This is great Brent:
“The main issue is simply immortality. Obviously the richest will be the first ones able to afford it. But surely, a few decades after that, most everyone will be able to afford it. But what happens till most everyone can afford it?”
After my wife of 32 years passed away, I began thinking about this a lot. The song by Queen “Who Wants to Live Forever” took center stage and occupied my thoughts. Why would I want to live forever without her? Surely some will die and even our best science will be unable to restore them. What then?
We might extend what you said so well…
What happens *when* most everyone can afford it?
Imagine, as I have, eternity without your beloved object (to use Freud’s phrase). Is that paradise?
And as I conjectured in the last chapter of my dissertation based on the data I received from the USRDS on everybody’s need for a replacement kidney versus the reality if that should come to pass…
Will each moment matter if we never run out?
It is because we can’t be together forever, that each second now is so precious to me
Thanks for this topic, all!
Lonny
Dr. Lonny Douglas Meinecke (King University)
http://lmeinecke.com/
“Comparison is the thief of joy” – Theodore Roosevelt
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever” - Mahatma Gandhi
"God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone" - William Butler Yeats (A Prayer For Old Age)
The main issue is simply immortality. Obviously the richest will be the first ones able to afford it. But surely, a few decades after that, most everyone will be able to afford it. But what happens till most everyone can afford it?
People are worried about the cost of health care now. None of what people are talking about now, trying to resolve the cost of health care, has anything to do with how much it's going to cost in 10 and 20 years. During the transition, not everyone is going to be able to afford it, simple as that. Sure, it's going to be WAY expensive, but life is worth it. Again, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Let us account for the potential abuses and ethical challenges... Should we hack the brain with portable external plugins that increase net intelligence? If we do, the rich will benefit by being able to afford the most capacity and upgrades. Will there one day be external memory, also with the cultural divide on capacity and access? Will there be an externalization of perception of "self"? Can such technology be hijacked for illicit use, to change political views, or force specific consumer decisions or lifestyle preferences?
Cool, yes. Grist for the mill of dystopian sci fi concepts? By the dozen.
IMHO, there are major questions that must be answered before human trials.
Yea, I think all that stuff is great. They mentioned others that have been doing similar interfaces, like the “Utah Array” helping blind people see and so on. And of course, as they always say: “You aint seen nothing yet.” And as he said: “The future is going to be ‘weird’. We think our lives are very different from people that live a few hundred years ago, before automobiles and so on. But because of accelerating work like Neuralink, the difference between our lives, and the lives of people 100 years ago, will be indistinguishable from our lives and people living 50 and 100 years in the future. (i.e. no death, uploading, avatars, amplified intelligence/memory…, traveling to space without needing space suits...)
But what continues to blow me away is how much neural progress like this continues while everyone is doing all this in only the abstract domain. People only use one word for all things red. (i.e. qualia blind.) Qualia are intrinsic qualities of something in the brain, so if you want to objectively observe/discover intrinsic qualities, you need to use multiple words, red (something that reflects or emits red light) and redness (the intrinsic quality of knowledge of red things.); How are you going to be able to get someone to see a spot of redness, vs greenness, let alone know if someone’s redness is like someone alse’s greenness.
It just seems so absurd to me that not only can nobody tell us the intrinsic colorness qualities of anything in this world, even the brilliant people like Elon Musk, and the world's most brilliant neural researchers and physicists, don’t realize we don’t know this. All peer reviewed work, today, is completely qualia blind, and basically just uses one word for all things red.
To better understand qualia blindness, see if you can pass the ‘Are you qualia blind’ test.
And if you agree with the importance of this, please help communicate this to the masses by signing or joining the "Representational Qualia Theory" camp, or one of it's supporting sub camps which most closely aligns with whatever you predict qualia will turn out to be.
Wondering your thoughts on Elon Musk’s NeuraLink device. Seems super cool to me! He talked about a lot of the long-term theoretical applications on his last appearance on Joe Rohan’s podcast, but this video is a great highlight of a first iteration.
--
Cole Butler
Project Coordinator: Treating Parents with ADHD and their Children (TPAC)
2103W, Cole Field House | College Park, MD 20742
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