If these general observations hold, look to the 21st century as being the century of the feisty fruit bats, oldsters with time on their hands and the inclination to do something with it. Sorta like the gerontocracy in Sterling's Holy Fire. If marijuana ever gets legalized here in the U.S. they'll be the group responsible (any harmful outcomes attributed to it by the State pall in comparison to its general effectiveness in managing pain).
]]>I've felt similar. But how much of that is looking for it (in my case, having seen a paternal grandfather develop Alzheimer's), and how much is an increased level of self-awareness that comes with life experience? A sort-of Dunning-Kruger effect?
It's like driving - are my roadcraft and reactions getting slightly worse, or am I just more aware, perhaps more careful and self-critical about my actions behind the wheel?
]]>Its funny to me how the language skews in service to our egos. The number of ways to avoid calling someone old is almost as vast as the number of ways to avoid saying "fat".
]]>mental acuity
Primarily, I've noticed a huge slowdown in my reading speed. When I was younger I could just shovel in entertainment and data. Now I'm much more critical of entertainment, and new data has to be balanced against old. Particularly with soft subjects like history, anthropology, or sociology.
]]>Ahem. Just how far past 100 do you plan to live?
At 59 in a week I have trouble with the though that I'm almost 60. Doesn't seem quite real. Partly due to having kids in my 30s I guess. Partly due to my family on my father's side seeming to never retire. Well never sit around relaxing. My father was busier at 70 than most people at 30.
]]>As Woody Allen said, I plan to live forever, or die trying.
(And I hear what you say about never retiring. Retirement, from what I've seen of it, looks boring. Sitting around in death's waiting room. I will concede that for people with jobs they hate or which involve manual labour retirement is a promise, not a threat, but I can see myself continuing to do what I do, albeit at a much slower pace and punctuated with increasingly long sabbaticals, right up until the terminal decline.)
As for living forever ...
The aches and creaks of getting physically old are unpleasant, and if offered an elixir of eternal youth I'd chug it immediately, even if the price was outrageous. I think the time to worry about immortal ennui is when you get it, not before; and I happen to enjoy being alive and want to continue until I stop enjoying it. Mind uploading, if indeed it ever becomes possible, is a second-best: I'd do it if I was dying, but I consider it an act of desperation, like cryonic suspension.
]]>I know people in their 30s who're MA, and others in their 70s who break easier than they used to but you would never describe as MA if you knew them.
]]>Yep. My dad died a year after they found his spine and chest full of tumors from decades of smoking. He was 76. The summer before he lost the feeling in his legs all he did was dig out an line a spring with timbers. Then install a pump. Ran a water line 400' up hill to the house. Then build and install an 8 zone sprinkler system for the yard. Which he had bought 10 years before and totally remodeled.
I'm doing way more in my house than I ever expected to. And aches are much more noticeable. But I can't imagine sitting around writing checks for what I want done when I can do it.
]]>I've made a little side-bet with myself that we'll see mind uploading scams in the next ten years.
"No - we can't run you virtually now... but if we high-resolution scan your brain, and slice 'n' scan you after you're dead - we will in the future! Live forever for a mere $N (for large values of N)".
Much lower overheads in storing data rather than frozen meat. You can also probably bring in some more annual payments stuff too (annual sets of scans "just in case" with some argument about more data / redundancy making the chances of resurrection better).
File under Evil Business Plans... I worry that my head produces so many that fit in that category ;-)
]]>get a modular chatterbox, feed in some data, and voila, there is the uploaded mind.
since
a) quite a few of the usual suspects for uploading would fail the turing test, just look at the usual troll b) there would be a nontrivial overlap between the usual suspects and heavy social media users, e.g. much data to work from c) we could do a background check to weed out people with friends knowing real secrets
it might work.
if somebody does a test on real secrets, it might help to use some tricks used by mediums, e.g. "this is of little concern to the uploaded", or "the brain was damaged before the upload".
iirc there was a max headroom episode about a similar scam.
]]>and there it is...
]]>You could, with a perfectly straight face, offer this as a brain preservation technique awaiting a sufficiently high technology to recreate you in the future.
For me, OGH and his fellow scribes have given me enough nightmares about what you can do with an upload that I'm rather glad neural tissue liquifies so quickly after death. It seems like a feature to me now.
]]>All my life I've tried to set up systems and regimens to motivate myself and routinize things to be more efficient. Most of the time I've had outside issues to deal with that impinged sooner or later and forced me to drop or alter a system so it would fail. I always promised myself that one day, maybe when I retire, I would be able to do this right. But now that I CAN I find that I don't want to and don't have to and would rather wing it all. Which means the cycle loosed.
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