[briggers]

> Hierarchical Temporary Memory

Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo.

He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened.

He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machine intelligence. At the consumer level, this should be as obvious as doing a search on Google. Long-hold your iPhone home button to see pretty good voice recognition, or try Google's and be blown away. Even a little deeper, there are many modern businesses with machine intelligence as part of their very fabric. If you've confused artificial personhood with artificial intelligence then it's an understandable mistake, otherwise not.

A useless distraction.

[jacquesm]

> Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50.

But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people.

The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever.

Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death. The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years, it is not surprising that those outside religion would yearn for a pseudo-scientific version of it.

It makes for some interesting science fiction but I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.

[briggers]

The maximum life expectancy point is good, note that actually it's changed a bit.

"The maximum (recorded) life span for humans has increased from 103 in 1798 to 110 years in 1898, 115 years in 1990, and 122.45 years since Calment's death in 1997" - Wikipedia

And "as long as there have been people" is going way too far. Your point that there seems to be some intrinsic limit stands, until medical science disproves it.

Living forever is as ridiculous as 100% uptime, but eliminating preventable deaths remains a good goal.

[orangecat]

the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death

"Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem." - Harry Potter (the version from http://hpmor.com)

The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years

True. The difference is that science might actually work.

I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.

Most likely. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the annihilation of billions of sentient beings.