Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

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> if you think you are entitled to respect simply because of your age

I'm glad you qualified that with if. When I said I was older the point was that "I too once stood where you stand now and said these same things."

Not only do I not think I am entitled to respect, I know for a fact I won't get it no matter what. That's why I said this dynamic is the cycle of life. Solomon commented on the phenomenon as well. Each generation is committed to learning their own lessons and knows for a fact that they know better than all that have come before. I would go insane if I thought offering advice would do any good. That is part of why the problems can not be solved. Everyone knows best and that their solution is going to work, and everyone that tried to fix the rotted house before simply didn't know what they were doing. The problem is not that the house is rotted, it can't be, because then how could we justify keeping it. Therefore the problem is not that it is rotted.

Let's check in in 20 years and see how all the various proposed costly repairs have worked out. It will be great to be proven wrong and see that restored house standing proud, working just as well as a brand new one using modern materials, and the repairs all done and delivered at a lower cost than building anew. Alternatively those "OK boomer" chanting people will now be hearing "OK millennial" directed at themselves from a new generation that is convinced their own proposed repairs to the nearly totally collapsed rotted wreck will be the ones to restore the house to glory and the only problem was that the millennials and the boomers didn't know how to repair it properly, not that it was rotted.

Forget 20 years, go out 50-100 years. Given a prior where we haven't annihilated the top of the food chain to give the planet a new shot at intelligent life...

We will have solved artificial intelligence and that's a game changer. It will create an age of limitless wealth. But what I wonder about is whether our hindbrains will insist on maintaining inequality in an age where everything is cheap and plentiful. And what will the AIs make of us?

Who cares about health care if there's cheap immortality? That's the best healthcare of them all. But will we make it generally available or will we try to attach artificial value to it as an entitlement?

And that's because once people stop dying from natural causes we're going to have a population problem. That means we're going to have to get off world.

That also means that climate change becomes irrelevant because if we can terraform Mars etc, then tweaking the climate of the Earth is trivial.

The one true god that has delivered on all of its promises is science and I don't think it's done delivering the good stuff. But it's also a wrathful and vengeful god in the wrong hands.

But even then, I'd rather live in the above future then in a future where we continue all of our petty squabbles over which nation state is the best. That's creating misery worldwide. We could end hunger and homelessness today for pennies on the dollar. But we refuse to do so in favor of a huge military and prison industrial complex. All that's doing for us IMO is giving other countries a chance to leapfrog us mid-21st century.

So I'd suggest you do as I am doing. Fight your own mortality to your dying breath and try to make a difference between now and your probably inevitable dirt nap because it might not be inevitable because we're heading for one hell of a phase transition (no singularity required).

> It will create an age of limitless wealth.

Uh-huh. We Boomers are still waiting for that electricity that's "too cheap to meter".

We failed to deliver on nuclear power. And that's on all of us...

At least we have Twitter...

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