just mechanics. Complicated mechanics, but mechanics nonetheless. It can be arbitrarily re-engineered.
You’re not a physicist by any chance?
Nick M,
If you have “clinical immortality with the prospect of still being run over by a hoverbus tomorrow” then you don’t have immortality. Live long enough and the odds of that hoverbus (or something) getting you eventually rise to near-certainty.
Sure you do, if you define immortality as just not getting old and dying of natural causes. Indeed, this graphic novel I keep mumbling about opens with our hero nearly getting killed by a polar bear, and our heroine, who’s his “guardian” while he acclimatises to life in Futuretopia, yelling at him, “You’re immortal, NOT invulnerable!”
If Ian B. is right about biology being mechanics then consciousness is somewhere in the machine. Consciousness then could possibly be transposed to data. This data can then be transferred between any consciousness capable machines. This effectively solves the death problem and incidentally allows at least speed of light travel.
I am not sure I would want to live forever (and in any event, you can never see infinity – what I actually means is a very, very long but still finite time. On top of that, even if you eliminate ageing, getting life expectancy beyond a thousand years or so is going to require life to be lived with a very different form of risk aversion to minimise death by accident. The Precautionary Principle probably them becomes sensible, and I am not sure *that* is good).
However, I would like to be able to choose how long I am able to live for. If life becomes boring and I want to end it, fine, although most of the reasons why suicide is generally a bad idea will probably still apply when you are ten thousand, would be my guess. Death is an unpleasant thing, and you don’t get to choose your time of going. I would like to see that eliminated. Once we are past that point, the serious question of whether immortality is a good thing can be considered.
One answer to the sudden death problem would be to keep the brain in a jar in a very safe warehouse facility, and have it control the body remotely via some kind of “atomic wireless”.
Thinking further on your comment, Nick M, I think that serious-life-extension-but-not-invulnerability, leading to nearly all deaths being sudden, might lead to a flowering of those religions that emphasise that one should always be ready for death. At the very least passages from the Bible such as “Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not” and “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? ” would resonate.
So long as we could deal with the overcrowding via space travel, I don’t really think it would change the way we think or love as much as all that. Rather, I think the big change in how we relate to others has already happened in the developed world and is in the process of happening in the developing world. The big change was a result of most children surviving to adulthood.
The thing that is really hard to imagine is what would be the effects on religion or anything else of being able to store people’s minds on computers – with backup copies, multiple copies, upgrades, viruses…
I’ve speculated on how this would relate to Christianity a few times, such as here.
Oh, and Brian, if I win, can I have the cash equivalent?
I don’t see why there’d be an overcrowding problem. There’s no rush to have your kids in a few years.
As to “storing” minds on computers, we have to remember that all you can do with data is copy it. There’s no continuity of the self. I would be no more ready to die than I am now if there were a copy of my brain that could be loaded into another body. I’d still be dead and that other guy, he may think he’s me, but I know he isn’t.
Natalie, that’s why I used the word “clinical”. I meant immortality in the “vampire sense”, never get old, never die but if Van Helsing stakes yer you are toast.
Ian, I hope you are right. But here’s a thought experiment for you… I wonder how consistent the belief in some form of religion is over the centuries. I don’t have figures and I suspect they are ticklish anyway but I might suggest while few Brits now take holy communion the slack has been taken up by Marxists and now Greens who perform the ritual of the washing and sorting of the trash as a sacred act. I’m not being glib here. Some Greens truly believe and some are being holier than thou and I would suspect the same goes for folks who claim to be Christians, Muslims, Jews… And always has done. Because we are at heart political animals and so were our “monkey” ancestors.
Do you see my point? Religion in practise involves politics. When Old Mrs O’Grady takes a cake round for Father Brennan she’s either doing it out of the kindness of her heart or to curry favour and obtain status. Think workplace politics, student union politics or indeed Westminster. Or even look up about the ousting of Hugh Dowding from Fighter Command. All political things.
Why do you think libertarians are considered weird? It’s because individualism is the rejection of politics. It’s refusing to play the game almost everyone plays and that game is essentially picking fleas off each other. It’s the death of politics we need.
No rational person who actually finds out and thinks about it would find almost any of the half-assed “ecological” things we are expected not just to do but brag about whilst it does nothing to the purpose. Yet it still gets done. Why do you think so many Hollywood multi-billionaires drive a Prius? It’s status seeking within their group.
Of course it is nonsense but then it isn’t is it? It gets money and promotion or people to sleep with you and all that.
Ian B. once consciousness is understood, how is continuity any different from waking up from sleeping. It is frightening, so at first, replicating yourself by data, may only taken up by those about to die.
Well Nick, my way of looking at it is that religion as we know it was developed to serve Civilisation 1.0, which replaced primitive tribes and shamanism. That’s why they need a new religious faith- Greenism etc- to maintain Civ 1.0. Doesn’t mean there’s an inherent human requirement for it. Most of the population of the West outside the bizarre USA is content without significant religion; most people only go to Church for marriage and death (arguably the same thing) these days. But neither are most of the population much enthusiastic about the new faith, and are having to be forcibly cajoled into taking communion at the recycling bin.
So there’s plenty of evidence that the masses can live without any particular faith, and it’s largely a ruling class thing, as your own comment points out. That gives us every encouragement that we can escape it for good.
Civ 2.0 is the final abandomnent of the tribal collectivism that was appropriate for, and the driving force of, Civ 1.0. Once we make the great leap forward; any time now, probably, the institutions and structures that defined Civ 1.0 will have no further utility.
Like I’ve said a lot of times, this thing is a class struggle between the majority of us, and the old elites who are trying to hold their old, outdated civilisational modes in place. Unless there is a collapse into an eternal dark age- that is, we literally throw everything developed over the past couple of millennia away- the only road left is forwards. The change is inevitable, but when it will happen we cannot say.
LOL to that, Ted:-) Physics is the only science there is.
Brian: FWIW, they say that children experience growth spurts while asleep (or at least they used to say that 15 or so years ago…)
Ian: I hope you write it, I will love to read it.
Alisa, I have the feeling nobody will ever agree to publish it. Any novel that opens with the heroine machine gunning a polar bear isn’t going to get past the bowdlers at the moment 😉
Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged –
‘To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when you know that you’ve had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people’s funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular.’
So both Douglas Adams and Larry Niven go for ‘boredom’.
I concur with Ian B on pretty much all points. However, wrt the continuity of self, we really need to understand what is occurring in the human brain with regard to that before we can say whether it would or could survive a transition to more pure data. And if it can, what happens upon duplication of that data? We may need a whole new philosophy.
Star Trek touches on this a little with their transporter technology and the duplication of Riker. I’m not much of an aficionado but I don’t recall they gave it more than a superficial treatment.
Richard Thomas, I too, have always been disappointed by the superficiality of the Star Trek transporter technology. Frederik Pohl in Beyond the Blue Event Horizon etc. is much better and set me thinking about this topic.
LOL to that, Ted:-) Physics is the only science there is.
xkcd already covered that
I always thought they goofed when they changed the premise of the transporter such that it converts people to data and back again, rather than in TOS being more of an analogue device that literally turns you into an energy beam and back again.
The obvious ramification of the TNG transporter is that it’s a resurrection machine. You could stamp out as many copies of a person as you like.
Ian B wrote:
One answer to the sudden death problem would be to keep the brain in a jar in a very safe warehouse facility, and have it control the body remotely via some kind of “atomic wireless”.
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. (It’s one of those movies that’s so bad it’s fun.)
OT: did you know?
Ian: maybe you can open it with her going clubbing instead?
O/T Alisa: No, I hadn’t seen that. I’ll have to give it a (free 14-day) try.
I agree with those who’ve said that data transfer is the answer. Trying to extend the functional duration of a biological system seems fruitless. Transfer the base data to a storage medium and then download it into as many devices as you want, like copying software onto numerous computers. Have all the adventures you want, even in extremely hostile environments (fancy a trip to the surface of Jupiter?), then upload and re-combine the data from all your surrogates. (Be sure to keep a backup copy.) That’s immortality, without the boredom.
Incidentally, I once wrote a medium-length story (not a graphic novel) using essentially that premise. Never did anything with it, though, and I probably couldn’t find it now.
Getting back to Brian’s original question: risk porn
Alisa, Laird, why bother? Samizdata reads perfectly well on Kindle’s built-in browser for free..
Richard, I was never able to get it to work well. Perhaps I should try again.
I think t’other Ian is right – we are not far off if not immortality, then significantly extended lives. I’m not expecting to benefit – too far gone already – and possibly not even my daughter, but in the greater scheme of things 50 years is nothing.
I suspect that this will be the cause of significant social strife – it will inevitably be available in the west first (if it turns up in China first I don’t see it becoming generally available!) and the have-nots will use that as a pretext for further mayhem. I suspect also that those who cannot benefit by way of being too old may also try to suppress it – they will use all sorts of pseudo-safety rationalisations, but it will still be a case of sour grapes.
Consequences of mass-longevity: longer scarves, bigger quilts, gentler conversation
Laird, I do hope I’m not misremembering. I will check it later if you don’t feel like wasting your time if I’m wrong.
Laird, Oh, “well”. Well, that’s a different story 🙂 I’m usually pretty flexible on what I’m willing to accept for free.
Samizdata is pretty simple though, it shouldn’t be hard to write a re-interpreter suitable for such a device. Bear in mind that the kindle subscription will only be the articles etc with no posting capability.
ian, forget those who will not benefit, there’s going to be a whole lot of screaming from those who will just say it’s not natural. Just look at cloning for example. Other than some indirect ethical issues with the procedure at the moment, when you get down to it, there’s really not anything wrong with it. Yet people don’t understand it and thus fear it.
Immortality (actually, I think there’s a word for when you just don’t age but aren’t actually immortal. Slips my mind though) is likely the best thing that could ever happen to mankind.
And as a not to Nuke’s first post, I wonder if people might decide to go neuter once they have all their family planning out of the way. Now there’s an answer for “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them”
Ted: that’s because math is not a science – but we’ve been over this before, at much length. Speaking of which, where’s PA these days?
Personally I think it’s far more likely that we will become human/machine hybrids than we will ever find a cure for aging. It’s basically the same result, but much simpler engineering.
Ian B; re- flying cars. It could be said that we already have these, in the helicopter. Any Air-car would be a lot like it in complexity, after all, and have similar problems and advantages… And a recent Australian design had two sets of blades on the one shaft, going in contrary directions- so you don’t need a tail-rotor. Fuel savings of 30% were mentioned.
Disclaimer: this will probably end up being a long and disjointed post.
First off, I expect that at some point, probably sooner than we think, technology will allow simulation of a human brain. It’s already being worked on (see here); it will probably require quantum computers and a significant amount of hardware memory storage, but appears to be a matter of decades, not centuries.
Second off, I also expect at some point – harder to time this one – technology, likely nano and/or advanced scanning, to allow the complete mapping of a human brain: the connections of each neuron to each other neuron. There are fine points there, like specialized neurons (e.g motor, sensory, interneurons), but the main issue, as with the simulation part, is that approx. 100 billion neurons are each connected on average to 7,000 other neurons, for approx 500 trillion or so connections.
From there – I dunno, 50 to maybe 200 years in the future from today – it’s possible to digitize a human brain and “copy” it into a virtual environment. This is where things get interesting.
Will it be done? I don’t see what can stop it, short of a natural or social disaster that will deprive us of the technology. Cost will be a huge issue for a while – “immortality” will initially probably be only for the rich; hat tip to Robert Sheckley for “Immortality, Inc.”. The cost will, also, eventually probably drop.
What next? Well, that’s where it gets wild and dirty. Some considerations:
1) Virtual brains can exchange information many orders of magnitude faster than human brains. Near-instant telepathy (here, copy these memory blocks!) is possible. Look at Facebook and Twitter (disclaimer: I use neither), and imagine not having to read someone’s page or tweet, but being able to ingest it. You could even ingest a person’s whole lifetime worth of “memory”. A hive brain in the making?
2) It’s kinda hard to upgrade a biological brain; not so with a virtual one. It’s kinda trivial (only a matter of computing power and memory) to make those 100 billion neurons into 1 trillion and/or to connect every virtual neuron to every other one. You have an instant super-duper-hyper-mega brain.
3) If you throw in boredom and its solution – thirst for knowledge/new experience/memory, what do you get?
3.a) Extensive use of remotely controlled data-gathering for the physical world. Want to know what it’s like to ski on Pluto? Send a sensor-loaded drone, fly him back, download data.
3.b) Better yet, talk to Chuck over there, who did this last year, and get the data from him. Will he gift it? Will he trade for it? Will you have to or choose to “assimilate” him against his will, if data is a valuable commodity? Will you “enslave” him, in order to capitalize on his future experiences/data as well? It’s not inconceivable that one entity will overtake a VR.
3.c) If data, memory, or processing power become a scarce commodity – which I expect – then economics kicks in, and you end up with a “society” similar in many respects to the current one. There will be “wars” and “property crime” to grab resources, as well as ways to protect them – encryption, poison pills, booby-trapped backups, mutual-protection pacts, trading data for protection, etc.
3.c.1) Here we’re getting into millenia, and possibly longer time horizons, but hey, it’s fun… One important way to protect oneself would be, simply and obviously, to isolate oneself physically from the virtual reality. You remain biological (of sorts), or you build a physically detached VR. Both of these are no real protection, if a VR has access to physical resources – it can send proxies to invade another network, or scan a biological unit. This, of course, is the Star Trek Borg scenario, which I view as quite plausible. If no superluminal motion is used, then one can get away. It may also be cheaper/easier/faster to a hive brain or mega-brain controlling a mega-VR to collect it’s own data, and not bother with grabbing others’, while converting any matter it comes in contact with into hardware, and hogging energy sources. It may also eventually get bored no matter what (another galaxy assimilated, nothing really new, bo-o-o-o-ring!), and… go to sleep? self-destruct? break down as communication delays mount? decide to procreate out of curiosity?
To sum up this deranged speculation, I see VR as the most immediate way to “immortality”, but it’s fraught with dangers, many of which we probably do not foresee, and thus I want an option in, but also an option out, and thus I would not give up on physical immortality as well. Ah, yes, since I did not say it before, I do want immortality, but with an optional death-on-demand. The damn finance geek in me just likes options, what can I say…
Shoot me down, make fun of me, it’s all fun among friends and bright people.
Cheers!
Plamus,
You just described the Omega Point(Link).
Basically God exists because we create him. It sort of links in with a few other ideas that go back at least to Dostoevsky.
IanB,
You mention continuity of consciousness. I got tortured with that one in my one and only uni philosophy module. But what of comas and general anaesthetics and even perhaps sleep?
It’s a right mess is consciousness from a philosophical viewpoint. I tend towards suspecting it’s unanswerable because it’s sort of using the thing itself to take apart the thing itself.
I didn’t say continuity of the consciousness, I said “continuity of the self”. Words like “I” and “me” refer implicitly to a singular individual; by definition there can be only one “me”. If you spin off a perfect copy- put me in a SuperDuperScanner that replicates me exactly- and create another “me” he isn’t “me” any more. He’s some other guy, even though he will be under the illusion that he is me (until it’s explained to him how he was created anyway).
I can’t send another me off to mountain climb the volcanoes of Io, or swim in the underwater seas of Europa. That’ll be them doing it, not me. If a technology exists in which their memories can be copied into my brain, I may have an ersatz memory of doing those things (Total Recall addresses this of course) but it still wasn’t me that did them, anymore than if I copied your memory of doing them into my head; then I’d have a strange memory of being NickM doing those things.
I am unitary. I cannot by definition be in two places at once. It might be fun to experience the memories of other people, even people copied off myself; but they still wouldn’t be my memories; I may remember being on Mars but I wasn’t really there and I know it.
***
In a more general sense, I’m sceptical about this whole “mind as data” thing. It’s like, as I said above, Victorians imagining a future of fabulous steam engines and the 1950s future of atomic cigarette lighters. Every age extrapolates the “cool” technology of the time. Currently, that is computers, so we imagine everything as being computerised, even to the extreme of people, or data-people, whatever, living their whole lives in constructed virtual realities. But I think the real has enormous appeal. An imaginary world is always inescapably unreal. It will always have more appeal to have skied the black run than to have an ersatz “experience” of skiing an ersatz black run.
Intellectuals dominate our society and as a result the intellectual is considered to define humanity. But the intellect is only a small part of being human. The greater part is the sheer physicality of it. I am sceptical that that emotional attitude will change. I want to stand on a planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani and say, “wow, I’m really here!“. To merely “experience” it, as a virtual construct or a borrowed memory is inherently not the same, any more than buying a diploma from a degree mill is the same as earning one for real.
I’ll never stand on that planet in orbit around that distant star, but I strongly suspect that the first person who does will be much the same as we are; a warm squishy brain in a warm squishy body, even if she’s somewhat upgraded from the thing that evolution cobbled together by chance. And when she scoops a handful of exodirt into her hands, the buzz of the glorious reality of it all will be why she took such risks to do it.
“You mention continuity of consciousness. I got tortured with that one in my one and only uni philosophy module. But what of comas and general anaesthetics and even perhaps sleep?”
You go to sleep/slip into a coma/die and your consciousness is transferred to a clone. Apart from any physical changes to the clone body, what tells you that you are now a ‘new’ consciousness and not a continuation of the ‘old’ one. Perceptually it seems unlikely that there will be a break.
Once you know however, all sorts of psychological issues kick in, as the Doctor demonstrated recently…
I reckon the techies will get it sorted; my money’s on sweet potatoes with added thallium oxide.
Nick, I believe it does have an answer and I suspect it lies in the quantum realm, I’m thinking in some kind of short-term prescient feedback. I know I am basically a machine and, as others, I function mostly according to that fact. However there is something more too. It’s not just a observer as evidenced by the fact that it is able to guide the machine to express the fact of its existence. Although there is the question of whether any consciousness would give rise to the same expression.
It’s an interesting question on the preservation of that self, as you say, sleep itself is an interesting phenomenon. Am I a different self from yesterday? How would I know, I have only my physical memories to guide me. Could my “self” somehow be transferring between different people, living different lives from day to day. Is my self a thread that runs through every conscious being through history? Am I somehow god and just don’t know it? Or is it just a brief spark that glows for 16 hours each day then fades after approximately 70 years.
That all wanders into the realm of fantasy of course but until we work out what’s going on, all interesting points to ponder. I often wonder if the answer (and perhaps the secret to immortality) are sitting out there for anyone to see but our brains just shy away from the fact. Perhaps the trick is to look not for the answer but for the shape of what lies around the answer. “for no man can see Me and live!'” and all that…
I tend to be sceptical about connecting consciousness with QMech.
The arguments tend to run along the lines of, “Both are really mysterious so…”
I could be wrong. Seen the latest stuff out of the LHC?
Woo Woo!
So am I. I’ve been interested in this for my whole life, and everything I’ve read about the actual science so far done indicates that the basic functioning of the brain is simple in the sense of being based on well understood chemistry and classical physics. Ionic pulses down neurons, changes of chemical concentration, and so on. There’s nothing mysterious going on in there (or in here, I should say!). It’s really just a matter of figuring out they wiring.
I think a lot of mystification occurs because people try to apply computer metaphors to the brain. It isn’t a computer, it’s nothing like one. There’s no data and no program. It’s an analog system. Philosophers wonder where this mystery thing “consciousness” resides, and I think they think too hard.
Consciousness is simply a consequence of being a physical system. The basic building blocks of thought are not concepts (that’s the computer metaphor “data” mistake). They are experiences. The primitives of thought are feelings; that hurts, that makes me feel good, that tastes good, that tastes bad. The experience of being a brain is the way it is because it is constantly assailed by experience. It doesn’t process data like a computer. It doesn’t poll ports. It’s just the hub of an experience stream.
I know, streams don’t have hubs. Whatever.
What about memory then?
Who Wants To Live Forever anyway?
Firstly everyone will have to die at some point if they haven’t moved off the Earth when the Sun dies.
Secondly people will die and you will still eventually be left, lonely, as one of the few people from your generation who you know and like. Every death will surely be much more of a tragedy that it is considered now due to its avoidability. I suspect we take infant mortality worse than we did 500 years ago, but I have no evidence for this (and that’s not to say it wasn’t an issue then!).
Thirdly, I think there would be a massive deterioration in society. Even looking at my brother who has grown up with Facebook, Wikipedia, etc., where I just missed it, he has a very short attention span, can keep in touch with close friends on a moment to moment basis and this has really hurt his capability to talk to strangers. There is something about the knowing that you are always going to be connected to your friends which means you don’t have to make an effort with people you don’t know: you always have a safetly net. Less need to use your brain as everything is at your fingertips. You don’t need to work for it so it will be much less impressive when you get it. Imagine the wonder pilgrims must have felt arriving at Canterbury Cathedral after walking barefoot for weeks. Compare that to driving there and having a poke around then saying “it’s alright, but X Factor is on and I have to get home”.
It’s scary stuff, magical even, but I don’t envisage human nature changing and everyone setting down their arms to live a peaceful, prosperous, fulfilling life doing things that they enjoy doing. Aren’t we meant to be doing that now? Instead most people are contactable 24 hours a day via Blackberry…..
Who Wants To Live Forever anyway?
Firstly everyone will have to die at some point if they haven’t moved off the Earth when the Sun dies.
Secondly people will die and you will still eventually be left, lonely, as one of the few people from your generation who you know and like. Every death will surely be much more of a tragedy that it is considered now due to its avoidability. I suspect we take infant mortality worse than we did 500 years ago, but I have no evidence for this (and that’s not to say it wasn’t an issue then!).
Thirdly, I think there would be a massive deterioration in society. Even looking at my brother who has grown up with Facebook, Wikipedia, etc., where I just missed it, he has a very short attention span, can keep in touch with close friends on a moment to moment basis and this has really hurt his capability to talk to strangers. There is something about the knowing that you are always going to be connected to your friends which means you don’t have to make an effort with people you don’t know: you always have a safetly net. Less need to use your brain as everything is at your fingertips. You don’t need to work for it so it will be much less impressive when you get it. Imagine the wonder pilgrims must have felt arriving at Canterbury Cathedral after walking barefoot for weeks. Compare that to driving there and having a poke around then saying “it’s alright, but X Factor is on and I have to get home”.
It’s scary stuff, magical even, but I don’t envisage human nature changing and everyone setting down their arms to live a peaceful, prosperous, fulfilling life doing things that they enjoy doing. Aren’t we meant to be doing that now? Instead most people are contactable 24 hours a day via Blackberry…..
What about it, Alisa? The point I was making is that it’s not data, like in a computer metaphor, where there’s a tabula rasa of empty cells filled up with bits. Information in a computer has no implicit meaning; it only gains it when a human interprets the data as meaningful. But in the brain memory has implicit meaning. That’s because (IMV) it is a bunch of experiences connected together by the neural wiring. The implicit meaning is there because the primitives from which those patterns are constructed have physical meaning due to them being ultimately patterns of external connections.
When you recognise your grandmother, a pattern of neurons that have learned her visual appearance fire in the visual cortex. The “memory” of what she looks like is implicit in the visual cortex wiring. It isn’t “stored” somewhere in a data bank part of the brain. No such thing exists. You can never extract her picture from your brain; that’s why drawing is hard. We don’t have any bitmaps in there.
The memory of what your grandmother looks like is synonymous with the [visual] experience of seeing your grandmother. Does that make any sense?
Ian: OK, I didn’t really get your point about memory, so I’ll put it the way I see it and see if you can help me out here? You said that brain is analog, not digital. Not only do I not disagree with you, I say that computers are not digital either. Where there is electrical current, no matter how small, and no matter how (finitely) controllable, the system is “analog”. The digital pattern is conceptually superimposed by us – that is to say that we interpret that “analog” system that is a computer in a “digital” manner. Computer data is a set of 1s and 0s that are, as such, “electrically” non-existent. In that sense, our brain is literally very much like a computer: it works by transmitting electrical currents between its different parts, and to the rest of our body. But now, when I want to take that analogy/similarity farther and to apply it to memory, I get stuck.
A computer is digital by design. If the voltage is above a certain threshold then it is a 1, otherwise it is a 0. The circuitry in a computer cannot distinguish between other voltages and take those into account, whereas your brain might be able to. A voltage of 0.5 in a particular neuron might indicate your grandmother whereas 0.7 might be your uncle. Quantum computing may be a closer analogy as is does not run on discreet 1s and 0s.
If you supplant a program from one computer to another, the program will run the same. However, imagine you put all your memories, experiences, etc onto a computer such that it is now conscious. You have copied yourself and you are still conscious, and it is now conscious. That doesn’t mean that you will know what it knows. If you take it to the other side of the world you will not be able to experience what it is experiencing.
For a very good description of a future society featuring life extension, backing up/dowloading minds I recommend Peter F Hamiltons’s Commonwealth saga (Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained)
IanB,
I think I came to a very similar conclusion to you about consciousness. Just one thing I would add. Taste, opinion.
Example: I can’t stand coffee. Lots of people love coffee. I have no idea why that is the case. I mean I’ve never liked coffee.
Perhaps it is due to the analogue nature of the brain and it therefore being inherently non-linear.
I had a vague idea for a SF short dtpry a few years back called, “Desiring Machines”. Essentially some computer scientists decide to build a real AI to pass the Turing test and that’s how they do it. The make a machine with desires, hopes, dreams, random flashes of inspiration, tastes that it itself can’t explain…
And they succeed and whilst technically a success it’s a practical failure because it essentially loses what makes computers useful. By becoming conscious their gizmo has lost the ability to do a zillion calculations a second or store data exactly.
The title I thought clever. It would have been the name of the start-up but also it’s about the fact that we desire machines because of the inherent uses they have in not having tastes or morals or values and all that jazz.
I guess in short what I’m saying is I very much doubt it is possible to build an AI as usually envisaged. I mean no C3PO who displays loyalty to his friends and a camp manner but also knows perfectly 6 million forms of communication is possible. I suppose we are back to flying cars here. They haven’t happened because they are combination of such very different things.
IanB:
I do not follow your argument, Ian. What happens when you see a person is your brain running a very quick search in its database of stored faces. If it finds one of sufficient similarity, it concludes “match”. Actually, the process is more of a filtering out – e.g. face shape brings in N potential matches, nose reduces that to M, eyes shape reduces that to L, and so on. Here’s Wikipedia on Face Perception: “A “view centered description” is derived from the perceptual input. Simple physical aspects of the face are used to work out age, gender or basic facial expressions. Most analysis at this stage is on feature-by-feature basis. That initial information is used to create a structural model of the face, which allows it to be compared to other faces in memory, and across views. This explains why the same person seen from a novel angle can still be recognized.”
I agree that the human brain is not mappable 1-to-1 to a binary element construct. But it may well be mappable on a 1-to-many basis – it may take multiple binary elements to perform the full range of functions of a single neuron. Furthermore, as Hektor points out, it’s not a given that computers will always be binary. That is an artifact of our current technology and economics. Analog computers have been used (ask NickM about naval gun data computers in WW2). Transistors beat the crap out of them on a cost/performance basis, so we’re in a binary age, but that may well end very soon.
I suspect you have locked yourself into a comfortable definitional loop. If she does not have the warm squishy body and the warm squishy brain, you will not recognize her as a person. Which is all well and good – you have a full right to. Just define a person, while remembering that a few hundred years ago black people or women were not considered persons. This is not a cheap “you’re a racist/sexist chauvinist” shot – just my clumsy way to point out that the definition of “person” is not immutable.
Well, I’ll admit that the QM explanation is definitely only a hunch. But it’s really the only option that’s showing itself at the moment. Otherwise, I really don’t see how the “self” can arise from a machine, either analogue or digital.
The universe is not simply a bag of machines. There is something very special in it and that something is me. Not just outputting data as a machine, not just recognizing itself as an entity individual and separate from similar structures but something which indicates there’s something beyond the physics we currently understand (though not necessarily beyond physics we can understand). Of course, others have no evidence of this in me and I can not claim to know that it exists in others other than assumptions based on external similarities but for me, I am present in me that I would not be in a duplicate of me (I assume).
If you don’t get what I mean, maybe you don’t have it :p
Plamus, I’m saying that that entire description of brain function is just plain wrong, with its computery metaphors and analogies. WHere is the “database” and where is the “search”? They don’t actually exist. The presumed homology between computers and brains, the whole “giant electronic brain” thing from the 1950s comes from saying, “well, brains are very complicated and computers are very complicated, and they can perform similar tasks, so they work the same”. They don’t.
A computer has an active core attached to passive peripherals. Consider a computer “seeing” with a webcam. At regular intervals it polls the webcam, gets the latest data, then its program chooses what to do with it. Okay, to complicate matters the webcam is probably alerting the processor via interrupts “hey, I have some data! Look at me!” but nonetheless the CPU decides whether to service the interrupt, and whether to upload the data, and whether to do anything with it. The camera is a passive device. Indeed, many computer crashes lock the keyboard and mouse; the CPU seals itself in a little world of its own and no amount of pressing keys and mouse wiggling will change that, because they’re passive. If the CPU ignores them, they can’t do anything.
The brain isn’t like that. If your grandmother appears in your visual field the visual cortex recognises her and initiates a cascade of activity in the brain, and the other parts of the brain can’t stop that. It’s a “push” model. Sensory inputs drive activity. There is no CPU “asking” them for data. Neither can we maintain the computer metaphor by saying, “ah, it’s distributed processing, there’s a program in the visual cortex searching the input for grandmothers (or flowers, fighter aeroplanes, fishsticks and all the other things it might recognise). There is no database of passive data being searched by an active program.
The optical neurons “push” at this level too. There are primivitives neurons that integrate inputs to recognise edges, lines, movement, etc. Higher level neurons organse them into squares and circles and forms, and eventually into grandmothers. But at all levels, it’s a “push” model, with inputs triggering outputs to the next level.
This if fundamentally different to a computer, whose CPU has stores of “data” which it decides at whim to process.
To illustrate the difference with a simple machine; imagine creating a little robot on a track that travels left or right towards a light source (it’s on a track to simplify our picture since it can only move left or right). Designed with modern computer technology, you might put a sensor on each end, and connect them to a microcontroller. A program runs in the microcontroller that polls the sensors regularly, compares their light level, then switches the motor in one direction or the other.
A simple organism wouldn’t do it that way. It would connect the sensors direct to the motors. Light at the sensor would activate the correspnding motor direction. That’s how primitive organisms do things; point to point wiring. A light sensor cell will be directly connected to a motor muscle. And all the complexity of brains evolved from that paradigm.
The brain is “pushed” by inputs, it doesn’t have a controlling CPU that “pulls” data from them. Seeing your grandmother may make you happy, or it may make you scared, and you then act accordingly, and “you” can’t do a damned thing about that because “you” are not a CPU.
Nick, I think that’s entirely correct. Great minds think alike haha.
Humans are able to do a certain amount of alogorithmic processing and the great mistake computer scientists made was to presume that that’s the main function of the brain; at the start of AI they thought that intelligence was literally theorem solving and playing chess. But it turned out that those things are pretty easy to program. The hard part is making machines that think and feel. My cat can do them, but can’t play chess. If you can make an artificial cat brain, you’ve solved 99% of the problem.
Brains aren’t data processors; they are “feelers”. They achieve action potentials by combining a bunch of imprecise inputs and feelings and previous biases, not by methodically processing “data” to reach a logical conclusion. Our ability to integrate unlikes- “my love is like a red, red rose”- comes from the sloppy processing; or rather, not processing at all; and allows things like insight and inspiration.
The algorithmic “processing” part of the brain that does mathematical theorem solving is a very late evolutionary bolt-on; most people aren’t any good at it at all, and it has nothing to do with “consciousness”. You can probably build an AI with a super-calculator in it, but in fact you won’t get any great advantage over a human with a computer to do the data processing for him, other than a bit more speed getting started. You’re not going to get “super intelligence” or “super insight” or any of the wonders people ascribe to AIs.
I’ve had some fun in the past asking techno-utopians what a super-intelligence will actually be like. They have no idea; their attitude is, “we will build it and it will amaze us” but nothing specific beyond that. It will supposedly figure out all the world’s problems (mostly leftie ones like ending world hunger, etc) but the problem there is that the ordinary human brain is quite capable of that. The problem we have is that most humans don’t want the correct answer (“free trade, industrialisation of the Third World”) and are dreaming of this super-brain that’ll create a utopian planned economy. Asimov’s horrid dream of machines running the world.
So anyway, I don’t think there is such a thing as super-intelligence. You can have an intelligent machine with a built in computer if you like, but it’s likely to be much the same as us, just a bit faster at solving equations. Its thinking will be as questionable and emotional as ours. That’d be useful, but not earth-shattering.
“Well, I’ll admit that the QM explanation is definitely only a hunch. But it’s really the only option that’s showing itself at the moment.”
150 years ago the only game in physics town was the old ether. Didn’t feature much on my physics degree. There are many examples of this sort of thinking. Sometimes they work out – DNA is an example. They found loads of the stuff in cells and couldn’t work out what it did. At the same time they were looking for the mechanism of genetic transmission and 2+2 did equal 4 that time.
IanB,
Computers only do algorithms. Human mathematicians look at things differently (sometimes). A lot of problem solving is visual or tactile or whatever. I’ve often thought about what I call “folk physics”. I for example never seen David Beckham take out a notepad and pencil before taking a free kick even though essentially that involves solving some quite complicated physics. It seems to me to be a totally different process from ENIAC printing out artillery tables for the US Army. Thing is the likes of Beckham got their through relentless training and practice. Computers aren’t like that when whizzing through algorithms. If the program is right they’ll give the right answer from the first go.
Put simply any computer smart enough to work intuitively ain’t a computer.
I think in thinking about the future, we can not deal in details, only concepts. In this the metaphors we use, which will naturally be current, can mislead us into details. i.e. the computing /data one of this thread.
If we compare consciousness to flying, most of the attempts before the Wright Brothers were envisaging flying like birds, few saw that the problem could be solved with a fixed wing.
So I do not expect artificial consciousness to achieved by a human brain imitation, although that to will come in time, just as now the technology and materials exist for flapping wing flight.
One word – Zardoz
Are you suggesting we make centenarians wear Sean Connery-style red nappies?
Sean’s Red Nappies
I presume that JohnP intented to include a link to a photo of Sean’s Red Nappites. Here it is. Viewer discretion advised.
Living to a hundred would be positively ruinous for people living in leasehold property. You told me that yourself once, Brian. Where would you live?
OMG Laird, I only saw it now…my eyes…my eyes!
You were warned. 🙂