Laiza, I agree with most of what you've said except for AGI becoming a reality in the next decade. AGI is further away than most people realize, we won't have strong AI or AGI anytime soon maybe not even in the 21st century.
They said AlphaGo was at least a decade away from beating human players. They were wrong.
Obviously, AGI is a very different beast from convoluted neural networks, but
not even in the 21st century? I just can't imagine how you could possibly come to that conclusion if you've been watching the progress in the field over the past several years. If we don't have AGI by 2045 at the very latest, something had to have gone very, very wrong in our R&D. In fact, I'm quite thoroughly confident that we'll have AGI before Elon Musk's Neuralink venture can produce the non-intrusive brain-machine interface they're trying so hard to perfect before AGI becomes an actuality.
Technological progress is not linear, after all. Remember, just a generation ago the fastest supercomputer we had was running around 125 gigaflops. Today?
93 petaflops. Let's write that out:
125,000,000,000 FLOPs vs 93,000,000,000,000,000. 125*10^9 vs 93*10^15.
Obviously, there is no guarantee that progress can continue like that indefinitely. However, between quantum computing, graphene, carbon nanotubes, and all these other alternate computing paradigms being developed in parallel with silicon, I think it would be foolhardy to exclaim that we're going to hit some kind of hard wall. We're going to see some amazing things happening over the next decade... and all of those things will pale in comparison to the things we see the decade after. It's going to be a wild ride for sure.
[...] A cure for aging is still probably a few generations off[...]
Nope. Why would you look at the last century of technological advancement, then compare it to the last
decade of technological advancement, and then conclude that something like this is
generations away?
Technological progress is not linear.
This thread is literally called "should we end aging" not "what will we do when we all stop aging?"
The video addresses that by mentioning everything that's happening with regards to anti-aging technology. Anyone responding to the thread title and not the content of the video is drive-by posting by definition.
While I don't have a philosophical or moral opposition to the use of technology to expand the human lifespan...
Whenever I hear about this kind of tectonic shift in human evolution being brought about via technology, it fills my head with the grimmest images of dystopia. Because all of this technology is going to exist for rich people exclusively at first, and I can't help but think that they're going to want to monopolize it somehow.
I see this a lot and it's a bit silly, because despite how disconnected a lot of rich folks can seem from the common folk a lot of the time, they are
still human beings, and they are
not ALL 100% self-centered psychopaths with no real interaction with the outside world. It's easy to make that assumption when you see an asshole like Trump taking the president's office, but he is not every rich person. When even
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg see the writing on the wall, there is at least some hope for the future.
While there are definitely evil rich people, any attempt to monopolize such technology would inevitably result in political backlash, and possibly pave the way to real healthcare legislation in the USA. The only issue is making sure it gets enough publicity.
