In reply to this comment by MycroftHomlz:
CURSE YOU DAG AND BLASTED POWER POINT REGENERATION!

I wanted to promote this.... but noooooo someone wouldn't let me.

CURSE YOU DAG AND BLASTED POWER POINT REGENERATION!

The record for longest human lifespan is currently held by Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

She did that with 20th century technology, and she wasn't even an intellectual or highly motivated.

We've already entered the age of organ regeneration... growing new organs from our own cell... and it's already saving lives. I think it will pass regulatory hurdles and come in to widespread usage within 10 or 20 years.

Genome sequencing is down from $250k a year ago to $5k now (http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006527.html). In 10 or 20 years most people will have their genomes sequenced, and medicine will no longer be a crap shoot.

Experts say that most drugs, whatever the disease, work for only about half the people who take them. Not only is much of the nation’s approximately $300 billion annual drug spending wasted, but countless patients are being exposed unnecessarily to side effects.

[Conventional] studies tend to be “one size fits all,” with the winning treatment recommended for everybody. Personalized medicine would go beyond that by determining which drug is best for which patient, rather than continuing to treat everyone the same in hopes of benefiting the fortunate few. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/business/30gene.html?ex=1388379600&en=a3e1de30bab852a6&ei=5124&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook

If you die in 2050, that sounds like a waste, because I think it's highly unlikely I won't live into the 2100s. Imagine where technology will be in 2100.

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Re: 'world of criminals'

I think the idea of humans as possessing 'personhood' is a simplistic model. The deeper you dig in the cognitive sciences and the human sciences in general, the more clear it becomes that human thought outputs and behavioral outputs are just the result of deterministic mechanisms. Looking at humans as 'persons' isn't looking at a deep enough level of detail... and it makes us take things 'personally' -- as if the decision agents (in a game theory sense) we're interacting with are 'persons.' Humans want to be good... they just have simplistic, unmotivated brains.

Change the inputs, and the outputs will change. Embryo selection is borderline-practical today, and it's increasingly being used. My prediction is by 2030 5% of births (in wealthy countries) will be using it (for cosmetic and temperament improvements - e.g. reduced addictive behavior, greater motivation, less 'social learners' and more 'infovores'), and by 2060 60% of births will be using it. When those generations reach 25 years old, they'll be starting to influence society, which will be 2055 and 2085, respectively.

However, by 2055, I think we'll have neurotechnology that achieves most of the large goals of neurogenetic change: next-generation neuropharmaceuticals, neuroimplants, and changes to the organization of our neural tissue using stem cells.

I believe the future is humanistic and humanitarian. And the world is incompetent, waiting for us to influence the arc of history.

IMHO, anyway.

What do you think?


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In reply to this comment by gorillaman:
I think we're going to miss SENS by at least a generation. The way I treat my body I'm expecting to die around 40.

Doesn't it gnaw at you that, living in a world mostly populated by criminals, any good you do will primarily benefit them?

In reply to this comment by chilaxe:
Gorillaman, we're young enough that we have a decent chance of living to see the fulfillment of SENS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey).

Doesn't that make you want to do something with your life that's ingenious and constructive, helping out the common good, instead of just pursuing vendettas?

Well, at least the blades regenerate after falling off...

Gamers today are seriously spoiled.

They don't even have health boxes on the ground in FPSs any more - you just go hide around a corner for 5 seconds and you regenerate up to full. It would seriously blow a kid's mind that people would take the time to beat games like Super Mario Bros 2 or Bionic Commando. I did it, and the thrill you get from beating a hard game is much better than any of these checkpointed/infinite retries games we have today. (Of course, Contra was so ridiculously hard I only beat it with the Konami Code.)

While I loved Bioshock, I hated how bloody easy it was since you'd just pop out of a resurrection chamber every time you died. I'd get bored during a Big Daddy battle and just keep respawning on him over and over again until he went down... about halfway through I decided to just ignore the chambers entirely and play the game without dying.

To clarify, I use 'sensational' as a subjective term. A moon landing and organ regeneration can be equally sensational, in other words. That's what I was trying to say in my previous post.

>> ^nach0s:
IMO, most national (and global) achievements haven't been as outwardly observable as past achievements. For example: the internet. Personal computing. Nanotechnology. Miniaturization of every conceivable electronic device. They are all amazing achievements, but they aren't as sensational as a trip to the moon.


I love how people just don't care about organ regeneration or any advances that are more than 10 or 20 years away.

Even if you're young now, some day your organs will fail --in one of an endless variety of painful ways. When that happens, you'll be surprised, and you and your loved ones will probably cry at the unforeseeable tragedy of it. Then, since nobody likes a dying person who's bitter, you'll talk about how the death and disease process is actually beautiful, even though, um, you kind of wish you weren't dying.

If you have organs, then organ regeneration is orders of magnitude more useful to you than watching on TV some guy in orbit walking on a piece of rock.

Nothing's happened as big as going to the moon?

The 90s saw the invention of the internet, and in the human sciences were considered the "decade of the brain." The 2000s saw the sequencing of the human genome and the first successful milestones in organ regeneration.

Annual global scientific output now is orders of magnitude greater than it was in the 60s.

Now let's see - Deltron Z
Art avenger, let's start the adventure
Hit ya with nerve gas, absurd blasts
Crashin space craft, I'm bio-enhanced
Hiero advanced series, monstrous evolution
Headed, tooth and nail, scoop the trail
Super-sleuth, a new race
Mad creator, savage nature
World Wide Web, the ebb and flow
Light years from watchful eyes while my thoughts provide
objectives to ostracize the pompous prophecies
Underground societies are hard to lead
Asteroid surfing, castor-oil burping
The darkest side of humanity animated
The grand awakening, plan to take it in
I demand your patronage, mobilize my battletanks
With clusters small, NTR's to empty Mars
Many MC's cruise low earth orbit
Easier for me to use my search warrant
Drift by a star, absorb it, and store it
Leave tourists pourous, my galaxy's gorgeous
Quantum jump - I'm right at your doorstep

Now I catch more wreck with fast ignition
My last decision, pulse amplification
Terror with napalm, I want y'all to stay calm
Alien annihilation, I stay armed to the grill piece and kill beef
20 percent matter, 30 percent is energy
Assimilating to become a living being
Evaporative radiation fades your station
I get high as aviation

I rise like helium, you're falling rapidly
Trapped in apathy, while I track your speed
I'm what you call a legend, dominance with armageddon
Gives me a warm reception
Verbal war with weapons, installation
Blowin the star dust, distance twelve parsecs
Enthuse your phalanx with my literary talents
Just a bit of balance, rip the silence
in space, all-star systems are our victims
Atomics, anonymous with ominous
implications of information, or information, and entertainment
Cyber-tech dialect, you gotta earn my respect
I'm like Gamera to amateurs, hit em with a cannonball
And in all this confusion
The fusion of music and mind precipitates translucent illusions
Search the ruins with Automator
Hit the walls with a carbonator
Hit-or-missiles, just regenerate
The sonic soldiers allow us to demonstrate
Emergency dispatch, skyscrapers ripped back
from the impact, their flow is mismatched
My style's protected by heat shields and ceramics
Don't panic, I landed on planet Mercury
Gave it atmosphere, set up my headquarters
I'll never get captured here
Rap your tear clap your ear with Soulsonic Mantronik phonics
Turn your brain to an omelette
I'll hold a comet in bondage, with my dominance
Take a space shuttle to escape trouble
Bounce through the Milky Way
Not many MC's feel this way

Kurzweil does have a decent track record of predictions for advancements in the last couple of decades (certainly better than people who didn't have any models for what advancements would occur), so I think his arguments can't reasonably be blanketly dismissed.

I think predictions on way far-off topics (like the "singularity") are more difficult and less useful, and his emphasis on them weakens his rhetorical position. But things like organ regeneration have already been around for a while. (It was front-page news last fall when a woman's trachea was re-grown for her, but over the last couple of years, scientists had already grown other organs like bladders from patients' own cells.)

When you combine organ regeneration/stem cells with things like the exponential rate of advancement of genomics and the general automation/industrialization of science**, it starts to look like there's a lot going on in medicine. The opinion that old age for baby boomers won't look the same as old age for previous generations seems to have broad support in the medical community.

*http://www.videosift.com/video/Robot-scientist-makes-discoveries-without-human-help
*http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-04/ff_brainatlas

Funny, just one problem... Wolverine actually only has one mutant power and that is rapid health regeneration. His claws were just an experiment which would normally kill him but his ability kept him alive.

Still Up-Vote Though

"Let him out, larry! Let him out!"

oh and "long ball larry" rofl

The blacks really regenerated this show for me!

Is anyone else sick and tired of the forced artificial 'cover' system dropped into every single console shooter these days? (Mind I'm a PC gamer but I do play console to pc 'ports'.)

Yahtzee appears to be getting tired of it as well. Every game from Halo to GoW to Mass Effect throws in these waist-high walls in the middle of roads, paths, even indoors to give the players cover. It's fake, it's boring and it's old hat. I much prefer shooters that take advantage of true collision detection for their cover. Like FarCry 2, where cover consists of things you would use for cover in real life, like trees. In FC2 if I'm injured I duck behind a tree in hopes of gaining cover for a few seconds so I can put my elbow back in place, instead of ducking behind a low concrete wall in the middle of an office hallway to regenerate ala GoW.

Am I alone in this?

>> ^Jerykk:
Some of you are missing the point. He's not insulting games that have stories. He's insulting games that focus on story or cinematic values at the expense of gameplay (which is a growing trend). The fact is that games are getting dumber and less challenging by the second. The platforming in Assassin's Creed consisted of holding down one button. The platforming, puzzles and combat in the new Prince of Persia were all dumbed down and streamlined compared to the games in the Sands of Time trilogy. Genres with steep learning curves have been or are being phased out. Western RPGs and survival horror games are now more like action games. Shooters now have regenerating health, third-person cover systems, aim assist, trajectory indicators, invincible squadmates, etc.
The sad reality is that developers are focusing on accessibility over depth, challenge and longevity. Games are becoming increasingly automated and decreasingly interactive for the sake of "cinematic immersion." Anyone who's been playing games for a while (particularly on the PC) can see the downward spiral that gaming has taken.



To paraphrase: Gears of War

Some of you are missing the point. He's not insulting games that have stories. He's insulting games that focus on story or cinematic values at the expense of gameplay (which is a growing trend). The fact is that games are getting dumber and less challenging by the second. The platforming in Assassin's Creed consisted of holding down one button. The platforming, puzzles and combat in the new Prince of Persia were all dumbed down and streamlined compared to the games in the Sands of Time trilogy. Genres with steep learning curves have been or are being phased out. Western RPGs and survival horror games are now more like action games. Shooters now have regenerating health, third-person cover systems, aim assist, trajectory indicators, invincible squadmates, etc.

The sad reality is that developers are focusing on accessibility over depth, challenge and longevity. Games are becoming increasingly automated and decreasingly interactive for the sake of "cinematic immersion." Anyone who's been playing games for a while (particularly on the PC) can see the downward spiral that gaming has taken.