Saturday, December 04, 2004
Building a better mouse department:
This guy says the first person to live to be 1000 may be 60 now.
Since I'm 44, that sounds about right.
His day job is he makes mice live longer.
Back in the 80's I met my first extropians. Before that, we'd called ourselves futurists. The extropians had five related memes: intelligence enhancement,
neutropics, life extension, ungoverned markets, space. The 6th one was memetics, the idea of memes themselves.
Twenty years later, where do we stand?
"Everybody" has a cell phone with a camera, and a computer with google, so we are wired together in social networks that in the 80's were limited to a few early adopters. By everybody I mean about a billion people, 1 out of 6. So "computers" haven't gotten that much smarter themselves, so much as networking human intelligence better. Today's $350 computer is a supercomputer by 1980 standards,
but we aren't mostly using it for rocket science; it's stuff we used to do with tools like televisions, voice mail, videogames. Some are doing rocket science.
Neutropics, chemicals for better brain function, haven't come to much yet for the healthy person. On the other hand, a lot of mentally ill people now have drugs that help them that weren't around in the 80s.
Markets in everything. The typical voter, D or R, remains hostile to markets, but
academia less so now, as markets transform Asia and Europe. The former soviet states do not seem to be embracing markets in the way that China has.
Private space travel is no longer if but when. The dot.com boom and bust created a lot of wealth for nerds who are taking their backyard model rockets to new heights.
The meme meme is more widespread, if still misunderstood.
So all in all the extropian vision is being vindicated - technological change did result in restructing of the ecomony and of society, and our ideas have spread from the few to the many. But most americans still live in redstateistan, where cloning, gay families, new ideas, are threatening. Haiti and Russia are models where traditional societies are collapsing into violence ignorance and squalor. Our inner cities are Haiti, our suburbs are Russia. Austrian economics holds that the markets are a wave of creative destruction, transforming society again and again. One outcome is that wealth doubles every 15 or 20 years, outside of the war zones.
But the stress is tearing apart families and the existing social order, which adapts more slowly. As the singularity approaches, and changes pile upon changes, the social order will be more and more stressed. My situation is not unique. While I am poor by middle class american standards, I am rich by world standards. But I am alone in my room, cut off from any community other than my online friends. That's partly about me - I am mildly autistic or something, and have always had trouble fitting in or making connections with people. But it's partly about a breakdown in social order - more and more people live alone in apart-ments, and wind up institutionalized in old folks homes alone at taxpayer expense, instead of being valued tribal elders.
I woke up at 5:30 am, as happens most days lately, so now I will try again to get back to sleep.
This guy says the first person to live to be 1000 may be 60 now.
Since I'm 44, that sounds about right.
His day job is he makes mice live longer.
Back in the 80's I met my first extropians. Before that, we'd called ourselves futurists. The extropians had five related memes: intelligence enhancement,
neutropics, life extension, ungoverned markets, space. The 6th one was memetics, the idea of memes themselves.
Twenty years later, where do we stand?
"Everybody" has a cell phone with a camera, and a computer with google, so we are wired together in social networks that in the 80's were limited to a few early adopters. By everybody I mean about a billion people, 1 out of 6. So "computers" haven't gotten that much smarter themselves, so much as networking human intelligence better. Today's $350 computer is a supercomputer by 1980 standards,
but we aren't mostly using it for rocket science; it's stuff we used to do with tools like televisions, voice mail, videogames. Some are doing rocket science.
Neutropics, chemicals for better brain function, haven't come to much yet for the healthy person. On the other hand, a lot of mentally ill people now have drugs that help them that weren't around in the 80s.
Markets in everything. The typical voter, D or R, remains hostile to markets, but
academia less so now, as markets transform Asia and Europe. The former soviet states do not seem to be embracing markets in the way that China has.
Private space travel is no longer if but when. The dot.com boom and bust created a lot of wealth for nerds who are taking their backyard model rockets to new heights.
The meme meme is more widespread, if still misunderstood.
So all in all the extropian vision is being vindicated - technological change did result in restructing of the ecomony and of society, and our ideas have spread from the few to the many. But most americans still live in redstateistan, where cloning, gay families, new ideas, are threatening. Haiti and Russia are models where traditional societies are collapsing into violence ignorance and squalor. Our inner cities are Haiti, our suburbs are Russia. Austrian economics holds that the markets are a wave of creative destruction, transforming society again and again. One outcome is that wealth doubles every 15 or 20 years, outside of the war zones.
But the stress is tearing apart families and the existing social order, which adapts more slowly. As the singularity approaches, and changes pile upon changes, the social order will be more and more stressed. My situation is not unique. While I am poor by middle class american standards, I am rich by world standards. But I am alone in my room, cut off from any community other than my online friends. That's partly about me - I am mildly autistic or something, and have always had trouble fitting in or making connections with people. But it's partly about a breakdown in social order - more and more people live alone in apart-ments, and wind up institutionalized in old folks homes alone at taxpayer expense, instead of being valued tribal elders.
I woke up at 5:30 am, as happens most days lately, so now I will try again to get back to sleep.
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