[jtchang]

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Absolutely insane the level of wizardry being applied here to turn a lump of blackened, charred scrolls into readable text.

Having only cursory knowledge with machine learning are some of the techniques used in the article only recently discovered or have they been around for a while?

Is it due to us having reached an inflection point with these types of algorithms that they have become more popular and thus we are seeing new ways to apply them to old problems?

[kortex]

There has definitely been a virtuous cycle between GP-GPU processing capability, algorithms, libraries and software that use that hardware, and researchers working with those tools.

[echelon]

> Absolutely insane the level of wizardry being applied here to turn a lump of blackened, charred scrolls into readable text.

Imagine what we'll be able to do to brains, dead or alive, in 100 years.

And in 10,000, maybe we'll be reconstructing the light cone. Maybe that's what we are right now. (Not serious, but it's a fun thought experiment.)

[xvector]

This is why I am going for cryopreservation if I ever have the luxury of choosing the way I die.

[patall]

The part that I do not understand there is: why would anyone/everyone else want you to be alive again? And do not understand me wrong, I would very much be interested to talk to people from various ages. Specific ones, but also commoners. But why should someone want to restore thousands of random people from (e.g) 1284 on their own cost? That only works if those people have big stashes of money that are legally still theirs. And while I understand that some may want to keep ownership after death, I think it is super dangerous to have something like that. Just image, 10% of the world today still belonging to Dschinghis Khan. That cannot be good.

[WitCanStain]

Perhaps in a near-post-scarcity world, resurrecting dead people is seen as one of the great humanitarian projects of civilization.

[echelon]

This.

Not to make a low effort comment, but this.

But that'll depend on things going smoothly and non-evil, non-dictators winning in the end. It'd be horrific if evil and malicious entities won and decided they just wanted to fuck with everyone.

[fennecfoxy]

Because death is the enemy, and the Jean Le Flambeur series by Hannu Rajiemi touches on this in pretty good ways. Won't spoil the plot, though.

It does put into perspective though, how distracted and selfish our species can be; oh, let's fight each other because of skin colour, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, fighting wars over resources, etc. Meanwhile people are getting cancer, have disabilities like blindness and paraplegia and generally just...dying, especially when it comes early, after a hard life. It's just so sad and disappointing that we have the resources to give everyone a pretty decent life while we work on solving these bigger problems...but we just don't.

[saalweachter]

Reverse parenting.

You raise your parents from the dead, they raise their parents, and so on and so forth.

Doesn't apply to raising random people from a thousand years ago, but it's a reason people today might be resurrected in a couple of centuries.

[echelon]

Well, that could go lots of ways. Maybe some rich trillionaire buys you and spawns you into an endless horror simulation. They might be into torture and get off on it.

("No real humans harmed.")

But if the future can reverse the light cone, nobody is immune to that fate.

Who knows what the future holds. These are just sci-fi flights of fancy.

[exe34]

I remember learning about ancestor simulations by the vile offspring in accelerando, but reversing the light cone is quite chilling - is there any sci-fi novel that deals with that you would recommend?

[Hedepig]

Argh, what has Black Mirror done to our sense of optimism?

(I agree with you).

[Loughla]

What is this light cone you keep saying?

[acover]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone

Basically reverse time.