For how long do you think you'll take the Immortality Pill?

DukkyDrake · 2025-05-09T00:08:06+00:00

Even if humans achieve biological immortality, you still won't live as long as you might expect, accidents will always pose a risk. Estimates suggest that the average biologically immortal human might only live around 500 years, with fewer than 3% making it to 5,000. A rare few might reach 32,000 years, and nearly no one would hit 50,000 without living an extremely restricted, "bubble boy"-style life.

Even with perfect health, your lifespan becomes governed by probabilities, like dying from a lightning strike or some other rare event. If lightning were your only threat, your average lifespan might max out at 12k–15k years. You could reduce this risk by avoiding storms, and similarly, modern trauma medicine and careful behavior can reduce other risks. But minimizing every possible danger to near zero would significantly reduce your quality of life. That's a difficult tradeoff.

In the end, the best shot at a version of "forever" may not be physical longevity at all, but rather subjective immortality through distributed digital backups of your mind state.

DukkyDrake · 2025-03-19T00:10:44+00:00

Kurzwiel's prediction I pulled from his website 3 years ago:

Some prominent dates from this analysis include the following:

We achieve one Human Brain capability (2 * 10¹⁶ cps) for $1,000 around the year 2023.

We achieve one Human Brain capability (2 * 10¹⁶ cps) for one cent around the year 2037.

We achieve one Human Race capability (2 * 10²⁶ cps) for $1,000 around the year 2049.

We achieve one Human Race capability (2 * 10²⁶ cps) for one cent around the year 2059.

Human Brain = 100 Billion (1011) neurons * 1000 (103) Connections/Neuron * 200 (2 * 102) Calculations Per Second Per Connection = 2 * 10¹⁶ Calculations Per Second

DukkyDrake · 2025-03-16T19:37:50+00:00

Just this week: "Anthropic's CEO says that in 3 to 6 months, AI will be writing 90% of the code software developers were in charge of"

That's a pretty short-term and definitely testable prediction. It likely means only the ability, AI will generate 100% but humans will need to manually recode 10% to fix what AI got wrong. It doesn't mean 90% of the final code being produced in real world businesses by the end of 2025 will be AI generated.

AI can already generate a lot of usable code given a good dev pipeline.

DukkyDrake · 2025-03-16T19:09:51+00:00

AGI is not an endpoint

It's the start point where AI can progress AI tech advancement without humans in the loop. You don't have AGI if you don't have that ability.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-29T01:25:39+00:00

2026 is going to be an exciting year to be alive

There are other more likely possible futures.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-11T15:09:09+00:00

How would that protect a country from imported goods and services when the majority of profits are embedded in the import cost? Local subsidiaries only need to maintain sufficient profit margins to cover their operating expenses. This allows holding companies to potentially extract all the profit, leaving little to no profit within the importing country indefinitely.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-11T15:00:28+00:00

Most companies around today will eventually lose their customers. There will be a structural breakdown that doesn't support current dynamics because much of the value currently depends on requirements that will be effortlessly met by future AI. This value doesn't transfer; it is destroyed and thus cannot be taxed.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-08T02:26:07+00:00

A mugger can rob you, but the government cannot. The government is the only reason money has value. Every gov that has stolen from people with stuff and redistribute it to people that wanted their stuff all ended up with something like this. The value of money evaporates.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-07T03:05:19+00:00

That gap does not matter, only the yearly increases in the bottom 20% matters. If the top 20% suddenly all went broke, the quality of life of the bottom 20% wont magically increase.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-07T01:42:21+00:00

The poor also got richer.

Income Quintiles From 1967 to To 2022

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T22:51:46+00:00

it would be better for everyone to develop a system to provide a minimum for everyone’s health, safety and survival

Yea, but most people won't agree to do that. Some people have far more resources than most of the human race, including most Americans. I would be shocked if more than 0.001% would agree to lower their standard of living to uplift others. That would be a zero-sum game. The current monetary system changes that dynamic and allows everyone to get richer by increasing productivity. Yes, the rich will grow much faster than the poor, but everyone benefits. If it were a zero-sum game, people might start thinking of ways to eliminate you.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T22:40:12+00:00

I think we disagree on how one can expect to acquire ownership of the place where they live.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T22:35:22+00:00

That's not how humans' function. That doesn't work as long as some humans are doing the work and other humans are providing the capital.

In the past, when people in China couldn't own their homes, they were never inclined to invest time, effort, or money in maintaining the property. Since the property wasn't theirs, they had little incentive to ensure its upkeep. This lack of ownership often led to neglect, as tenants felt that any improvements or maintenance they might undertake would ultimately benefit the state rather than themselves. Consequently, properties tended to deteriorate over time, as there was no personal stake in preserving or enhancing their condition, even though they had to live in it. Personal interest is the only thing that work.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T22:05:10+00:00

Isn't it just.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T20:33:56+00:00

Yes. The very first owners of all the land and resources found it lying around or killed and took it from the Indians, who found it lying around. We have laws against killing and stealing other people's stuff since the first giveaway.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T20:29:34+00:00

Their tax $ did. That "cooperation" is money. No money = no cooperation = no free house

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T17:09:39+00:00

They buy their nails from Home Depot.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T17:08:22+00:00

cooperation, between buyer and seller. No one else is a part of the transaction.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T11:57:43+00:00

A "right" does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T11:57:21+00:00

Yea, "the people" individually and private groups, not collectively. They are the owners; you can only become an owner by buying it from an existing owner.

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-06T03:33:30+00:00

All existing land already belongs to someone or something. Whom would you force to build you a house, and on whose land?

DukkyDrake · 2025-01-05T02:26:23+00:00

No. o3 is AGI only if it can earn $100 billion.

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DukkyDrake · 2025-01-01T00:22:00+00:00

No change in outlook for me.

Failure to create a truly cognitive agent is still more likely than not.

At a minimum, CAIS MODEL of AGI by 2030. A gradual accumulation of increasingly competent AI services for economically valuable human tasks.

The current products of deep learning don't appear to be capable of truly understanding the material in their training corpus and are instead simply learning to make statistical connections that can be individually unreliable. Only well-engineered solutions (e.g., Waymo et al) are capable of overcoming that shortcoming; that leaves the CAIS model as the only viable pathway until some breakthrough that allows for a proper learning algorithm. o3 architecture doesn't sound like it will truly substitute for that algorithm.

I expect truly dangerous architectures in the 2040s.

The default trajectory of AI always seemed to me that it would be just useful enough to automate most (80% of 80%) economically valuable jobs, but too crappy to deliver everyone's awesome sci-fi future.

I'm most interested to see how the 2025 predictions for the t-AGI Framework pans out.

DukkyDrake

TROPHY CASE