Life extension in mice via senescent cell clearance

[K. A. Pital]

I am pro-life, I guess. The future generations will come at a slower pace, but they will come nonetheless. The consequences of human lifespan extension are not fully understood even now, but I don't think we made the wrong choice to mass-produce antibiotics nonetheless.

[LaCroix]

Yeah, even if people are immortal (or better put, non-aging), random unprotected fucking will not cease to be a thing. People are not logic creatures that will put off children forever. Especially since the females will run out of eggs after a few decades. So to have children, they either have to freeze them or get it done, early. That part of the biological clock is pretty much set at birth.

Also, the sentiment of "I want to live my life while I'm still young and healthy, and not get bogged down by children" will lose a lot of validation if you can see your children grow up and through university and have great-grandchildren of their own, and still be fit and healthy by that time. And people will still be wanting kids, just the same.

People will reproduce just the same, I'm sure.

[Darmalus]

For men time is not an issue, most will be fully capable of making babies at 300 as they are at 18. Given that viable sperm have been made from stem cells, I can't see eggs not also being made the same way.

As far as having children, I am under the impression that it's modern culture/economics making having children all pain, no gain and lack of economic security while young that has resulted in negative population growth.

[Lord Revan]

For men time is not an issue, most will be fully capable of making babies at 300 as they are at 18. Given that viable sperm have been made from stem cells, I can't see eggs not also being made the same way.

As far as having children, I am under the impression that it's modern culture/economics making having children all pain, no gain and lack of economic security while young that has resulted in negative population growth.

while it's probably possible to restore fertility to a woman who has lost all her eggs, they don't restore naturally the number of Eggcells a woman has is determined at birth and can only go down naturally.

[Darmalus]

For men time is not an issue, most will be fully capable of making babies at 300 as they are at 18. Given that viable sperm have been made from stem cells, I can't see eggs not also being made the same way.

As far as having children, I am under the impression that it's modern culture/economics making having children all pain, no gain and lack of economic security while young that has resulted in negative population growth.

while it's probably possible to restore fertility to a woman who has lost all her eggs, they don't restore naturally the number of Eggcells a woman has is determined at birth and can only go down naturally.

I was thinking of in vitro fertilization using new eggs made from stem cells, which would also make it easy to fix any bad mutations or genetic diseases that arise. Thus bypassing the biological clock.

[Purple]

Not to mention the fact that any development that leads to such a massive demographic shift as immortality tends to be is also going to change things up economically. The current model of rushing into an education and carrier so that you can work until you drop dead of old age simply won't be able to cope with the influx of 250 year olds that are still as mentally fit and willing to work as they were when they were 25. There already aren't enough jobs for everyone.

[NecronLord]

This forum is so shock level 0

What the fuck's that meant to mean? No, seriously, someone spill--Starglider, you seem to know what the fuck he's talking about?

Google is your friend.

No surprise, it's Eliezer Yudkowsky, high priest of the LessWrong/"Machine Intelligence Research Institute" cult ranting about how stupid the uninitiated are again:

A Shock Level measures the high-tech concepts you can contemplate without being impressed, frightened, blindly enthusiastic - without exhibiting future shock. Shock Level Zero or SL0, for example, is modern technology and the modern-day world, SL1 is virtual reality or an ecommerce-based economy, SL2 is interstellar travel, medical immortality or genetic engineering, SL3 is nanotech or human-equivalent AI, and SL4 is the Singularity.

The classification is useful because it helps measure what your audience is ready for; for example, going two Shock Levels higher will cause people to be shocked, but being seriously frightened takes three Shock Levels. Obviously this is just a loose rule of thumb! Also, I find that I often want to refer to groups by shock level; for example, "This argument works best between SL1 and SL2". (This does not mean that people with different Shock Levels are necessarily divided into opposing social factions. It's not an "Us and Them" thing.)

SL0: The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology - not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
SL1: Virtual reality, living to be a hundred, "The Road Ahead", "To Renew America", "Future Shock", the frontiers of modern technology as seen by Wired magazine. Scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers, technophiles.
SL2: Medical immortality, interplanetary exploration, major genetic engineering, and new ("alien") cultures. The average SF fan.
SL3: Nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, minor intelligence enhancement, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration. Extropians and transhumanists.
SL4: The Singularity, Jupiter Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of "life as we know it." Singularitarians and not much else.

Full Page

It's mind you, talking about shock in the context of 'that idea blows my mind' I really don't think anything on his SL4 is that, err, shocking. I'd be shocked if someone found a Jupiter Brain or ultra-intelligent being, but it's pretty routine as a futurist/sci-fi concept.

TL;DR it's another example of 'ordinary people are stupid' - if you can read the background for warhams necrons without being yourself afraid or impressed (By the novelty of it I assume? I for one am impressed by eighteen wheeler trucks but still comprehend a variety of singularitarian tropes - eighteen wheelers actually exist and are loud.) you're shock level 3, and there's a toy soldiers game featuring them available in almost every British town.

[K. A. Pital]

I think a lot of people read works like Solaris with very little shock. "Shock level 4" lol.

[salm]

Maybe he means when imagening or discussing something for real. I mean if you read a novel you suspend disbelief.
So maybe not being "shocked" is supposed to mean the ability to discuss a possible future development seriously, i.e. without brushing it off as pie in the sky nonsense and whithout it being too overly enthusiastic, scared or impressed.
Otherwise a categorisation like that doesn´t seem to make a lot of sense.

[K. A. Pital]

I can very well imagine and even personally witness very horrible things. I guess this whole "shock level" stuff is just because a lot of geeks are sheltered, overprotected and desocialized first-worlders.

[salm]

Yes, but I guess term "future shock" is derieved from the term "curlture shock" which doesn´t necessarily have much to do with a normal shock either.
Culture shock describes the experience when you move to a significantly different environmnet by moving to somewhere else.
Future shock, I assume, should discribe the experience you have when too much stuff changes in your own environment in too little time.

Or somthing like that.

The interpretation that is supposed to mean being scared of an imagined horrible future doesn´t really make any sense because most people can read dystopian scifi novels or similar things just fine. And that is such an obvious thing that I kind of doubt that anybody would use that term in such a way.

[K. A. Pital]

Yeah, but then "contemplate" is absolutely wrong here.

I can contemplate any kind of weird shit. Contemplation does not cause a culture shock; being immersed in the culture does. As a person who changed his country of residence several times, I can say quite certainly that talking about some nation's cultural traits does not cause a shock itself (neither does thinking about them). It is only the first-hand experience which can be described as a "culture shock". Even then, it is not necessarily fear or "being impressed"...

It is also proven by the fact that posts about tribes and ethnographic stories are often the subject of reading, thinking and a lot of conversations between people; they love to read that stuff and think about it. But they are not afraid or experience strong emotion. It is only if they happen to live in such circumstances, they undergo a "culture shock" state.

[salm]

Yeah, maybe you´re right and that guy is just an idiot.

[Starglider]

Why? Because I like children.
Now, that's not to infer others here don't, but it seems obvious to me that the longer we live, the less children we can have in the world. The less proportionally, but also the less in absolute terms.
I want there to be more children, not less.
I could accept an average life-span of sixty or seventy, if it meant more kids in the streets.

This is a bad sentiment and you should feel bad. The primary reason is that if there are more adults to each child, we can afford to invest more resources in making sure every child has good education and healthcare. In addition, the total number of children you will see in your lifetime will remain roughly constant; they will just be spread out more. From the child's perspective this will not be so apparent as children will still be mostly grouped into schools etc.

This forum is so shock level 0

What the fuck's that meant to mean? No, seriously, someone spill--Starglider, you seem to know what the fuck he's talking about?

Turn-of-the-millenium online transhumanism. It was a different time.

[K. A. Pital]

Yeah, maybe you´re right and that guy is just an idiot.

He's not an idiot, just a yuppie snob leading a sheltered and deeply atomized existence.

[Terralthra]

It's easy to disdain something written twenty years ago as sheltered and regressive. We've come a long way in terms of public understanding and ideas of such concepts in the past two decades. For a counterpoint, at the time that was written, if I suggested to my friends (who all had pagers, as they were reasonably trendy among teenagers then) that in only a few years' time, all of us would have cell phones that could access the web faster than our (by and large dial-up) home internet connections and in many cases, have screens with higher resolution and quality than those same computers, most of them laughed at the idea, and only a few would've agreed with me.

[K. A. Pital]

I did not say this concept is regressive (on the contrary, ubergeeks like the Silicon Valley yuppies like to pose as "true progressives" and that requires espousing at least some share of basic progressive views), just that it is very, very sheltered. Usually people who have a non-sheltered life can contemplate a great many things without extreme emotional impact implied by the word "shock".

You are talking about the fact some people have a hard time imagining future technologies or future society. This is another thing. They are not really emotionally distressed by the potential future, they just find it hard to imagine or believe some things will or can happen.

[NecronLord]

It's easy to disdain something written twenty years ago as sheltered and regressive.

2016-1999 is... not twenty.

And your argument would be relevant if we had found the link and were picking it apart for no reason; in fact cosmicalstorm referenced the concepts described on the link as a means to try and brush off plausibility/feisability concerns about his dreams on... Mon Feb 29, 2016. That's why the topic was raised.

Few people will say that the Talmudic books of the bible stand out as unscientific compared to say, contemporary texts to Ba'al, and if you talk a hymn to Ba'al-Hadad on here, most people will automatically put it in its proper context (or make Stargate jokes perhaps) while if you discuss the book of Genesis, people will talk about its current context, generally, because people still swear by it.

[Simon_Jester]

NecronLord- a text written seventeen years ago is not as 'out of date' as one written twenty years ago, but it's close. 1996 and 1999 were a lot more similar to each other than either of them is to the present.

Stas- I think "future shock" and "shock level" are poorly chosen words... but at the same time, consider how cosmicalstorm was (inappropriately) trying to use the term. We showed skepticism that a particular technology would work out as quickly as he (foolishly) thought. And he accused us of kneejerk, reflex skepticism. Such reflex skepticism seems to be pretty much what the advocates of "shock levels" are thinking of.

This is a bad sentiment and you should feel bad. The primary reason is that if there are more adults to each child, we can afford to invest more resources in making sure every child has good education and healthcare. In addition, the total number of children you will see in your lifetime will remain roughly constant; they will just be spread out more. From the child's perspective this will not be so apparent as children will still be mostly grouped into schools etc.

Schools as we know them (swarms of kids, few adults) actually are a product of how few resources we can invest in ensuring every child has good education; they are an attempt to do wholesale what we cannot afford to do retail, using the labor of at most a few percent of the population.

If we had massive economic resources in a post-scarcity society to educate children, we might do things very differently, especially since we'd have so much surplus labor available to closely supervise and teach children.

[NecronLord]

NecronLord- a text written seventeen years ago is not as 'out of date' as one written twenty years ago, but it's close. 1996 and 1999 were a lot more similar to each other than either of them is to the present.

It is hyperbolic nonetheless and your objection misses the meat of my reply.

Stas- I think "future shock" and "shock level" are poorly chosen words... but at the same time, consider how cosmicalstorm was (inappropriately) trying to use the term. We showed skepticism that a particular technology would work out as quickly as he (foolishly) thought. And he accused us of kneejerk, reflex skepticism. Such reflex skepticism seems to be pretty much what the advocates of "shock levels" are thinking of.

And dismissing such arguments on the basis of 'you are future-shocked' is an ad-hominem at best.

[LaCroix]

we might do things very differently, especially since we'd have so much surplus labor available to closely supervise and teach children.

True, I think this is how the Vulcan Academy came to be - Long-lived people, few offspring. It only makes sense that each pupil would be catered by multiple personal teachers tailored to (and pushing) his abilities at the speed that he would be able to follow their instructions.

[Korto]

Thanks, NecronLord, Starglider, although you are of course right. I could have just googled it. That just completely didn't enter my head.

Why? Because I like children.
Now, that's not to infer others here don't, but it seems obvious to me that the longer we live, the less children we can have in the world. The less proportionally, but also the less in absolute terms.
I want there to be more children, not less.
I could accept an average life-span of sixty or seventy, if it meant more kids in the streets.

This is a bad sentiment and you should feel bad. The primary reason is that if there are more adults to each child, we can afford to invest more resources in making sure every child has good education and healthcare. In addition, the total number of children you will see in your lifetime will remain roughly constant; they will just be spread out more. From the child's perspective this will not be so apparent as children will still be mostly grouped into schools etc.

I thank you for your suggestion, which I have given due consideration, but I'm afraid it's really not a good fit for me at this point in my life. If, however, at a later point of time I do feel a need to wallow in pointless and unnecessary guilt, I'll definitely keep it in mind.

You do seem to me, however, to be assuming a bit about the future of children. Yes, we may be capable of making sure each child has good health care, and a good education, but "Can" and "Will" are two different things. America's capable of having free universal health care--how are they going with that? We (Australia) are no doubt capable of ensuring no child needs to sleep on the streets, but tax cuts are more important.

In the future there may be no schools. Each child will taught by an AI teaching program, in their own home (Asimov wrote a story on that once). With very few children, they're all kept safe at home, never allowed out except with masks and antibiotics, to protect from the dangers of any illness or accident. They have little to no contact with other children. Their parents constantly hover over them, protecting them from any possible harm, real or imagined, while laws keep them constantly monitored. No living pets, obviously, they could attack without warning, and they harbour disease; electronic pets are far safer and cleaner, and don't make a mess.
Any rowdiness or rebelliousness is treated as a "mental disorder", and is medicated.
If a child does anything like climbing, or jumping off things, they're immediately stopped, and the parents may be reported and investigated. They'll be investigated, too, if the child should hurt himself, break an arm or a leg, for that would be a clear sign of negligence.

The child is not taken out in public. There's very few children now, and people have gotten used to the peace and quiet, the sedateness. "Breeders" are glared at, no restaurants cater to children, and shops don't like having them in, as they upset the other customers with their noise and running about. Certainly people wouldn't want their taxes to be used to support breeders, who no doubt only had children to mooch off welfare and don't know how to look after them properly and let them run around all over the place like animals. No, tax cuts are more important.

The people fall in love with the idea of children, the fairy tale, and lose touch with the reality. If a child doesn't match the fantasy, loving and innocent and obedient, they're rejected with shock and horror. It becomes routine to try and sentence children as adults. Records are set and broken in the youngest person to be sentenced to death.

Finally, they come of age, and enter a world they've been taught to think of as scary and dangerous, where risk-taking is bad; if they have children themselves, they'll teach those children the same thing.


Do I think all this will happen? Not really, I just pulled it out of my arse now. I don't think it won't, either. I have no opinion either way. I'll leave predicting the future to people who enjoy being wrong for a living.

[K. A. Pital]

To make a grim future for children more plausible, you do not even need total isolation.

Total observation is enough. If children feel that they live in a Panopticon-like world where their every step is observed by an omnipresent authority, they will be more and more conformist at heart with every generation. It is a well-established fact that even observation itself, if known to the target, causes long-term behavioural shifts.

Or perhaps atomization through the technology pressure. "You have to learn programming or you will be worthless to the world". Children will then use most of their free time with computers, instead of collective activities outside, and also outside supervision.

[Esquire]

I don't see why that should be true a priori. Any programming language is more regular than, say, Chinese; it's possible to learn Mandarin and also have a social life. Many families will find an appropriate balance, some won't, and the world will muddle through the way it always has.

[K. A. Pital]

I don't see why that should be true a priori. Any programming language is more regular than, say, Chinese; it's possible to learn Mandarin and also have a social life. Many families will find an appropriate balance, some won't, and the world will muddle through the way it always has.

Learning Chinese does not require you spend hours in front of the computer; any programming language does. It is very much possible to be proficient in 3-4 real languages and not be desocialized, especially if you learnt them as a child at school, but that is because learning them doesn't enroach on your social contact time the way programming does. In fact, language encourages contact - you can't learn it alone in front of a computer, no matter how hard you try. You have to go out and practice with skilled teachers or native speakers. With a programming skill, it is the exact opposite. You can learn it alone by communicating with the machine and getting better at it, but the machine won't be able to replace other humans.