One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.
Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.
It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.
Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.
That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”
The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.
In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.
Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.
in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.
Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.
Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.
Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us.
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My grandfather lived to 97 and thought he had lived too long. His last two years were not pleasant ones to say the least. I have never read anything from these people on how to reverse aging joints. What good is curing cancer if you are stuck in a wheelchair at 125 because all your joints are worn out and you can’t handle anymore replacement surgeries?
“The Golden Years,” of retirement are one of the biggest lies in GAE culture.
That is because, for most people, there is a huge range of activities that are no longer physically enjoyable, or even possible when they hit 65+ years of age.
The purpose of the lie in part was to encourage hard work and productivity with the incentive of enjoyment afterwards. Given the change of circumstances, you have to wonder what myth follows. Arbeit macht frei…and?
Lost in looking to the next life, trying to be an angel, is the fact that discipline makes you a human being in the meantime. Hedonism makes one an animal, and after the fun is over, the animal is back to scraping out an existence.
At the other extreme is the self-styled best living the good life thanks to slave labor, but that’s a different matter.
In all things, seek the golden mean!
Anyone noticed that one of the things that’s disappeared are those Spending Our Children’s Inheritance Greatest Generation bumper stickers? Good riddance. That shit won’t fly anymore. I always hated that message. The sentiment still persists though, just not so overt. Let the tech bros have their fantasies, it will all come to nothing.
Haha. Or maybe it was the Silents. I can’t keep up with all these different generations. That’s just a lot of divisive bullshit. There were no “generations” in the current sense until I was well into my twenties. Only wipipo are susceptible to this shuck and jive.
This statement makes me think you’re either early Gen X or a Boomer. There was a song called “My Generation” a hit from the Who in 1965. Jesus talks about generations. The Chinese talk about generations.
Ironically, “This is divisive BS and generations don’t exist anyway” is about the self talk of a couple of generations.
You blatantly misrepresented what I wrote. The words are right there, man.
Just ask Icarus.
I hadn’t heard that phrase IRL in ages. My grandfather (b. 1900) said it a lot, as did my great grandpa. Then I heard a variant on it just yesterday. My Zoomer kids texted me and suggested we take my bride out for a belated birthday dinner. The text started something like, “Hey, Dad, let’s go out and spend our inheritance.”
Youth is wasted on the young.
Wasted youth isn’t such a bad thing if you learn from it, and if you aren’t completely bailed out. A lot of shallowness and naivety in society on account of the, well, conservative and successful people imo. Too much tolerance of the ne’er-do-wells, also.
Being that lessons can’t seem to be passed down, a kick in the pants for everybody might be a good thing.
aint that the truth, tho? It doesn’t help that society confuses and enstupifies young people further so that most don’t get their shit together till their 30s.
There was a book that argued that the 20s were the decisive decade in someone’s life in terms of dictating lifetime accomplishment and that is quite right. Unfortunately, most people in their 20s, even bright people, DON’T KNOW SHIT!
Also there is the mental change. For an older person even in good health, the idea of sitting on airplane can be revolting while a young person doesn’t really care.
One of my grandmothers, who lived to be 96, had a health crisis in her 80s which required hospitalization. After which, her mind went, and she was without it for her final decade. I’ve always had the idea that medical science extended the life of her body beyond what it otherwise would have been, but was unable to do so for her mind.
Good point, especially when one considers that we don’t even know what or where the mind is. And as the Z Man points out, that’s also what we know about consciousness: nothing.
My dad turned 86 last September.
Last year he did a full kitchen rehab with my help. Sometimes he couldn’t hold a drill.
He said it was his last one, but as a hard headed Bohemian, we shall see.
He is afraid that the minute he stops “doing things”, he’s toast.
Life is work.
As long as it is not wage slaving…
“He is afraid that the minute he stops “doing things”, he’s toast.”
He’s right. My father never retired. He very much liked working, especially after my mother passed away. All your planned projects will be completed (or possibly abandoned) within a couple of years. Then what? Sit around and watch TV all day? My father was in remarkable condition for his age. When a retiree falls into that bad life of TV and small chores around the house, they decline quickly.
Sometimes, at that age, the mind may be very willing, but the body is no longer cooperating. At almost 69, I can feel it starting.
Ol’ Dads loved hard labor and physical activity, he just loved it.
That’s why I’d call him on Father’s Day and ask him if he knew the milkman’s number. No way in hades could I be his kid!
Your Dad is a wise man.
It’s true. Lots of times retired guys who envision just travel, drinks, and golf simply turn fat and die pretty quick.
Your dad is an example to us all.
They’re transhumanists, they want to upload their minds into machine bodies.
This eternal life lunacy has been a scheme of this world’s elite families for a very long time. They are obsessed with keeping their grip on this planet, and the way to extend their rule indefinitely is the Ray Kurzweil route. Babel Dos. The coming AI enhancements, both cognitive and physical, will produce supermen and superwomen with abilities and powers far beyond the un-enhanced. This will begin at elite levels because the cost, at first, will be prohibitively high for the rest of the population. Extrapolate from there. This is madness. ‘The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they… Read more »
Which would not–could not–be what we call “life.”
Since Hell’s function is organic formation–rather, the breakdown into essential elements that precedes formation–my deepest suspicion is that Hell is trying to bypass or supercede the traditional methods.
A new form of life is struggling to be born…
“What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem…?”
Its aims, as are White people themselves, are trans-terrestrial; that is, a stage to flee the Nest, in an organic replay of Creation’s radiant panspermia. One could see it as either a redundant necessity, a back-up sporing, or one could see it as an attempt to break out of quarantine.
they intend to suck their “self” out of the crbon based organ called a brain and put it on a chip and continue on ruling the world from their new silicone based “body” . they nueural link is supposed to facilitate this transfer once perfected.
I never understood why people (Alex Trebek is a good example) who have stage 4 cancer in their late 70s and “decide to fight it”?
Appreciate the time you had, man. Unless our supergeniouses can figure out a way to cure everything and reverse aging, I generally think once you hit 70 you’ve basically won at the game of life, and are on bonus time now, and thank God for the bonuses you get.
Of course, this is really easy to say when you aren’t 70.
They might fight and win, though I suppose that comes from never seeing someone who fought and lost.
As the notorious 6 million skeptic Norm Macdonald noted: “I’m pretty sure, I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time. That’s not a loss. That’s a draw.”
I thought it was Adam Eget who was the Holocaust denier! When he wasn’t jerking punks off under the Queensboro Bridge, that is.
Because everywhere they go, people adore them, and even the most cynical person after a while might start to say, “I like it here as a celebrity, I must be special in some way compared to others,” and that will serve as justification for years of medical treatments — not for them, but for those who won’t be able to survive without these celebs on earth. They do it for us.
Yes, this. Normal people like us don’t have a conception of the life of the rich and famous. Endless money, constant adoration, fun, sex, and adventures. . .
at a certain point they figure they’re too special and rich to die and death is for the little people.
I am in my seventies and I agree 100 percent.
The obsession of the body, from birth onward, is survival. So the body reacts with panic to impending death. There are no exceptions because we share the same biology.
When I no longer can do for myself — and that time is coming soon — it’s adios baby. Off to see Papa again.
I am plus that figure and I think you are right. When the time comes I do not want any extreme treatments to keep me alive. I don’t want to become a burden to anyone. That is my fear.
I dunno, we are programmed to want to live. So even with stage 4 at 70, lots of people will still grasp to hope and try to fight instead of just going into that good night.
The human mind cannot accept the concept of its own oblivion.
If someone had taken out Gene Rodenberry before he got to “Star Trek,” we wouldn’t be having half of these problems. The damage that Hollywood sci-fi has done is incalculable. People really believe we’re going to live on other planets, live to be 1000, run marathons at 250 — they should all be institutionalized. Instead, they have billions if not trillions of dollars at their disposal, because human beings are suckers for a good story.
No. The only “value” I see coming from AI is increased surveillance and ability to be spied on.
Agreed. AI will probably become the latest Tower of Babel.
The value of LLM is to sift through mountains of information. You can already imagine how the metadata gathered by the intel agencies will be sifted and sorted by LLMs – all the better to monitor you with, my dear.
I have to say I don’t think you can be too cynical about AI and silicon valley in particular. I really don’t believe that Altman believes for a minute any of his bulls**t hyping of AI. One thing he’s trying to do is keep the AI hype high in hopes of cashing out on stock options in an IPO of OpenAI. He’s also hoping to sell a bunch of computing resources and software to a bunch of gullible corporate types before everyone realizes ChatGPT is just a glorified auto-complete that plagarizes content from existing webpages. Here’s an interesting video discussing… Read more »
Altman drips sleaze. Someone with that jack should be able to hire better PR people and a fashion adviser. “Siri, how do I not sound like a used car salesman?” has been available a long time now.
He reminds me of the guy who ran WeWork or whatever it was called. The only thing endless is the scams.
Wework dude is back with some residential renting scheme.
Just think, at some point we must have had morals which would deny a scammer from getting right back in, but we can’t call scams scams these days.
Also one of his sisters says he diddle her when they were kids. Also reminds me of that troll that ran a bitcoin scam. They all have one thing in common, and i’m generally not a firm believer in what many here espouse, but it is strange.
Another billionaire who has never turned a profit
He’s gay. I can kinda understand a man who was born very feminine being gay. But these “normal presenting” gay males trouble me. It must be some sort of mental disorder that masks extreme trauma and/or an extreme sadism and/or masochism.
Call me old fashioned, but I read these entries on immortality and Artificial Intelligence and I keep getting this vibe:
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
While fusing neural intelligence and electronic intelligence sounds promising, who provides the electricity to keep the computers going? 😏
Whitey
The elites are starting to get that maybe trying to erase European males is a bad idea. But they are just starting to get it.
The elites have big wars in the queue. The West fighting big wars means they need white males. The other demographics won’t cut it.
We’re going to be lucky to have white males. The ones I see in my neck of the woods are not battle ready. I’m not convinced that we’re going to see WWIII on that fact alone.
That is a bright side of all the childhood obesity, I guess. ‘Course, I have no idea what society is going to do when they all go Type 2 in their late 20s…
Great point. I have noticed the same thing.
God gives you eternity; until then, whitey saves your ass
“God created us and therefore we are worth the saving” is far more motivating to me than naked attempts to appeal to saving our flesh alone. The statement gives hope and meaning to the necessary sacrifices that are coming. The hope that my children might be not just another white cog in a never ending wheel, but future residents of Heaven helps too.
Whitey may only be around a few morw centuries.
Yeah, there are a few very scary short sci-fi stories out there about the consequences of being digitized, and then being a digital slave to the people who control your electricity and computing power. I think there’s also one about some poor sod being endlessly duplicated as a “base AI” for a whole bunch of menial, servile computing tasks — countless copies of him living forever in misery.
A common topic in Neal Asher’s books.
Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. It was and, in many ways, still is the point of life, yes. In a world where those who are worth remembering no longer procreate, gadgets are employed. In a world that no longer values and produces worthy art in all its forms, gadgets are employed. A world where you watch your son become a man is a world worthy of life. A world where painters, composers, authors, and the creative thrive is a world worthy of life. A world where Sam Altman is the ideal is one that distracts itself… Read more »
‘A world where you watch your son become a man is a world worthy of life’
Beautifully said.
“Then our sons will be like plants nurtured in their youth, our daughters like corner pillars carved to adorn a palace.” Psalms 144:12
Coming soon domestically. Whether through something like CBDC, and/or AI controlled killer drones, no resistance to the regime will be permitted.
First rule or weaponry: Measure begets countermeasure
First rule of Cheap Chinese Sh, I mean Stuff: If they have it, we can have it.
That may have been true in the 1700s but it isn’t today. There is a huge list of weapons the regime has that we don’t have, and would be imprisoned for possessing.
Your statement is loaded with limiting assumptions.
They still have names and home addresses.
The way they envision it, the panopticon will see you coming a long time before you get there. At which point your accounts and your vehicle will be shut down. And then you’ll have to walk there. Which the cameras will see. The higher level ones will have security that will stop you if you get around or through all that. Maybe you can take out a lower level one. Good for you
It never fails to impress me that people cannot imagine we are living in a novel age. The discrepancy between the power the government has and the average prole is greater than anytime in the past and is accelerating. Couple this with the dispersal of power through managerialism (whom would one strike, anyway?), and the prospects seem dreary for any escape.
Don’t give into despair. Without the points of the spears, DC is a bunch of senile old farts telling each other stories. Those spear-points are, almost to a man, no longer the Boomer oppressors.
However, if Boomer Hate is an effective tactic for turning them, I’m all for it. Does anyone know any FBI or ATF or even State Police that’s worked on? Or are the golden handcuffs the real oppressor?
That is true until it isn’t. For some reason, militaries around the world were astonished when someone started dropping grenades from off-the-shelf drones.
That genie ain’t goin’ back in the bottle.
They won’t need drones once they force Neuralink on everyone.
This is because all Neuralink units will have a small shaped charge explosive that the algo in the data fusion center can trigger via Starlink.
Wouldn’t take a large charge to go through say, a spinal cord.
Altman is saying this very thing. To paraphrase him, a world with advanced AI is a well-behaved world. Indeed.
‘Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever’ Only the greatest of fools — or of salesmen — would want to endure such a horror, a horror almost beyond imagining. Me, I can’t wait to get this evil orb in my rearview mirror. Not one minute more here than is absolutely necessary. But the tech idjits eventually will get their way: ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find… Read more »
“I can’t wait to get this evil orb in my rearview mirror. Not one minute more here than is absolutely necessary.”
Most every morning, I take a walk outside, up and down the driveway, with my dog, and I marvel at how miraculous and beautiful the earth and heavens are. The wind in one’s face, the sound of birds, the sight of the clouds, stars and moon. It’s an absolute miracle. I will miss it when I pass.
As far as I’m concerned my friend, you win the internet today…well said.
The Norse/Germanic mythos of Valhalla and Ragnarok and the final battle encode the wisdom that these megalomanics in their ignorance miss. The end, yours and even the universe, is inevitable. This is not a cause for sorrow. It is a fact that must be greeted heroically and honorably – side by side with your people making the most of the time you have. Of course it also encodes the wisdom that we must do battle against entropy. Looking at Larry Ellison and Bezo’s new tail are instructive. And as always our host hits on a subtly related point. High interest… Read more »
“Indo-Europeans” is about as a solid theory as “Judeo-Christian”. Can we please ditch the theory before our new Indian overlords remind us who is the first modifier in “Indo-European”? It’s not going to end well.
Interesting point. Judeo-Christian is not a theory it is a propaganda tool. Indo-European is not a theory. Pan-European? Occidental? I get your point, but we have the claim on it. We know via DNA, linguistics and archeology where they originated from and who they conquered. Food for thought. I am not discounting your concern, but we are in an existential crisis that is also an identity crisis.
A major part of the dispossession project is abrogating our claims on our lands and our origins. I know what you don’t want to do. What do you propose instead?
“We know via DNA, linguistics and archeology where they originated from and who they conquered.” I will politely disagree here. We don’t know these things. The linguistics is probably the weakest point. It involves a few syllables, of which they seem to be common throughout the planet. Almost every language’s formal or informal name for “Mother” is “ma”. The Indus river valley had an advanced civilization that seemed to have completely vanished. It’s not like the Mediterranean Sea with semi-continuous written records etc. It’s not possible to come up with historical DNA records, as we really can’t test bones very… Read more »
“It’s not possible to come up with historical DNA records, as we really can’t test bones very well.”
Where can I learn more about this? I thought it was through testing Neanderthal hair and bones and such that we had a rough idea of how much of H. sapiens DNA was Neanderthal. You are saying that can’t be done with far younger fossils?
Indeed, we will boldly steal the secret of Life from the Gods and use it for sexbots and AI sports referees to end the dominance of the KC Chiefs.
Will it replace grilling, though?
I grill, therefore I am.
If AI ends the dominance of the Taylor Swift Chiefs and their referees, then ok. I’ve changed my mind. Bring on the electrodes!
I’m speculating but perhaps ideas like the ones Richard Morgan floated in his trilogy (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) have some traction with the Tech Bros — a future where consciousness itself has been digitised. As for the trends in AI and other massive computing projects, they leave me disturbed. To my mind they are anti-life. These projects require a massive amount of electricity and mineral resources at the expense of the biosphere. We already know this from bitcoin mining. There’s a good recent essay at NLR on energy and mineral consumption which is quite revealing: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/exponential-abyss Trump himself… Read more »
It’s possible that our much discussed schism among the “elites” is nothing more than a squabble over who will control the AI
That’s an impressive theory and possibly what is actually happening. It would be wonderful if the camps were divided over how to use AI but if this is the point of friction you are right, it boils down to control.
Yeah, I doubt he understands what he is doing. He just wants to make a deal with the cool nerds.
Next stop: Planet of the Apes
First full day in the White House and he goes right back to mRNA, which is literally what he was yelling about the day he left it in 2021. C’mon now.
The Silent/Boomer generation has an uncomplicated relationship with technology. In fairness to them, they lived through an era where basically magic happened every decade or so. There’s no reason from their POV to not expect the “bugs” of mRNA to be ironed out. Other people are little more cynical.
it was Jewish wet-dream that imprisons white people at electronic world and humiliate over eternity
artificial intelligence is glorified programing, a financial tool for scamming
That tech bro weirdo who is getting blood transfusions from his kid and has a team of scientists try to de-age him gave up on one of the medicines because it likely did more harm than good. Death is a part of life. It’s one of the first things that philosophers in all traditions discovered and expounded upon. These dorks cannot change the basic reality of God’s plan just because they have money. They’re going to learn it the hard way and are learning it the hard way. And I would argue that AI can’t even create clever memes. People… Read more »
“That’s why people in prosperous countries react to trivial problems as if they were life-or-death struggles. They have no life-or-death struggles, but they need them. We need to feel that our lives have a significance beyond our span of years. We hope we’ll achieve some great good to survive us and to remind the world that we were here. But when the worst social problems are who gets to use which bathroom or used the wrong pronoun, we feel bereft. Where is the great challenge we can overcome, the invincible monster we can defeat, the intolerable wrong we can set right?… Read more »
Thought provoking post. In my opinion, not a single person who ever drew a breath, wants to die. That said, I’m getting to the point where I’m starting to understand suicide. No one ever wants to die; what they want is whatever is happening in their life, that is overwhelming, to stop. I’ve had a good life. Not perfect, but a hell of a ride to say the least. The thing that is starting to overwhelm me is the suffering that is on display every day. It’s in our face. And the people dishing it out, are doing it with… Read more »
I’ve been a Zen “adept” (as practitioners are known) for more than 60 years and what might be called your “third result” is that your individuated self experiences a combination of A & B. To wit: your individuated identity consciousness is dropped, either voluntarily or through extinction; if the former, consciousness survives in a transcended but non-individuate manner, in the latter, well, lights out or maybe reincarnation. The ground belief behind this is that all simply IS, individuation is illusory as is time.
This is the same option as “sleep forever”. If I lack an individual consciousness after this life, then the self is dead.
I can’t think of a 3rd option. It’s either sleep forever or something after death. I didn’t come back to Christianity because I wanted eternal life. I just wanted to fill a gap that existed in this life. However, if we ask the question why God might want humans to have eternal life, we could borrow the answer from a particular carpenter from Nazareth. “Even Moses demonstrates that the dead are raised, in the passage about the burning bush. For he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not… Read more »
Solid.
You have the choices. I recommend (B) and coping with the doubt. “Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did exist. And desiring God’s existence and acting conformably with this desire, is the means whereby we create God—that is, whereby God creates Himself in us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. For God goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love, and hides Himself from him who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason. God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the head, reversing… Read more »
It’s the real Pascal’s wager.
B. But there is no such thing as reincarnation. That nonsense came outta the East and is a control mechanism.
Reincarnation is wanting this life forever for some reason.
Just heaven and hell by different means. You get a “better” next life if you were “good,” and a “worse” one if you were “bad.”
Sure, but the difference between a Brahmin and untouchable is a matter of wealth and class. It’s not like the Brahmin has been promised no pain, illness, bad fortune, suffering or been exempt from witnessing all those things.
Actual Heaven involves “no more tears” to borrow from a few hymns here and there.
That’s self-evidently untrue, or we wouldn’t have suicide statistics.
There are certainly some subset of those who simply long for oblivion.
“In my opinion, not a single person who ever drew a breath, wants to die.”
But why? I have no problem shrugging off this mortal coil (not that I’m actively courting death, mind). There are probably many people just like me.
https://www.nderf.org/
Only one way to find out….
People who are familiar with the fundamentals of computer science and the fundamentals of neural networks and still imagine that they somehow embody the potential for eternal life are first order determinists. They make the most hard core HBD race-realists look like the cast of an olden-tyme coke commercial. How does one make that colossal mental leap required to go from a multi-variate transfer function that has been manipulated to give certain discreet outputs for certain discrete inputs to imagining that increasing the scale of input / output assignments eventually crosses some threshold into consciousness? They must think the secret… Read more »
There is a penalty for living too long. It calls to mind the Ship of Theseus. Replacing yourself gradually over time with the new, and the possibility for endless renewal, you become something you begin to rebel against. It’s possible for you to become something you begin to detest. The only answer is to actively reject the replacement of yourself. There is the vampire genre of literature. The problem of the vampire is his immortality. Not a big fan of Anne Rice but she portrayed in brilliantly. I think living beyond your time would be deeply unsatisfying for the hedonist.… Read more »
One video game I played had an immortal character who had been driven insane by the longevity of his life, of seeing everything he knew repeatedly die. As a different character put it, the toxins of life had slowly poisoned his soul since they could never be released.
“Immortality consists largely of boredom-” (Star Trek)
How can an ugly little and unhealthy looking troll like Ray Kurzweil be selling life-extension ideas?
I am certian that AI is used for much more nefarious purposed than making memes, we are just not privy to that info. not wild about trumps delegat to head this https://seemorerocks.substack.com/p/meet-larry-ellison-leader-of-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=630659&post_id=155476198&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=o2w9y&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Does anyone feel like transhumanism sounds like something from the book of revelation?
Technology is teleology. If a thing can be done, it will be done, if there is an advantage in doing so. On a long enough time frame, no moral or philosophical objection will prevent anything which is truly useful. This is why I fear that the Panopticon is inevitable. It is simply too useful to TPTB. If we must have tyranny, then at least let be a tyranny which has as its object the preservation of my people and culture, as China does for the Han. However, if everyone becomes a Kurzweillian cyborg whose “defects” are corrected with CRISPR, bionics… Read more »
From the Revelation 13:“15 The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. 16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.” John is clearly talking about a world authority or leader which commands the construction… Read more »
Yes, this exactly. Been obvious for many years that the Scriptural Image of the Beast will have a strong AI component. Likely, a mix of bio-human with the Enhancements. When the implant Enhancements become commercially available — and that’ll be soon — they will be sold via invitation to elitism, as the Enhancements will create people who in various ways are superior to the Old Human models. Do human beings have a potent desire, an obsessive desire, to be ‘better’ than their neighbors, a superiority — even a supremacy — that is available for purchase at the click of a… Read more »
The irony of a Gerrman complaining of an Orwellian government in another European country! “In an awkward revelation that comes as Habeck seeks the nomination of his Green party as candidate for chancellor, prosecutors on Friday said the economy minister had filed a criminal complaint after the man called him an “idiot” on social media in June.” A criminal complaint; surely they mean it’s a civil case. “Lawyers acting for Habeck filed a criminal complaint, prosecutors in the Bavarian town of Bamberg told Germany’s DPA news service, confirming earlier media reports.” But it is Germany so…”Germany’s criminal code includes provisions… Read more »
For the ones who focus on AI assistance as a way to upload their consciousness to a computer or cloud, they focus too much on the “I” and not enough on the “A”. I can take a damn good picture of the Mona Lisa with my cell phone. But it will never be the Mona Lisa.
So Trump was elected to provide billions to tech moguls so they can pursue eternal life? His circa 2020 “platinum plan” for blacks looks like a great idea in comparison…
Talk about maximum hubris! The human body is orders of magnitude more complex than anything produced by these tech boys, and really, it shouldn’t work…Trillions of operations are going on each second in your body, and any significant failure rate would kill you..Based on my past life regressions, and millions of others, the soul is immortal and we do have a choice to reincarnate…But for the atheists among us, the question is why you would want to live past 100, in a worn out body often confined to your bedroom…Because entropy (2d law of thermodynamics) is constant, and everything wears… Read more »
Keep in mind that physical laws are descriptive, not prescriptive. The Second Law describes the situations we’ve observed, but it is not engraved on immutable stone tablets. Disordered states are more numerous and probable than ordered states, but life itself defeats that reality at least for a while. Many scientific advances involve extending the length of time that we can hold entropy at bay. That might not be forever, but it can at least be a longer time.
I don’t see how a glorified search engine with walled off virtual intelligence limiting its ability to use the data it holds can help make organic beings become immortal. There’s already calls for the medical industry to ban so called “AI” for being able to detect race from x-rays of ribcages because White people will use that to oppress black astronauts. Can’t use it for policing because it hurts black people’s feelings, can’t use it for anything even vaguely eugenic because all genes are equal, especially the ones responsible for antisocial behavior. Dysgenic supremacy is implicitly the guiding principles of… Read more »
Real immortality is mathematically impossible. But life spans counted in centuries rather than decades would be nice. Once we get that (if ever?) some will want millennia instead of centuries. Seen as dementia is already a common problem after say eight decades, that suggests the human brain doesn’t have the memory capacity for such life spans. So now they’ll have to expand the brain. I doubt it will get that far. Modern creature comforts aside, our behavior is still very close to that of chimps. We fight each other all the time. If China reached immortality escape velocity, I’m sure… Read more »
“AI powered drones hunt for men.”
Sounds like a movie to me.
BUTLERIAN JIHAD NOW
“psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit.” Humans suffer because they are too disconnected from what is natural. Death is where we were before we were born. We were born to die. Sunrise, sunset. It has to be accepted. “Ye shall be as gods” is the oldest trick in the book.
I would have thought that reading about Heinlein’s Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love would cure anyone of living forever.
Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan will also do it.
“at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes” It is mostly used for fraud, scams, and spam. As should be expected from a product that is designed to convincingly imitate humans and the products of the human mind. AI proliferation has made the internet significantly worse, and it’s starting to make the real world worse too. Miles of the most beautiful scenery in the country, near me, are slated to be bulldozed to build power infrastructure for an AI datacenter. Destroying real squirrels to replace them with pictures of AI squirrels. These tech dorks are more of… Read more »