Saturday, November 11, 2006
from fight aging blog. More Blog Interviews, Answers to the Questions
As you might recall, Attila Csordás of Partial Immortalization put out a set of questions on healthy life extension - primarily aimed at bloggers - and set out to get folk to answer them.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?
3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?
4. What is the most probable technological draft of human life extension, which technology or discipline has the biggest chance to reach it earliest? (regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, gene therapy, caloric restriction, bionics, hormones, antioxidants, …)
5. When?
6. What can blogs do for LE?
updating with a few thoughts of my own:
1. Like most futurists, I started with a thorough study of speculative fiction, SF, during the golden years - I was 12. It was pretty clear that I and we were in a race to get off the planet and achieve immortality, or die trying. The news trends were gooid, then bad, then good. In my teen years I got a copy of Futurist magazine, read a bit of Timothy Leary, but didn't run into my first Extropian until I was in my 20s in the 80s. Later came Vinge and Varley and so forth. So since I was a kid, I've kept in mind the possibility that I would live a long time in an interesting and unknowable future - this set me a bit at odds with the dominant culture.
2. My commitment is to moderate life extension - I want to live another 100 years, at least until the singularity,and then evaluate my options.
3. My favorite argument? Hmm. Not sure I have a fave, but, here's one: Archimedes' lever. Archimedes said that with a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move a planet. The point is that choices have consequences that get bigger over time, so if you can extend the timeframe, we become more able to create our own destinies, and free will matters.
4. Which is the more likely technology?
Offhand, I'd say robotics has a bit of an edge over cloning - I'm willing to settle for a computer similation that thinks it's still me, when it's time to go explore strange new worlds. So, transhumanism.
5. When? I think the singularity could come as early as 2012. One can already see singularity effects as the rate of change speeds up. I like to read slashdot for the gee whiz stories of superscience. Most days, not every day, there's some story about a revolutionary worldchanging new discovery. Today's story, a roundup of 50 trends from popular mechanics, says the government is well on its way to a goal of having individualized DNA readouts for about $1000 by 2015. I'm going to revise that to 2012, to fit my singularity predictions. Knowing what your DNA is will have practical benefits worth $1000, while meanwhile more people than now will carry $1000 around as pocket change. So as the price comes down, the market goes up, so applications will be widespread. Knowing what my DNA is should be helpful in knowing what drugs can cure my depression or improve my memory recall or improving various skills, so that I'll be able to do something socially useful, more so than just blogging, not especially well. Time magazine's 50 cool new inventions article is less interesting.
5. Blogs are replacing or augmenting older models of change dissemination.
Blogs are part of the crowdsourcing revolution which is part of the transition to the post-scarcity open-source economy. Instead of waiting for university department chairmen to die off before a new idea can take hold, or waiting 17 years for a patent to expire, or waiting a year for a journal article to be published, blogs can spread a new idea in hours, fast cheap and well.
I'm an early adopter of the post-scarcity lifestyle. I have a little money, not much, so I get by. I enhance that by salvaging cast-off junk, since the worker bees always need the lastest gadget and don't have storage space for the old gadgets. My real wealth is access to all the free info online. I blog, not very well, in order to do my small bit in the crowdsourcing revolution. I cultivate my wuffie, reputation capital, by blogging and small projects such as litigation about privacy.
Today's privacy litigation tasks aren't going well, my ongoing struggle with writer's block, which is one reason I blog - to get in the habit of writing, so that when I need to write something that will matter, it should come more easily. Doesn't always work as well as I'd like.
As you might recall, Attila Csordás of Partial Immortalization put out a set of questions on healthy life extension - primarily aimed at bloggers - and set out to get folk to answer them.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?
3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?
4. What is the most probable technological draft of human life extension, which technology or discipline has the biggest chance to reach it earliest? (regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, gene therapy, caloric restriction, bionics, hormones, antioxidants, …)
5. When?
6. What can blogs do for LE?
updating with a few thoughts of my own:
1. Like most futurists, I started with a thorough study of speculative fiction, SF, during the golden years - I was 12. It was pretty clear that I and we were in a race to get off the planet and achieve immortality, or die trying. The news trends were gooid, then bad, then good. In my teen years I got a copy of Futurist magazine, read a bit of Timothy Leary, but didn't run into my first Extropian until I was in my 20s in the 80s. Later came Vinge and Varley and so forth. So since I was a kid, I've kept in mind the possibility that I would live a long time in an interesting and unknowable future - this set me a bit at odds with the dominant culture.
2. My commitment is to moderate life extension - I want to live another 100 years, at least until the singularity,and then evaluate my options.
3. My favorite argument? Hmm. Not sure I have a fave, but, here's one: Archimedes' lever. Archimedes said that with a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move a planet. The point is that choices have consequences that get bigger over time, so if you can extend the timeframe, we become more able to create our own destinies, and free will matters.
4. Which is the more likely technology?
Offhand, I'd say robotics has a bit of an edge over cloning - I'm willing to settle for a computer similation that thinks it's still me, when it's time to go explore strange new worlds. So, transhumanism.
5. When? I think the singularity could come as early as 2012. One can already see singularity effects as the rate of change speeds up. I like to read slashdot for the gee whiz stories of superscience. Most days, not every day, there's some story about a revolutionary worldchanging new discovery. Today's story, a roundup of 50 trends from popular mechanics, says the government is well on its way to a goal of having individualized DNA readouts for about $1000 by 2015. I'm going to revise that to 2012, to fit my singularity predictions. Knowing what your DNA is will have practical benefits worth $1000, while meanwhile more people than now will carry $1000 around as pocket change. So as the price comes down, the market goes up, so applications will be widespread. Knowing what my DNA is should be helpful in knowing what drugs can cure my depression or improve my memory recall or improving various skills, so that I'll be able to do something socially useful, more so than just blogging, not especially well. Time magazine's 50 cool new inventions article is less interesting.
5. Blogs are replacing or augmenting older models of change dissemination.
Blogs are part of the crowdsourcing revolution which is part of the transition to the post-scarcity open-source economy. Instead of waiting for university department chairmen to die off before a new idea can take hold, or waiting 17 years for a patent to expire, or waiting a year for a journal article to be published, blogs can spread a new idea in hours, fast cheap and well.
I'm an early adopter of the post-scarcity lifestyle. I have a little money, not much, so I get by. I enhance that by salvaging cast-off junk, since the worker bees always need the lastest gadget and don't have storage space for the old gadgets. My real wealth is access to all the free info online. I blog, not very well, in order to do my small bit in the crowdsourcing revolution. I cultivate my wuffie, reputation capital, by blogging and small projects such as litigation about privacy.
Today's privacy litigation tasks aren't going well, my ongoing struggle with writer's block, which is one reason I blog - to get in the habit of writing, so that when I need to write something that will matter, it should come more easily. Doesn't always work as well as I'd like.
Comments:
Post a Comment
