Every time an existential post is made here, I have to remind people:
As technologists you guys should have a little more confidence/faith/whatever in the progress we're making every passing day, than is evident from the tone of most of the comments here.
Smart-phones, social media, startups, IPOs, these are huge blind spots of technology. It makes you think that's all there is to it.
Technology is much more than that. In that regard I always remember the DARPA's 21st century forecast of what's the most relevant human progress:
- Info"Tech"
- Bio"Tech"
- Nano"Tech"
We're making huge advances in all three (another blind spot is linear thinking when technology actually progresses exponentially).
With regards to biotech:
- CRISPR has made huge advances
- stem cells are making rapid progress
- supercomputers and advanced algorithms (including machine learning) are getting to the point where we're putting human biology on solid "informatic" footing every passing year. (IMPORTANT: And this is without assuming onset of human-level AI, which in itself is forecasted to happen by 2030. If that happens, then the progress would be unbelievably faster!).
- but most importantly, people like Aubrey de Grey are "waking up" medical researchers and gerontologists from a narrow view of "cure cancer", "cure HIV" and asking them to treat "aging" as a problem and treat it as an object of manipulation.
If people like you (technologists) can get out of the pessimism of pro-aging trance, a lot can be accomplished in the next 20 to 40 years.
You have not offered any argument, you have simply said "if you don't see it my way, you should reconsider".
Why should I reconsider? What about your view do you feel is better than living healthier for longer?
The way I see it, if you take advantage of doctors at all you are already competing against your own ideals.
We have made huge leaps in health such that even if we die at 80, our lives will have been much more healthy and active up until that point.
If I can be healthy and active until 80 and then die at 100, then I will do that. It isn't immortality they are after, it's just more high quality life.
There is nothing graceful, or more respectable, about succumbing to death because it is the social norm at a certain age. I will cling on to life until I can no longer.
One argument is that death and limited lifespans are advantageous for the species overall. More sex, gene mixing and having offspring is better and allows for faster adaptations.
Plus ideas can change faster as culture changes.
That said, there may be ways to overcome this and I still think it's worth working on not having to die. Though trying to determine purpose behind existential questions becomes difficult pretty quickly.
Even if we figure it out since sex and having children is core to biological life and the basis for the replicating genetic code that eventually lead to us - not sure how we'd solve that. Guess we also better get working on space colonization for our start trek future.
Advantageous for species in general, maybe, but for an increasingly knowledge-based species, I don't think this still holds true. We spend our first 20+ years in training just to be able to contribute to society, and then only have 40-50 productive years left to work. This seems incredibly wasteful.
I'd be interested to know how our species' life span has changed over the past few million years. We live significantly longer than other great apes, that's probably relevant.
Asking for someone to offer an argument for the claim that "it is worth while considering other life philosophies other than those that lead to chasing immortality and viewing the end of one's own life as a negative", is kinda, well, quite frankly you sound either too naive to the world to understand the wisdom in such a claim, or you are too stubborn to allow any world view other than yours to be entertained.
Either way, life philosophies that would reflect such a claim don't have comment length "arguments" that would be convincing to anyone on any level. Some things do not lend themselves to logic. Some things require more than a few paragraphs and an argument. And sometimes, those things, are best served by parsimony, rather than loquacious debate.
So your response is that if a cute soundbite is not enough to have me nodding agreeably maybe I am not wordly enough?
You have made the exact same argument that you are defending, it boils down to "you do not understand my world view, if you understood more maybe you would."
I understand not everything fits in a comment box, but when you choose to participate in a discussion then a one line excerpt of "wisdom" is hardly useful. You cannot just imply someone is wrong and not discuss why. This isn't twitter, there is room to get started.
All I ask is some substance above "Have you considered that you might be wrong?"
Because yes, I have considered that, and I am eager to talk about it.
HN is, barely, a step above twitter. If one were to pick the bottom 20% of comments from HN, it would be ignorant, biased, group think, poor logic, borderline bigoted (but mainly ignorant).
I don't expect that you'd be nodding agreeably. But I do think one with a bit more perspective might engage in a more productive manner.
All I have done is suggest that the parent comment's argument was shallow and ultimately unhelpful. The intention was to illicit some in depth discussion, hence my questions and my views added afterwards.
All you have done in both your comments is slight the platform and slight myself, adding nothing.
I believe I understand his argument; It would be a waste to spend life chasing immortality, as you would waste the only life you had in search of more of it, thus getting to truly enjoy neither.
But I am still glad there are people chasing it, as it means we get to enjoy more life than if they were not.
The parent comment's sentiment only really makes sense if you yourself are chasing more life, and even then only if you are destined to fail. The last 50 years alone should show us that more quality life is an extremely reasonable goal. Adding nearly 20 years to the average life expectancy, from 60 to 80 for males in Australia for example.
If you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be, then I respectfully disagree with you [0].
eventually even atoms will stop spinning. i think what the commenter was getting at, is that, immortality is impossible, and so finding meaning in a life that must eventually end, is still important.
also, your argument, red herring. the commenter didn't say, let's all be happy that old age is crap. at all. that was you. you said that. why? idk.
Again you're not making much sense. 'To reconsider getting old and dying as negative' is as close to 'consider philosophies in which old age and dying is not negative' as it can get.
Please look at a description of 'red herring' [0] and kindly elaborate how it applies to my response.
"A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue."
And, this is exactly why I keep "losing my password" for my HN account, so that I have to take a break from participating. I didn't need to look to Wikipedia know what a Red Herring is. And it's a waste of my time spelling it out for others when they could figure it out themselves.
So, it works like this:
You said: "If you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be, then I respectfully disagree with you."
But the person you were replying to said:"If you consider aging and death in old age as a negative, perhaps you should reconsider your philosophy, instead of chasing immortality."
their comment..
If P, perhaps Q.
P = "you consider aging and death in old age as a negative"
Q = "you should reconsider your philosophy" & "[not] chasing immortality"
and your comment...
"If P, then Q."
P = "you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be"
Q = "I respectfully disagree with you"
so, the "P"s are at issue, as both "Q"s can roughly be translated into, "no", "false"
P[1] = "you consider aging and death in old age as a negative"
compared to...
P[2] = "you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be"
Not the same.
The original comment simply said, it's not necessarily bad. You said, "you're" arguing it is good, or natural, or the way it's supposed to be.
Again, red herring: "A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue."
You're misstatement of the original comment so distorts the issue that we're now arguing about whether "death is natural and inevitable" or "death is good". That is not what the original issue was. So, to reply to your comment, is to be distracted from a relevant or important issue. One would have been misled to go down that path.
logic 101. but hey, you have more karma points than me. so, what does logic really have against that.
Without having too much hope for it, it should be noted that the first one who catches immortality will make your post look very condescending and outright damaging to progress.
I think it has been a good thing so far. Considering who tends to get access to new things first the ones that would still be living would most likely not be the nicest men and women of all times but rather the greediest.
I don't understand this popular craving of immortality. If you look at the current society and add immortality, you just get horrific dystopian future, where by the way majority of the world is still mortal just enslaved by power-hungry immortal overlords.
Right now however sadistic regimes are, we still know that Stalins/Kim Jong Uns of the day will die and there is at least hope.
In currently(!) non-sadistic regimes we have inequality issue where richer just get richer and poor get poorer, but at least money can't be taken to the grave, how is it good to eliminate the grave?
And the reasons people usually give for immortality are either outright egotistical "I don't want to die" or a bit veiled "my grandpa/mother/Steve Jobs was a golden person, I wish they still were around".
Well, kudos to him/her, but I take your dead grandpa over suffering of the millions, thanks.
The same for your fear of death, deal with it.
There are some nuances though:
1. We definitely should work on non-suffering in old ages.
2. This grim outlook applies only if there is no other relevant technological revolution happening at the same time. For instance, if we have free nano-machines making everything out of thin air, hierarchy of the society will already alter enough as to allow immortality being thrown into the mix.
I think immortality, like flying cars, is a goal that will only come incremementally.
It may take 1000 years to make people who can live 10,000 years, and in the interm I doubt we can imagine the social and economic changes that will happen as people progressively live longer.
Take the current world, and allow everyone to live till they are 120 instead of dying in their 70s on average. Is it such a horrible thing?
even if we accomplish all this and more, we have still not answered the question, "what is the 'good life'?" because that is not a technical question. we can put off death. we can increase quality of life during the later years of life. and this is important and beneficial work. but, nothing in this work intrinsically speaks to existential issues we face. we may use these technologies as a paradigm through which to attempt to grapple with existential issues, but none of these issues can only be 'solved' with the correct technical tools.
so when your comment begins:
"Every time an existential post is made here, I have to remind people:"
I read that as a global claim (global claims are almost never true) and arrogant (in that you "have to remind people", "thank you for reminding us! what would we do without you!")
First to respond to reasoning behind my first line, maybe I should've said "Every time an existential post _like this_ is made." It's pretty clear that one of the points of the website showing the 52x90 grid is to remind us that we have only a few decades of life left. (And I believe that's the wrong way to look at it in this day and age.) And people responded accordingly in a depressing manner. This has happened multiple times in the past, hence my "I have to remind people".
As for the rest of your response (and after reading your other comments), honestly you're not making a whole lot of sense. Should we stop using technological solutions to make our lives better as much as we can, because they don't solve all your existential issues? (or did I commit a red herring again by thinking you might be committing a 'perfect solution fallacy'?).
Re: ad hominem critiques. I thought they were duly deserved. Your comment came across, to me, as condescending and arrogant, both qualities of the person putting forth the argument, rather than the argument. So, the critique will by necessity be "to the man" (or woman).
As to, you not being able to make sense out of my other comments. That's not necessarily my fault.
A good friend of mine has a 365x100 rectangle on his (high res) display. As a reminder that it is small, yet he has less days in his life than pixels in this rectangle. And every day spent not on a worthwhile project is a great loss.
An e-mail I received right before reading this post:
"THANK YOU for your excellent customer service. Your videos on YouTube -- while I little over my head -- tell how you have a passion for electronics and creating solutions. I have told several people about you and I hope it brings you business.
Thank you for sharing your talents with the world."
It is so hard to imagine that reflecting on this e-mail might bring me some satisfaction on my death bed ?
I've watched both my parents as well as several other close friend die, and none of them really expressed any regrets. What's the point? Most people live the best life they can, and I've never known anyone to spend their last years or hours mired in regret. They actually seem to mostly reminisce about the highlights of their life, whatever they were.
The inverse being: Why don't I just end it all right now?
One answer possibly being: Hmmm, better find some stupid project, and occupy myself, before I really consider whether I'd find a convincing answer to that question. Oh cool, they open sourced this childhood video game!
There is an enormous range between working on a worthwhile project and end it all right now. The point was that very few people lay on their death bed and wish they spent more time working. Typically they wish for more time with their family, or in the general sense more experiences.
Personally, I love the experience of learning something new and hence enjoy a lot of programming. I will not be wishing on my death bed to have written yet another CRUD app. If I die before my wife, I will have wanted more time with her - traveling if possible.
To me, worthwhile projects is about personal achievement, reaching your potential, and giving back to society. So yes, I do wish I had more time to work on more worthwhile projects.
No. It can be assumed that people here enjoy working on projects. Projects that interest them. The deeper meaning of this statement, in my opinion, is that every day you spend doing something that you dont like is a very big deal because, as this graph illustrates, there aren't really that many days available to waste.
Here "worthwhile projects" is not about more clients, money or the HN front page. It's not about work - it's about passion (often - hobbies, side-projects, etc).
Isn't really that no-one says at h[ei]r deathbed "I wish I wrote that book; now this story is lost forever."?
I wonder if the 'tick a box per day' model is a proper visualization of your life. You age, health and knowledge define your potential of doing and accomplishing things e.g.
-- the majority of your top quality relationships are build in the first third of your life
-- you are very attractive for females between 25-40
-- you can learn certain things very fast as a kid
-- you age exponentially after a certain biologic age et cetera
I keep a journal since three years and I mostly write about current "projects" (be them work or my own things) and future ideas.
To answer, yes, a day in which I haven't done anything useful is not really worth as much as a day in which I have, and it will be forgotten (unless I happen to be traveling (rare) or have met someone interesting (rarer)).
Most people have life goals that filter into professional, personal, family, etc. Some goals might not sound like projects "go on more vacations with the kids," but require a sequence of things to be done in order for them to be feasible.
In "the end," the ones that are most valuable will probably not be the professional things, particularly in the technical space. Most because they'll feel especially inconsequential 10 years out. The professional projects I spent weeks and months on a decade ago are problems largely solved and turnkey in 2016. That said, they're fulfilling, and that's why we enjoy doing them and challenging ourselves.
So unless you're doing some really monumentally important-for-humanity professional projects, their value is probably ephemeral. They should play into a larger set of life goals.
Would it be great if you could select ranges of blocks and assign a color to each range according to how you felt those days, i.e. green: good, yellow: not that good, red: not good.
I did something like this in past, with colors, and contrarily to the expectations it actually cheered me up to see all those green blocks making up a huge chunk of life.
Reminds me of Pixar's Inside Out, where memories are portrayed as little colored spheres, with different colors indicating joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and anger. These spheres end up getting stored in enormous warehouses, with enormous splashes of various colors.
I'm not sure what it's attempting to do, but the data it provided me was completely wrong. It was claiming there were only 6 days left in the year, for example. (It's April 10th, so there are many more than 6 days left.) It said 20 minutes left in the hour, but it's 8:22, so there's more like 38 minutes left. WTF?
It's just an info-graphic. A reminder at how important it is to have weekly goals. The squares toggle, so I could mark the current week, or a short period. I think it's pretty awesome you drew a smiley face :-)
Ever since the 60s, epiphanies and ideas like this are fads, fashion statements. How did George Romero say it? Something like "it was the 60s, everyone had something to say." The 60s never ended, people keep thinking they have something to say, and since nobody's listening to them on Twitter and Facebook anymore, they're just getting more creative.
Ahh yeah, this is from Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks post [0], and way before Tim discovered and wrote his awesome posts about the AI Revolution [1] and cryonics.... I guess he knows now that 90 might actually be quite short sighted.
So, I'm forking and adding the estimated date where we trascend from humans to cloud-beings (around 2045, Kurzweil's™ prediction) [2]...
Here's a similar project where the dots fade as you get older to indicate chance of death (the opacity is based on actual US mortality data from actuarial tables).
On my death bed, my only regret will be that I didn't work smarter, harder and longer. That's why I work so hard now; to minimize the amount of regret.
I immediately began marking some memories of my early teen, a period when I remembered being genuinely happy (memories of growing up in Central Africa with my heroic elder brothers). But then I began marking several squares in my late teens for doing things I regretted. I marked a few squares in my mid twenties for doing things I regretted. I marked more in my early thirties for things I regretted. All dumb shit, nothing serious.
I was about to mark a few more blocks towards the end of my thirties too for things I regretted ... I had by then realised that I was one colossal self-bashing negative joy-sapping son of a bitch. How do I stop this self-criticism, dear lord?
Nice tool! Maybe it can be modified to aid psychotherapy.
It shows 100 years of days with someone's life highlighted. Kind of sobering.
I want to be believe like fizixer but it's hard to notice any medical changes. I'm 50, what's changed since I was born? I'm no a doctor so I have no idea. Sure I know we've got CRISPR and we've mapped the genome but where are the actual changes? Friends have gotten cancer, AFAICT treatment hasn't changed much. I still get colds. My hair is still falling out and turning gray. Face getting wrinkles.
Well, over here we're shooting at people's heads with a particle accelerator beam to kill brain tumors. Works pretty well if the conditions are met. Next up: Moving targets you can't bolt to the table because the person will die from not breathing. (So the beam has to be moved.)
Crazy to think how many people will get up tomorrow morning and hate the outlook of their day. To me that is insane and something that future generations will look back on in awe.
The idea is nice (depressing, but nice). But what's the use, you can only turn tiles to red. Can't even drag the mouse to select many, state is also not saved :(. My 2c
Why do people always feel like they are wasting time? How exactly do you waste your time? I ask people this every time I am told, by them, I am wasting my time playing games on my computer. I love playing games... why is doing something you love wasting time?
Way too optimistic. Here, all rectangles look similar, but actually, quality of life in bottom rectangles deteriorates rapidly, medical expenses are skyrocketing, and basically everything sucks.
You could possibly say the same thing about quality of life in the beginning. Lots of necessary medical care, making your parent's lives miserable, can't get up and make a sandwich, higher likelihood of death [1], etc.
I am living in the country with such laws in place (Switzerland); but most old people I talked to really want to live. Nobody wants to die, unless they are in great pain.
This is really profound. I made a rough estimate of when I will die and ticked the box that corresponds to it. Being able to see each individual week that I have left really gave me pause. Wow. And this graph is generous. Your perception of how long a week is decreases with time. So if this were a graph of how much perceived time you have left it would be even smaller...
Aw, I thought this was some kind of colorful Conway's game of life and spent a while looking for a play button after drawing a bunch of gliders and such.
this is amazing. It so clearly shows the human aging process and why 27 is the hardest year/color. But if you survive it, you break on through to the next color. I think around 87 there is another tough year.
I'm not sure whether this is more ridiculous overstatement or personal attack, but it contains enough of the latter not to be ok here. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all.
Well, the latter is simply not true, and if it is the former I hardly see how it would pose a problem. Not that you're in a position to make such a diagnosis.
Assuming it is, though, how would one know whether they are or not?
>I hardly see how it would pose a problem
Being unable to feel a variety of emotions and feeling the same each day can indeed be problem -- an indication of incomplete emotional development / functioning -- which can affect many parts of life, most importantly decision making, relationships, etc.
Of course the web can't make the diagnosis, but an expert can, given an examination.
Of course you might also be saying it lightly, e.g. feel "more or less" the same everyday, as opposed to always exactly the same, and given that nothing especially nice or bad has happened to you and those you know all this time.
> Assuming it is, though, how would one know whether they are or not?
You don't have to know it, you just have to believe enough to pursue something. You can sit around saying "nothing I do matters," but if the end result of that is doing nothing, then surely that kind of thinking would matter even less than any alternative.
>Of course you might also be saying it lightly, e.g. feel "more or less" the same everyday, as opposed to always exactly the same, and given that nothing especially nice or bad has happened to you and those you know all this time.
I feel a good number of emotions, they just don't color my whole day. I don't have bad days, basically. There are doubts, joys, pains, and irritations, but that's pretty much true of every day.
As technologists you guys should have a little more confidence/faith/whatever in the progress we're making every passing day, than is evident from the tone of most of the comments here.
Smart-phones, social media, startups, IPOs, these are huge blind spots of technology. It makes you think that's all there is to it.
Technology is much more than that. In that regard I always remember the DARPA's 21st century forecast of what's the most relevant human progress:
- Info"Tech"
- Bio"Tech"
- Nano"Tech"
We're making huge advances in all three (another blind spot is linear thinking when technology actually progresses exponentially).
With regards to biotech:
- CRISPR has made huge advances
- stem cells are making rapid progress
- supercomputers and advanced algorithms (including machine learning) are getting to the point where we're putting human biology on solid "informatic" footing every passing year. (IMPORTANT: And this is without assuming onset of human-level AI, which in itself is forecasted to happen by 2030. If that happens, then the progress would be unbelievably faster!).
- but most importantly, people like Aubrey de Grey are "waking up" medical researchers and gerontologists from a narrow view of "cure cancer", "cure HIV" and asking them to treat "aging" as a problem and treat it as an object of manipulation.
If people like you (technologists) can get out of the pessimism of pro-aging trance, a lot can be accomplished in the next 20 to 40 years.