Like him or not, to say he is not important is simply ignorant.

So much technological progress has been made by single persons. What you say is simply incorrect. Now granted, it’s almost always based off the previous work of others, but that doesn’t detract from the fact a lot of progress was made by a single person working on a problem.

The stagnancy of digital assistants has been truly shocking to me. I remember when Siri was first released when I was in high school, I figured that in 10 or so years, it would surely be well advanced. Turns out, it barely does anything more than when it was released and hasn’t had a proper update in years.

I hate to be that guy, but… This ISN’T a good thing. We have yet to solve both the containment and the alignment problem. Without solving both, inventing AGI is gonna be horribly dangerous.

AGI is dramatically more difficult than the deep learning algorithms we have now, no matter how smart of human-like they might seem already today. It’d put money on AGI being at least 2 decades away. Let’s pray to our future basilisk overlords we’ll have solved the containment problem by then.

Yep, that’s the assumption I’ve been going with. That it’s probably too late for our parents but that we (us under 40 or 50) should hopefully live to see it happen. It’s very likely that the first methods of life extension will be focussed on maintaining pre-existing infrastructure, helping the body better repair itself, etc. If that infrastructure is already significantly degraded, you might be able to halt further degradation of the regenerative processes, but even though you can stop a metal beam from rusting with a new layer of paint, if it’s already partially rusted through, it’ll give eventually.

The trick then is to stay alive long enough to see them come up with a way to properly reverse aging too.

*Oh and as a little edit: Be careful to not hold onto that “I’m sure I’ll live to see radical life extension” idea too strongly. It’s unhealthy, and I have to frequently remind myself to live as if it’ll never be a thing.

Radical life extension is like fusion. Always 30 years away, until the day it suddenly isn’t. There’s really no way to predict this kind of stuff easily, since it usually depends on a series of ‘lucky’ breakthroughs.

I’ve talked about this often with my friends, but you know what scares me? The chance of being on the generation for whom it’ll have been just barely too late.

Highly depends on what qualifies as a movie? Something that makes sense? With a compelling plot and characters, people would actually pay money for to watch? Easily over 10 years. So many other things have to happen first. But ANY movie? Just a 30 to 90 minute piece of video that shows some, any connected events. Probably in just a few years.