2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime~~

And that's because we've already found the ability to do it. The idea that we will continue to do so into infinity is a bad assumption. Where the trains stops is where the train stops.

Once we reach a certain threshold, we can build machines that are smart enough to design future generations of machines without human intervention. This will drastically accelerate the curve. Anyway, you're being just as irrational by assuming that it has to stop at some point. In 300 years we could infuse human intelligence into every particle of matter in the Milky Way Galaxy. (Note: that's a paraphrase from the article, not my own assertion.)

edited 10th Feb '11 8:50:58 AM by Fighteer

Information theory would disagree with you/them. There is a lower limit to information density, so no technology in the world would let you put a human brain in an arbitrarily small space.

edited 10th Feb '11 8:51:43 AM by Yej

Ahem. In 300 years we might have human intelligence in practically everything within a 200 ly sphere (simplified), not the whole MW unless something really outrageous happens.

No, a singularity is not outrageous enough.

edited 10th Feb '11 8:52:15 AM by ChurchillSalmon

Unless it's physically impossible you know. Physics dictates what technology can do. Being able to exploit physics does not mean you can ignore it if you try hard enough.

Fair enough.

Intelligence embedded as encoded streams of light? Information stored at the level of individual electron energy levels? Just because our current physics doesn't establish methods of doing this doesn't mean that the physics of 300 years from now won't, especially if you project the curve.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but processor clock speeds actually peaked ten years ago. Sometimes, the laws of physics do win.

...Though processor clock speeds aren't a perfectly accurate measure of performance.

Besides, we can do anything with overclocking and liquid nitrogen/helium.

You are cherry picking. Processor speeds peaked, but MIPS - the number of instructions a computer can execute per second - continued to increase with multicore solutions. The human brain is massively parallel, not serial. Anyway, Moore's Law is not limited to speeds but also discusses transistor density.

edited 10th Feb '11 9:05:00 AM by Fighteer

And memristors ought to be getting used for cool things soon enough.

Also, apparently they have a name: singularitarians. That's quite a mouthful.

You'd never heard that word?

Guess I hadn't. I follow this stuff only casually.

I'll be 50 something by then... sweet!

70 here. Which makes me worry a bit - all the males in my family line have been relatively short-lived. Of course, they did dangerous stuff like smoking or working in coal mines, so who knows? Maybe I'll request to be cryogenically frozen on death so they can revive me in 20 years or something.

The article has quite a description of the community:

they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality.

And the cherry on top:

The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention.

The edit is because I decided to cut the snark.

edited 10th Feb '11 9:49:16 AM by lordGacek

I know that clock speed is not a good indicator of performance and that processor technology is still improving.

I'm just giving an example of how things can't keep increasing exponentially forever. Especially relevant since it was one of the measures listed in your quote on the first page.

Anyway, I'm still awaiting the razorblade singularity.

edited 10th Feb '11 9:46:24 AM by storyyeller

Razorblade singularity? How about custom tailored human DNA that removes facial hair entirely, maybe even applied retroactively to a living person? More down-to-earth, you can get laser hair removal now, although it's expensive and comes with potential side-effects. Don't we also have depilatory creams? Honestly the only reason we still apply sharp metal to our faces is that it's such a tradition that nobody's seriously explored the alternatives.

edited 10th Feb '11 9:56:48 AM by Fighteer

The razor blade thing is a humorous example of the danger of extrapolating from past trends. We were supposed to have fractal razors with infinitely many blades by now.

The discussion is specifically about computer technology. General manufacturing is way behind the Moore's Law curve, but it was never intended to apply there. In theory, there's no reason we couldn't have quantum nanobot razors within a decade, except that nobody's invested the time to develop them. Many of the issues retarding general technological development are sociopolitical in nature, not scientific.

edited 10th Feb '11 10:07:49 AM by Fighteer

All these sciency termys make my ALMOST!sixteen year old brain hurt ):

Anyone know when we can simply "restart" our entire life? Whoever invents that woud be the boss/ a millionaire.

I wanna be six again, dammit!!

edited 10th Feb '11 10:19:43 AM by cutewithoutthe

Nanobots strike me as something that will show up sooner than genetic engineering for facial hair, simply because you don't need special ones, you just need to write an app for cutting the hair.

-skims thread-

YES!

LIFE ON THE EDGE, HERE I COME!

Immortality would seem rather the opposite of danger.

Not if I live out Everything Trying to Kill You.

Of course, anyone who's passed high school geometry knows you can't extrapolate a line from one data point, or a trend from two — especially if one is zero. Also, the trend line is ignoring the fact that it was not only zero yesterday, but the day before that, ad infinitum. Otherwise the poor girl had negative husbands.

Yeah, I mean there's a very good reason processor clock speed leveled off. If we tried to extrapolate it just a few years ago, we'd be expecting them to require and emit energy density on the level of a NASA rocket nozzle by now.