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apple_achia t1_iv9mksm wrote

Reply to comment by civilrunner in Becoming increasingly pessimistic about LEV + curing aging by Phoenix5869

Yes it’s very difficult to answer any questions 20+ years away. Like “will America have succumbed to fascism in the face of the refugees caused by the (conservatively) roughly one billion people currently expected to be displaced by climate change between now and 2050” or “to what extent will there still be complex society in the face of widespread ecological collapse”

Very difficult questions to answer indeed. I hope our techno overlords figure out how to fix this mess quickly and choose not to keep all of the gains in productivity to themselves like they have since the 1970’s. Any way I’m sure the secret to immortality is RIGHT around the corner in the next computational break through, for those who survive til then.

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DyingShell t1_iv9vxse wrote

shh we don't talk about REAL issues on here, only fantasies.

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apple_achia t1_iv9wy11 wrote

Funny you should say that. On my post regarding climate change and singularity, I got into a lengthy discussion with someone who claimed that having a true metaverse, a simulated reality people could secede into where they could act as a God and experience whatever they want, would solve the climate crisis. That the ultimate fantasy IS the solution. presumably the thought was that if this happens, enough people would opt into it that we’d be able to save enough resources to stop climate change.

So shallow. No acknowledgment that this would just be offering an extremely pleasurable form of suicide to the masses. No acknowledgement that the people most likely to take such an option would be the least materially well off, and thus the people causing the problem the least. No mention that this wouldn’t affect any existing power structure and so even if it was Jeff Bezos himself that chose to digitally castrate himself into experiencing only a simulation of reality, someone else would just take his place.

I think many people on this sub are just technological optimists unable to reckon with the heightening crises of industrialized society, and anxiously awaiting a savior. Maybe there will be a technological singularity before climate change makes that next to impossible, but the idea the result of that will just be a fantasy VR machine is absurd and shallow.

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Frumpagumpus t1_ivjp3be wrote

it seems pretty obvious that replacing business trips (and i know you are a doomer so this will trigger you, but vacations) with vr would be a massive ecological boon.

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apple_achia t1_ivjrl99 wrote

I’m a doomer, but you’re realistic for saying metaverse will save the biosphere from abrupt change. Yes, very realistic solution, have fun with that

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Frumpagumpus t1_ivkgl78 wrote

bruh the biosphere has been through quite a few abrupt changes. and it's been around a long time. some of them quite a bit worse than modern co2 emissions.

human civilization is changing even more abruptly tho.. kinda the point of this sub...

and lastly you intentionally re phrased what I said just to disagree with a point I didn't even make lol.

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apple_achia t1_ivkhrm3 wrote

The last time the atmosphere changed in composition by a comparable amount to the last 250 years, Cyanobacteria was colonizing the ocean and photosynthesizing, injecting O2 into the atmosphere and causing one of 6 recorded mass extinctions. Now granted, this was at a fraction of the speed, it took place over a few thousand years, a lightning flash in geologic terms, and changed the composition by a smaller percentage make up.

So yes, the biosphere has seen changes in the past, even within humanities timescale. But not by this amount and this abruptly. To say there have been “worse” ecological changes in the past is obfuscation of the crisis we’re in.

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Frumpagumpus t1_ivktbls wrote

what are you gonna do about it, aside from brigading this sub?

covid lockdowns didnt put much of a dent in co2 emissions.

personally i think there is 0 chance you could put a gov into power either democratic or authoritarian which would reduce emissions as much as you want

realistically that leaves geoengineering. which would probably be a lot easier to do with AI.

oh yeah and of course VR would help too but you just cant help but shit on people who are trying XD

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Artanthos t1_ivc9c2o wrote

Fascism as a response to climate driven immigration seems much more likely than a complete collapse.

Desalination plants are already capable of solving water shortages in the American West, just not at a price people are currently willing to pay.

Vertical Farming and cultured meats are pretty much climate independent. Again, not at a price most people are currently willing to pay.

It’s going to be the 3rd world countries that face collapse.

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[deleted] t1_ivcmsa5 wrote

If 3rd world countries collapse, everywhere else does too. The lives of the wealthy first world folks is completely reliant on cheap labour and slavery in poorer countries. Without that, everything wealthier countries rely on completely collapses too. Welcome to globalised capitalism; a vast slave system.

There’s no corner of the globe you can run away to and be safe from the ensuing political and economic instability. Most likely this instability leads to large scale warfare that puts our risk of nuclear war way way up there too. Perfect storm

I don’t really see human civilisation lasting long under that scenario which is why tackling the lions share of carbon in the 2020s, before it snowballs and becomes an order of magnitude harder, is crucial

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Artanthos t1_ivee32z wrote

  1. If 3rd world countries collapse, the availability of cheap labor increases. To the extent that society allows immigrants.
  2. Automation is already reducing reliance on cheap labor. This is especially true in agriculture and food services.

If anything, the wealthy will soon reach a point where they no longer need laborers. At least not at anything resembling today’s volume.

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[deleted] t1_ivci07a wrote

And with regard to life extension, people in this sub seem to think that “discovery” will automatically lead to “access”

People in the US are still routinely bankrupted for extremely basic access to healthcare but people in this thread seem to think they’ll somehow have access to the most highly coveted form of life extension in human history?

As if.

It’ll cost hundreds of millions of dollars and none of us have even the slightest hope of accessing it when it is discovered. Access is likely to be politically suppressed as well due to fears of overpopulation.

So the real barrier to life extension for all of us is actually political change, not scientific discovery.

Discovery might happen this century.

Access? In a harsh unequal economic system that treats healthcare like a for-profit cash cow? I think we need an anti capitalist political revolution to even have a slim chance of socialising life extension

A revolution like that has been fought for hundreds of years already and arguably since the advent of mass surveillance we have an even less surmountable asymmetric power struggle in front of us than ever before.

Frankly I think we probably have already missed our best chance at achieving that a few decades ago

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botfiddler t1_ivj7nal wrote

Overpopulation is coming from the growth in poor countries, especially in combination with increasing standards of living. We were first. I will not limit my life time in favor of other people.

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[deleted] t1_ivj9qa6 wrote

We were first, so we’ve already used up more than our share of resources, and those places need to be given a fair share in developing..

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civilrunner t1_ivb0tqj wrote

I would say that democracy and government is the most critical thing we can do today to protect the future. Doing that will go a long way to taking care of the rest.

I personally expect the developers of longevity medicine to want to profit from it so they'll make it widely available and likely sell it to the government because a biologically young workforce can be far more valuable than an aging one.

Although for instance Bezos may be rich, Amazon does provide substantial value to the majority of people at least in the USA by competing and lower cost and increasing quality across a lot of markets. Similar things can be said for bill gates and making computers accessible to mass markers.

While extraordinary wealth may be generated, it will only be generated if the technology affects a mass market.

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[deleted] t1_ivcob28 wrote

Amazon takes substantial value from people, their profits come from their workers labour. It doesn’t provide shit; it’s workers do that with or without Amazon, but it can’t do shit without them.

What’s worrying about your comment is that I don’t think democracy can exist without destroying companies like Amazon. Amazon is a great example of how capitalism is taking us back to feudalism with petty lords in charge (ie NOT elected democratically)

As you say we must protect the future by protecting democracy .. but democracy is way further gone already than you might think. Capitalism is a direct threat to it because it’s fundamentally about preserving privilege often passed down over generations, like feudal monarchs, so completely mocking democratic power.

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civilrunner t1_ivcon7g wrote

That's a taxation problem. They keep prices lower and provide substantial competition across countless industries including web services.

Their pay for workers is also pretty high and they offer to pay off tuition and more. I know it's fun and popular to hate them, but I personally blame the politicians who write the tax code.

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[deleted] t1_ivcpzg9 wrote

Monopolies crush competition, they don’t create it. Amazon buys out its competition it doesn’t bother trying to better them. It is probably the worst example for “encouraging competition” you could pick in our global economy.

And you’re now deviating significantly from your initial statement about protecting democracy when you advocate that a company employing millions should be run by 1 unelected dictatorial owner.

Which one is it? Democracy or dictatorship?

You can’t advocate both; these push us in opposite directions.

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civilrunner t1_ivcqeja wrote

Amazon is a lot of things, but a monopoly is definitely not one of them. Walmart still controls more market share for retail than Amazon does by a pretty wide margin. Even AWS has healthy competition with Microsoft and others and is therefore not a monopoly...

Amazon is a public company in the private industry. They aren't part of the government obviously... The government taking over them would also be devastating to our economy. Private Public partnerships and taxation with reinvestment is the way to go...

I get that you like to doom, but at least know what to doom about. Moore v Harper, the SCOTUS case that may allow state legislators to ignore voters and send electors as they please and therefore end democracy is the biggest threat today.

We should elect officials who may enable reducing inequality and creating opportunity through government investments but that's a separate issue...

Edit: also you can always buy Amazon shares and then vote about the direction of their company if you'd like...

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[deleted] t1_ivcr2wo wrote

Hard to swallow fact: a country cannot claim to be very democratic at all when millions of its people are made to spend the largest share of their waking hours languishing under a dictatorial power structure. That’s absolutely how 99% of hierarchical capitalist businesses are structured.

So you don’t in fact advocate for democracy, you need to admit you have no problem with authoritarianism dominating the majority of peoples lives.

That’s a direct threat to the sort of socialised life extension I think most people assume is desirable

I would expect that people with an interest in the singularity should all expect us to move on from barbarism’s like this. You can start by advocating for democracy to be expanded into all walks of life; I’ve little doubt a singularity would lead to workplaces returning to common ownership as worker coops or similar; if for no other reason than that it will recognise that all human history has represented the struggle to free ourselves from authoritarian oppressors

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[deleted] t1_iv9wqtn wrote

You’re right, being a pessimist who bitches on Internet forums is a lot more productive.

This subreddit has nothing to do with most of the issues you are talking about anyway?

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apple_achia t1_iva2dsn wrote

Well sorry but if AGI is going to solve all of our problems and usher in a new era the least it can do is start with the impending doom staring all of you in the face.

If there werent any pessimists on this sub, it would just be a circlejerk about how protein folding software is going to make you immortal by 2025

I like to poke and prod, because otherwise all you’d get here are people saying a singularity will bring us all into paradise. We’d be immortal beings, living in computational metaverses, omnipotent in their own rights. This is something I’ve actually seen multiple times on this sub. Now we’re doubtlessly in an unprecedented age of technological advancement, but without examining our ideas about this we’re bound to overestimate progress in the same way people on the collapse subreddit assume civilization will end yesterday. I’m here to interrogate ideas, bring a little bit of reality back into the mix, and occasionally have a laugh when someone tells me I’m going to be immortal. You know, because no generation before us has ever thought that.

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TheHamsterSandwich t1_iva7iht wrote

We should be optimistic that an AGI/ASI can fix all of our problems.

On the other hand...

We shouldn't rely on it, and we should be doing the best we can to save the planet until autopilot becomes available, yeah?

Sometimes truth hurts, and the truth is that blind optimism helps no one.

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No-Philosopher2573 t1_ivaebwa wrote

Should we be optimistic? How do we know for sure AGI is going to be a net positive at all?

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[deleted] t1_ivcm88y wrote

An AGI is still built by engineers paid by someone to build it

Hard to swallow pill: The people paying for it will be the ones to benefit from it. There’s absolutely nothing that says it’s benefits will be socialised. We live in a highly individualistic unequal capitalist system built and purveyed by the people with the money to fund this research and there’s no reason to believe they’d program it to favour some sort of socialist utopia; they’ll design it to protect their own privilege as they always have when designing our politician and economic system.

People in this sub often seem to assume that “discovery” is all that’s needed but that’s immensely naive.

The main barrier to benefiting from AGI and life extension is political, not scientific discovery. And likely it will take decades or centuries to win politically; and victory isn’t even guaranteed anytime soon.

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[deleted] t1_ivcsjg3 wrote

I think it’s also dangerous to assume that AGI won’t have inbuilt biases based on those who built it and those who are designed to administer it. All software that exists already faces this issue.

So it will exist to benefit certain politically powerful people and shore up their privilege and advantage.

Those interests could be DIRECTLY opposed to what’s best for the rest of us. See: how military tech is used now; mostly for social control and political suppression.

It’s only really an ASI that would likely significantly benefit everyone and I hate to be a downer but I don’t think people who aren’t programmers quite realise how little chance there is of that arriving soon. A lot of sensationalist headlines, not a lot of substance there unfortunately

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ActuaryGlittering16 t1_ivbi1j8 wrote

This is really refreshing. I’ve never seen this type of pessimistic, prodding sentiment on Reddit before. If only there was an entire subreddit full of millions of people like this, all discussing the future! Every fascinating advancement could be funneled into the same talking points of climate change, race, gender, and classism! Just think of everything we could accomplish with a subreddit like that, wow!!

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apple_achia t1_ivbt6yh wrote

Gees it’s like those issues tend to reproduce themselves when new technology develops since nobody ever touches the power structure behind them. Surely the invention of the cotton gin will end slavery and the oppression of the African diaspora.

If there were reasonable expectations for what something like protein folding simulations could accomplish, I wouldn’t poke fun like this. There’s a reason I’m not doing this on a computational biology subreddit right now

But no, rather than thinking of enzymatic pathway engineering or costly advances in artificial food technology or expensive and extensive clinical trials on novel proteins, this sub always goes to “eureka! I’m immortal! We can be gods!”

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[deleted] t1_ivcny0n wrote

100% the biggest barriers to ordinary people benefitting from scientific breakthroughs is our harsh unequal capitalist system.

It’s laughable seeing people think that all we need to do is discover life extension.

I bet they sell it with a multimillion dollar per year subscription attached.

I bet that then leads to a political movement asking for it as a human right but just like most movements demanding access to life in the form of housing, food, healthcare etc which have been raging for centuries against our current system, there’s no guarantee of victory at all.

In fact I think the asymmetric power imbalance has never really been worse.

Police are more militarised than ever. Mass surveillance is a weapon of repression an order of magnitude more powerful and one-sided than the invention of iron or gunpowder… it could well be true that capitalism has completely triumphed and so ordinary people will never be able to afford life extension.

I put the odds of this at 90%.

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StarChild413 t1_ivedwqo wrote

so we just need to inspire people with the promise-via-parallel of immortality to join a movement for housing, food and healthcare as human rights and have among the movement good enough hackers to combat the surveillance state to make those rights a guarantee so immortality is

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[deleted] t1_ivelyuf wrote

Hackers like that exist but get captured by state interests fairly fast, competing probably isn’t viable. That said I do think there is an internationalist protracted people’s war ongoing against capitalist interests that is the best hope for the socialising of immortality tech.

Until that tech is discovered, socialising healthcare is the necessary preparation.

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