Before you die, what do you want to see become a reality

[Enigman]

Why would you want to live forever though? It can get pretty borrrrriiiinggg...You wouldn't have any friends, if you did have them, being a singularity you would already know anything they are about to say or do. You may not even have a body, as ultimately the organs will die after a 1000 years or so and you would have to regrow them if you really want a physical manifestation...(Hmmm...ears falling off-to do tomorrow grow new ears.)

 

[Enigman]

As far as I am concerned: free books period.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

As far as I am concerned: free books period.

Not sure I understand this one. Do you mean open access textbooks or that all books should be free? The former seems noble and potentially possible (so long as all majors textbook produces switch to public financed, social enterprise or charity models) but the later would seriously harm the fiction publishing industry.

 

[Enigman]

Oh, textbooks only.
As for fiction is concerned well, the more the difficulty in getting hold of a novel the more you tend to cherish it. I guess the same could be argued for textbooks but often once you have got one book on the it almost seems livable without other better alternatives or additions.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

I see what you mean and kind of agree. Ideally I'd like to see something along the lines of an open access encyclopaedia that has educational functions as well as reference and can produce tailored answers/summaries/recommendations on the basis of the question asked. Like if Wikipedia and khan academy had a baby raised by wolfram alpha.

 

[bp_psy]

Why would you want to live forever though? It can get pretty borrrrriiiinggg...

How do you know that? Have you lived forever? I think I could find fun stuff to keep me busy for a couple of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of years. The fact that we die pretty fast and we can lose much of our physical and intellectual faculties even earlier is the worst thing about life. All of the sentimental arguments against living a long time are not very convincing.
The singularity stuff, yes it is pretty much nonsense.

 

[Enigman]

...Like if Wikipedia and khan academy had a baby raised by wolfram alpha.

Now that would be heaven...

As for living forever well, I am pretty much bored in the 'short' life I have...
No sentimental arguments; but growing new organs also without singularity living forever wouldn't be much fun 'cause either you would spend all your memory and forget recent things or you would have to create 'virtual brain drives' to store your memory- if so you won't even be able to use all your memories without integrating yourself to the drives and you become something akin to singularity..

 

[edpell]

See anomalous heat from nickel and hydrogen proved and deployed. AI I can have a conversation with. 100,000 people settled on Mars. Saudi Arabia out of oil and bankrupt.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

RE: boredom and long life. If you had a comfortable amount of money then I see no reason one would ever be bored (besides laziness and lack of imagination). Consider how long it would take to visit every interesting place, to do every leisure activity from a spa day to BASE jumping and now consider how many new things to do, experience and talk about are being created all the time. I'd love a longer healthy life, there's just too much to see and do to ever be bored.

 

[jim hardy]

RE: boredom and long life. If you had a comfortable amount of money then I see no reason one would ever be bored (besides laziness and lack of imagination). Consider how long it would take to visit every interesting place, to do every leisure activity from a spa day to BASE jumping and now consider how many new things to do, experience and talk about are being created all the time. I'd love a longer healthy life, there's just too much to see and do to ever be bored.

agreed.

Life is a smorgasboard .

My interests tend toward tinkering in the workshop
and traveling by automobile on the backroads
and classical music concerts
and meeting people

I could entertain myself for a thousand years.
(It'll take me at least that long to figure out the symbolism in"Moby Dick")

There has never been a time like the one we're living. I sure hope it lasts .

old jim

 

[mfb]

Boredom and long life usually don't refer to 1000 years - it is no problem to find something new for 1000 years. It's probably possible for a million, or even a billion years. But if you consider "true" immortality (you cannot die, even if you want to), eventually you are running out of new things you can discover, or you have to forget at the same rate you see things, and get stuck in some sort of endless loop.

 

[dlgoff]

Boredom and long life usually don't refer to 1000 years - it is no problem to find something new for 1000 years. It's probably possible for a million, or even a billion years. But if you consider "true" immortality (you cannot die, even if you want to), eventually you are running out of new things you can discover, or you have to forget at the same rate you see things, and get stuck in some sort of endless loop.

my bold

Truth? That happens way sooner than 1000 years. Or even 100 years.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

I don't want to wander off into sci-fi territory here but I'd add memory enhancement to the longevity wish list. At least that's been one of the things I've had in mind when I said healthy life extension.

 

[mfb]

my bold

Truth? That happens way sooner than 1000 years. Or even 100 years.

Certainly with everyday experiences (there is no point in detailed memory for every time you tied your shoes anyway) , but not with exceptional things.

 

[dlgoff]

Certainly with everyday experiences (there is no point in detailed memory for every time you tied your shoes anyway) , but not with exceptional things.

Yea. You're right. I remember the how cool it was that Peter Higgs was at the CERN announcement of the finding of the Higgs Boson but I have to look down to see if I've put my shoes on.

 

[Akaisora]

Nothing beats living in a futuristic utopia.

 

[lisab]

Nothing beats living in a futuristic utopia.

Ask the folks living 1000 years ago -- we're there, buddy, beyond their wildest dreams .

 

[cdux]

Nothing. Human progress will never end so if you have the illusion that you will be happy if you see some innovations you are wrong. If you see alien life you will then wonder if you will meet intelligent life, and if you see a CPU doing 100x the work of those now you will then wonder if one does 1000x the work. You will never be happy following that path. Innovation will not end and it will always be approaching infinity.

Well, that's practically wrong since the Universe has a finite life cycle, at least in this iteration, but in this iteration, it's still a baby.

Besides, you can already imagine some of those things being actually real. e.g. who seriously believes alien life doesn't exist? It's so likely that even intelligent life is extremely likely to the point of being certain.

I think a better path to happiness is knowledge. Deep knowledge. Knowing that what is going on is part of reality in such a fundamental level of understanding that you are no longer a slave of it or one that has the illusion of a God that controls it, but that you are a camera looking at it clearly and saying "yeah, that's what's going on".

After all, do you really need power? All you need is inclusion.

 

[mfb]

Nothing. Human progress will never end so if you have the illusion that you will be happy if you see some innovations you are wrong.

I see innovations on a daily basis, and I think this is really awesome. Bigger innovations are more awesome, and some of them happened within my lifetime. It is not an illusion, it is a fact.
Example

If you see alien life you will then wonder if you will meet intelligent life, and if you see a CPU doing 100x the work of those now you will then wonder if one does 1000x the work. You will never be happy following that path. Innovation will not end and it will always be approaching infinity.

That just means there are more awesome things to discover.

Besides, you can already imagine some of those things being actually real. e.g. who seriously believes alien life doesn't exist? It's so likely that even intelligent life is extremely likely to the point of being certain.

There is a huge difference between the hypothesis of life elsewhere and an actual discovery - or even communication with them.

I think a better path to happiness is knowledge. Deep knowledge. Knowing that what is going on is part of reality in such a fundamental level of understanding that you are no longer a slave of it or one that has the illusion of a God that controls it, but that you are a camera looking at it clearly and saying "yeah, that's what's going on".

That is connected to innovations.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

who seriously believes alien life doesn't exist? It's so likely that even intelligent life is extremely likely to the point of being certain.

Life or intelligent life? Either way we have only one example of a planet housing both and we don't have sufficient understanding of abiogenesis and evolution to place a probability that an identical primordial Earth would give rise to either (the Fl and Fi in the Drake equation). It could be that those two values are so high that it is statistically unlikely that there is life anywhere else in the universe, or it might not be. There isn't enough data to suggest it is likely one way or the other.

 

[NextElement]

I'd LOVE to see a new, SAFE, renewable energy source so society can stray away from fossil fuels. I'm no environmentalist, but I think everyone can understand the benefits of renewable energy.

My high school biology teacher was just telling us today how he went to a nanotechnology conference, and they had teams build small cars that ran on hydrogen. When I asked why they couldn't do this with full size vehicles, he said because hydrogen is explosive... Isn't gasoline explosive too?

 

[mfb]

Hydrogen at room temperature is a gas, tanks in cars would have hydrogen with a high pressure. A mixture of hydrogen and oxygen is extremely dangerous.
Gasoline evaporates if it can, but the tank itself is not under pressure and it is not as bad as hydrogen.

 

[Pythagorean]

A place to stay
"Oi! A real one ..."
Enough to eat
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more no-one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no-one kills the children anymore.
And no one kills the children anymore.

 

[OmCheeto]

A place to stay
"Oi! A real one ..."
Enough to eat
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more no-one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no-one kills the children anymore.
And no one kills the children anymore.

hmmm...

And there I thought I was the only person who read too much into music.

I don't remember this song. I shall listen to it tonight.

Unless of course, I die, before I get to my place to stay.

But I doubt I'll die tonight.

...

We shall talk in the morning.

 

[Evo]

Before I die, I'd like to see people finally understand what the internet is and isn't. Not one person I've run across online actually knows. Of course, since I worked for the company that invented the concept with the US government and worked in it for the past 3+ decades, I know.

It's not a "thing", it thousands of companies and governments all contributing pieces of data connections.

It's not a "right".

Politicians have no clue what the internet is, they go by what people tell them, usually special interest lobbyists.

Then there are individuals and companies that create websites that can be accessed through the myriad data connections that form parts of what we call "the internet". They are not the "internet".

 

[OmCheeto]

...
We shall talk in the morning.

Watched a video of the song.
Yes, these last 100 years, have been brutal.
...
Reloading...
Things I want to see... hrmmm...

All lawyers must die!

hmmmm...

Wait! That was Shakespeare... Never mind...
------------------------
I can hear the drones, already...

 

[cdux]

I see innovations on a daily basis, and I think this is really awesome

Yeah the thing is all this optimism is something I took into account. What you didn't take into account is that the coin has a second side, pessimism, if you don't get your fix soon. A habit that gives a high doesn't only give highs, it also gives lows.

You probably misunderstood my way of thinking though. I mainly criticized spectators. I think being the actual innovator is the real joyful thing, even if sometimes you fail, people are hardwired to want to struggle (it explains how all Billionaires still work at the age of 80+). But if they just stand in front of a screen waiting for innovations to come merely as spectators they will have highs and they will have lows. And frankly they will have more lows if they are too fixated. e.g. I'm waiting now for new GPUs to come out and it's such a long process (move it TSMC!).

They are not the "internet".

The thing is besides the historical origin or even some of the current infrastructure, in practice a country can now just disconnect from the rest of the world and have its own internal network. So in my view, the internet is nothing but a 'network'. I don't really have to qualify it further since that's the main quality of it, that it networks computers in an area. If the internet - as you define it - disappeared, then we'd miss mainly the lack of networking, rather than the underlying technological details or its historical origin, even if some of those details are in some cases defining (e.g. the quality of having an IP address whenever you connect anywhere.)

 

[Lsos]

Why do I have have to carry 5 freaking keys around in my pocket at all times? Is it too much to ask, this day and age, to not require keys anymore?? Cars have been able to be opened remotely for a long time, but for some reason this hasn't transferred yet to anything else. When will my "smart" phone be able to open all of my doors??

Am I asking too much? I'm not requesting a servant robot or a flying car over here

 

[Digitalism]

human animal hybrids

technological telepathy/telekinesis etc

 

[berkeman]

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