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Comment by picafrost | Hacker News Reader

I admire the human belief that the improvement of technology and our living standards will be infinite. It will be a bitter moment if we finally realize the plateau we've been stuck on is not temporary and all future gains will be marginal.

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This realisation is by definition wrong, or coincidence. You can’t know the future, so you’ll never know whether something will eventually come around and change everything.

I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.

Fair enough. If we reach a point where we’ve discovered all fundamental truths of the universe and no more knowledge is helping towards solutions we need, then yes, that may imply awareness of the plateau; I’ll give you that. It also seems fantastically far away, so much so that it seems an exercise in futility to speculate about it.

Its so far away, in fact, considering that we cannot even observe most of the universe, or even have a fully coherent notion of what the universe is.

We didn't need to discover every mathematical truth to discover that there are limits to what we can mathematically prove. Nor did we need to discover every algorithm to know that we can't determine if a program will halt. Both of these have helped understand where plateaus exist in their respective domains. We don't need to enumerate every truth to understand that there are some things we cannot do.

Natural one maybe.

Humans are biological machines. We know how to replace hearts with artificial ones that can last years. Soon they may start lasting decades.

We can replace many hormones with artificial ones.

I do not see any reason we can’t learn how to replace other organs and systems.

And in this case you may as well live 200+ years

And it even might be a rather short (in length, not height) peak we won't ever reach again. Nowadays I don't see a single reason to believe that children won't be put back to work in western societies in 200 years, unless massive hypothetical innovations are made to replace depleting oil and keep the very high productivity per capita we've been enjoying for decades.

How can you think this in a world where AI is making miracles happen?

Which miracles has it enabled yet other than human-sounding chatbots and humongous capital investment sums?

> llms are somewhat good at some things hence immortality is around the corner

Idk if we should study age as a disease but we surely should study the delusions of techno solutionists

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