A lot of art from the middle ages is anonymous. Painting itself is an extension of the artist, containing the intension of the person producing it and hence no name is necessary. This is a theoretical state of quality, where activity is not measured in numbers or on a scale but is seen as expression of a particular unique human being. Then comes the renaissance and painters begin to attach names to their works. Here starts a crucial shift - a turn from quality to quantity. Certain artists are better than others and hence quality itself is now measured (quantified) using a name of the person. After that the name becomes so prevalent that some works begin to be valuable only because a certain name was responsible in producing that work. Think - Picasso. Quantity starts to take over. Then comes film and comics and ads where the painter is expected to have no individuality, and he is praised for having a style and technique that is replaceable. Same is true for corporate software development by the way. Here the name (the intermediate state connecting quality and quantity) starts to disappear and is often replaced by a name of a "golem" - a corporation. Quantity dominates - more and faster is better, and the more "nameless" the better. Ten years ago one might think that this is the limit of dehumanisation and it cannot move any further. But now we have AI - where a work of art (or other kind of work) cannot be associated with any quality (cannot be given a name) in principle. And quantity (more, faster, cheaper) dominates. When you think in these terms, the "techno-optimism" is just a place somewhere in this arrow moving from quality to quantity. Or in other words moving from a qualitative anonymity (my work is an extension of my being) to quantitative anonymity (the work is not associated with any being). Hence, it is not a stable position.
Yes! I didn't understand why I always found the Little Prince story (and by extension "alchemist") so repulsive, until I read that book. Little prince is aimed at people who have lost their idealistic youth qualities and seek to get back in touch with that part of themselves. I had the opposite problem - I never fully left that place.
Even if they do not strike gold the second time, there can still be a multitude of reasons:
1. The innovators will know a lot about the details, limitations and potential improvements concerning the thing they invented.
2. Having a big name in your research team will attract other people to work with you.
3. I assume the people who discovered something still have a higher chance to discover something big compared to "average" researchers.
4. That person will not be hired by your competition.
5. Having a lot of very publicly extremely highly paid people will make people assume anyone working on AI there is highly paid, if not quite as extreme. What most people who make a lot of money spend it on is wealth signalling, and now they can get a form of that without the company having to pay them as much.
I was dazzled with the drawing itself. Then by accident I discovered you can zoom in and out too. And on top of that - you can also rotate 360 degrees around the object.
Too far out of my field for me to understand how impressed I should be - but I am impressed.
The average life expectancy was low because of more deaths during childhood and wars. But the natural lifespan was more or less the same as it is today. For example, take a look at famous philosophers or politicians from Ancient Greece. Majority of them lived to about 70-80 years of age.
Such arguments go both ways. For example, if aging is accumulation of damage and not programmed, then why don't we see lucky people who live 5 times longer. Also how come the patterns of aging are so similar between individuals and even between different species (wrinkly skin, grey hair, fragile bones).
How do you propose someone would "luck out of" the wear and tear your body undergoes just to function? It's accumulation of damage to the very systems that work to prevent and repair damage, leading all organs to accumulate the damage they would have hidden by fast repair in "youth". It's unavoidable and accelerating by definition, and that reflects what we observe in aging.
The "patterns of aging" you describe are, again, definitionally just what happens when the same organs built and functioning the same way across species undergo their respective failure modes. It makes more sense for all skins to exhibit the same signs of aging if they're all just wearing out the way "skin" does, rather than being attacked by species-specific "age limiter" processes artificially enforcing lifespan limits. Why would something like skin even need to decay at all, when it's basically unrelated to aging-related death?
But aren't there a lot of processes that could drive accumulated damage that are hard to avoid (so you can't realistically get lucky)?
E.g. if metabolic processes produce harmful products in low quantities that build up ... How would you possibly survive many decades without doing at least a certain amount of metabolizing food etc?
Think this is a statistical thing. Your body is made of lots of cells. But one exceptional one wouldn’t outlive the whole system’s failure. You’d need a hell of a lot of cells to survive that long.
This would be an optimistic scenario and introduce a possibility for the "scheduled gene program" to be controlled or turned off. The current thinking in the field seems to favour the idea that aging is a complex combination of programmed changes, stochastic damage, as well as various adaptations to help cope with the damage.
Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it. Depending on the project this could happen at 50% completion or 90% completion. Take scientific research for example. For me there is a lot of motivation to figure things out, to fill the gaps, to make sure everything is solid. But then there is the mundane part of putting it into text and publishing. And my energy is not in there. I already know what will go into that paper, I know getting it out will count as "success" and I know it should be shared. But my libido is not in it.
Another thing - the end of a big project signifies a big change. If you worked on something for a long time, what will you do once it's finished? Norman Finkelstein in one of his interview put it like that (paraphrasing): "I think some people genuinely don't want to end the conflict [between Israel and Palestine] because they built their whole life around it. In the past it was a problem for me as well. I have spent my whole academic career writing about this conflict. I read enough books to fill this room. Literally. If the conflict ends tomorrow - what am I going to do with my life?".
> Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it.
Yes, I have similar issue with motivation I have noticed, if I am presented with a problem to solve and I can see the solution before implementing anything, I am not really interested in coding the solution and testing it. I.e. the abstract or logical proof of the solution is sufficient for me (the fun part), but the actual coding, fixing some environmental problem and details of creating a working solution are (usually) much more boring - because they are almost always essentially the same.
I think there is a general over-emphasis on DNA. There is no process in nature that builds a cell out of DNA. Instead DNA is just part of the cell and the cell can slice-and-dice its own DNA however it wants. Neutrophils even throw their DNA outside of the cell in order to build traps for bacteria.
