It wasn’t a rhetorical answer. 4000 years is the length of most of recorded history. There is no possibility or need to answer any question so far out, even leaving AI singularities aside. How about, “what will happen when most people lead vigorous and productive lives into their 80s?”
I don’t quite understand your viewpoint. Do you not believe humans can adjust their beliefs based on projections, forecasts, and/or extrapolations more than a few thousand years into the future?
Humans can adjust their beliefs based on the entrails of slaughtered animals, or the indifferent motions of the heavens. Adjusting them in the direction of reality takes more than that.
A future with 4000-year-olds is at least 4000 years away. We know nothing about what society will look like then. Will there even be such a thing as “work”? Or “40-year-olds”? Or “society”? How big a target in possibility space even is a future society with 4000-year-olds in it?
Humans can adjust their beliefs based on the entrails of slaughtered animals, or the indifferent motions of the heavens.
Yes
Adjusting them in the direction of reality takes more than that.
Probably
A future with 4000-year-olds is at least 4000 years away.
Perhaps
We know nothing about what society will look like then.
No. We almost certainly do for some basic parameters. Such as:
Lifeforms will continue to generate entropy.
Lifeforms will continue to agglomerate into larger and more complex entities. i.e. large multicellular organisms such as humans.
Such organisms will seek to acquire competitive advantages over others.
In this process they will self organize into larger groups.
etc…
And that’s with near certainty, assuming there hasn’t been some catastrophic event like a pulsar burst sterilizing this planet.
Some aspects of the universe we can even know with certainty will be the case even 4000 years from now.
e.g. Stars will continue to provide EM radiation peaking in certain wavelengths which lifeforms will continue to adapt to if they exist. i.e. leaves will remain green.
etc…
A superhuman intelligence should be able to derive from such a basis likely projections for the most probable appearances of society. And act accordingly based on those projections.
An ordinary human may likewise depending on how prescient and perceptive they are, along with their willingness to expend the effort.
Whether or not anyone currently existing is capable of doing that is unknown, but unknown != impossible.
Will there even be such a thing as “work”? Or “40-year-olds”?
Perhaps
Or “society”?
Probably
How big a target in possibility space even is a future society with 4000-year-olds in it?
Finite. Very large if you include the tails of the distribution, smaller if you consider only the most likely outcomes.
If you don’t believe it possible for humans to make such projections you could have just wrote that. If you didn’t want to directly answer that’s fine as well, I put this up incase a passing reader got confused.
New fields appear, circumstances change, tools change, and so on; consequently, experience is not a permanent advantage, but is constantly evaporating. In some fields, how quickly you can learn is more important than how much you already know. I don’t know how much cognitive flexibility in old people will be regained by aging treatments, but even if that problem were reduced to “maintaining flexibility in the presence of long-ingrained habits”, I expect that’s something that the majority of the population wouldn’t be very good at, so by default the young would have some advantages there.
Genetic counseling, embryo selection, and possibly even genetic engineering would tend to make the new generations inherently smarter than the older one. (They’ll want to enhance adults too, but it’s easier to enhance a human who hasn’t grown up yet, and that will probably remain so for a long time.) Thus the young, as a group, will have advantages in jobs where that’s more important than experience.
Come to think of it, the above applies more generally to fields where there’s a relatively low ceiling to how much experience brings you versus natural advantages (I suspect, say, modeling is one such), and those would end up dominated by people with the greatest natural advantages no matter their age. (And, again, if these advantages get genetically selected for, then they will tend to be dominated by the young as a result.)
It seems reasonably likely that we’d see a need for multi-specialties—we want someone who’s very good at subjects/skills A, B, and C all at once. This may lead to a combinatorial explosion such that it’s often possible to find some combination of specialties where you don’t have much competition. (On the one hand, probably most combinations are not useful; on the other hand, which ones are not useful will probably keep changing, so a new combination will become vogue that no one is good at yet.)
Multi-specialties would come with a longer educational period. A longer educational period would become viable and likely necessary. (If your career ends at age 65, then continuing to study from age 25 to 45 is throwing away half your career, so the education needs to double your earnings plus pay its costs to be worthwhile; but if your career ends at age 665, then increasing your earnings by 4% is sufficient.) Today, presumably no one has even tried to develop a curriculum spanning 100 years, because no one would try to take such a course; but as time went on, people would create and improve such curricula, so the young people would be competing with old people who never took those courses. (Of course, it’s possible for older people to continue with education too, and, depending on their planning horizon, some will; but since they can currently earn more, they have a stronger incentive to just keep working, and will take less advantage of the new education.)
Even if education didn’t improve or become obsolete over time, presumably one learns faster in education than in industry (otherwise what’s the point? (which is a valid question for today’s education)), so even if others started thousands of years ahead of you, you could still catch up eventually—assuming you could pay for it.
Why wouldn’t the old timers try to all do the same as well? If we assume technology has advanced to the point where it’s possible to live to age 4000, then I imagine the problem of human cognition would also be solved.
e.g. the best possible 40 year old human, including their entire nervous system, could be modeled to the atomic level to allow those with access to such resources the ability to negate all the advantages of the young,. Any old timers afraid of being overtaken in developmental rate could fairly trivially self modify at that point to always stay ahead of the curve.
e.g. the best possible 40 year old human, including their entire nervous system, could be modeled to the atomic level to allow those with access to such resources the ability to negate all the advantages of the young,
If you’re setting up someone’s entire brain all the way down to the atomic level, that seems to mean every bit of knowledge in their brain is something you’re putting there deliberately. Which means there’s no advantage of the old, either—whatever they used to know (and be, for that matter) is completely wiped out by the process you describe. Nor is there any need for, say, a childhood during which lessons and skills are learned—you’ll be constructing fully formed adults whose brains embody those skills, from scratch.
… I guess you say “modeled” rather than “constructed”, but I guess that means you’re constructing computers that emulate a brain. Which probably has lots of economic and physical advantages over biological hardware, including perfect save-states and the ability to spin up perfect clones of yourself at a moment’s notice, and quite possibly faster execution. The bigger question would not be “how can the young compete with the old?”, but “how can the humans compete with the ems/synths?”.
The only internally consistent answer I’ve ever heard to that is that humans cannot compete, without evolving to something we would all likely agree would be non human. Which is why technological advancement beyond a certain point guarantees the extinction of circa 2022 humanity. Though the extinction of 2022 humanity is guaranteed in any possible future.
circa 6022 humans however may be able to outcompete circa 6022 machines though through what means I know not.
We have 4000 years to find an answer to that.
They weren’t rhetorical questions. I am genuinely curious if anyone can post a answer.
It wasn’t a rhetorical answer. 4000 years is the length of most of recorded history. There is no possibility or need to answer any question so far out, even leaving AI singularities aside. How about, “what will happen when most people lead vigorous and productive lives into their 80s?”
I don’t quite understand your viewpoint. Do you not believe humans can adjust their beliefs based on projections, forecasts, and/or extrapolations more than a few thousand years into the future?
Humans can adjust their beliefs based on the entrails of slaughtered animals, or the indifferent motions of the heavens. Adjusting them in the direction of reality takes more than that.
A future with 4000-year-olds is at least 4000 years away. We know nothing about what society will look like then. Will there even be such a thing as “work”? Or “40-year-olds”? Or “society”? How big a target in possibility space even is a future society with 4000-year-olds in it?
Yes
Probably
Perhaps
No. We almost certainly do for some basic parameters. Such as:
Lifeforms will continue to generate entropy.
Lifeforms will continue to agglomerate into larger and more complex entities. i.e. large multicellular organisms such as humans.
Such organisms will seek to acquire competitive advantages over others.
In this process they will self organize into larger groups.
etc…
And that’s with near certainty, assuming there hasn’t been some catastrophic event like a pulsar burst sterilizing this planet.
Some aspects of the universe we can even know with certainty will be the case even 4000 years from now.
e.g. Stars will continue to provide EM radiation peaking in certain wavelengths which lifeforms will continue to adapt to if they exist. i.e. leaves will remain green.
etc…
A superhuman intelligence should be able to derive from such a basis likely projections for the most probable appearances of society. And act accordingly based on those projections.
An ordinary human may likewise depending on how prescient and perceptive they are, along with their willingness to expend the effort.
Whether or not anyone currently existing is capable of doing that is unknown, but unknown != impossible.
Perhaps
Probably
Finite. Very large if you include the tails of the distribution, smaller if you consider only the most likely outcomes.
If you don’t believe it possible for humans to make such projections you could have just wrote that. If you didn’t want to directly answer that’s fine as well, I put this up incase a passing reader got confused.
New fields appear, circumstances change, tools change, and so on; consequently, experience is not a permanent advantage, but is constantly evaporating. In some fields, how quickly you can learn is more important than how much you already know. I don’t know how much cognitive flexibility in old people will be regained by aging treatments, but even if that problem were reduced to “maintaining flexibility in the presence of long-ingrained habits”, I expect that’s something that the majority of the population wouldn’t be very good at, so by default the young would have some advantages there.
Genetic counseling, embryo selection, and possibly even genetic engineering would tend to make the new generations inherently smarter than the older one. (They’ll want to enhance adults too, but it’s easier to enhance a human who hasn’t grown up yet, and that will probably remain so for a long time.) Thus the young, as a group, will have advantages in jobs where that’s more important than experience.
Come to think of it, the above applies more generally to fields where there’s a relatively low ceiling to how much experience brings you versus natural advantages (I suspect, say, modeling is one such), and those would end up dominated by people with the greatest natural advantages no matter their age. (And, again, if these advantages get genetically selected for, then they will tend to be dominated by the young as a result.)
It seems reasonably likely that we’d see a need for multi-specialties—we want someone who’s very good at subjects/skills A, B, and C all at once. This may lead to a combinatorial explosion such that it’s often possible to find some combination of specialties where you don’t have much competition. (On the one hand, probably most combinations are not useful; on the other hand, which ones are not useful will probably keep changing, so a new combination will become vogue that no one is good at yet.)
Multi-specialties would come with a longer educational period. A longer educational period would become viable and likely necessary. (If your career ends at age 65, then continuing to study from age 25 to 45 is throwing away half your career, so the education needs to double your earnings plus pay its costs to be worthwhile; but if your career ends at age 665, then increasing your earnings by 4% is sufficient.) Today, presumably no one has even tried to develop a curriculum spanning 100 years, because no one would try to take such a course; but as time went on, people would create and improve such curricula, so the young people would be competing with old people who never took those courses. (Of course, it’s possible for older people to continue with education too, and, depending on their planning horizon, some will; but since they can currently earn more, they have a stronger incentive to just keep working, and will take less advantage of the new education.)
Even if education didn’t improve or become obsolete over time, presumably one learns faster in education than in industry (otherwise what’s the point? (which is a valid question for today’s education)), so even if others started thousands of years ahead of you, you could still catch up eventually—assuming you could pay for it.
Why wouldn’t the old timers try to all do the same as well? If we assume technology has advanced to the point where it’s possible to live to age 4000, then I imagine the problem of human cognition would also be solved.
e.g. the best possible 40 year old human, including their entire nervous system, could be modeled to the atomic level to allow those with access to such resources the ability to negate all the advantages of the young,. Any old timers afraid of being overtaken in developmental rate could fairly trivially self modify at that point to always stay ahead of the curve.
If you’re setting up someone’s entire brain all the way down to the atomic level, that seems to mean every bit of knowledge in their brain is something you’re putting there deliberately. Which means there’s no advantage of the old, either—whatever they used to know (and be, for that matter) is completely wiped out by the process you describe. Nor is there any need for, say, a childhood during which lessons and skills are learned—you’ll be constructing fully formed adults whose brains embody those skills, from scratch.
… I guess you say “modeled” rather than “constructed”, but I guess that means you’re constructing computers that emulate a brain. Which probably has lots of economic and physical advantages over biological hardware, including perfect save-states and the ability to spin up perfect clones of yourself at a moment’s notice, and quite possibly faster execution. The bigger question would not be “how can the young compete with the old?”, but “how can the humans compete with the ems/synths?”.
The only internally consistent answer I’ve ever heard to that is that humans cannot compete, without evolving to something we would all likely agree would be non human. Which is why technological advancement beyond a certain point guarantees the extinction of circa 2022 humanity. Though the extinction of 2022 humanity is guaranteed in any possible future.
circa 6022 humans however may be able to outcompete circa 6022 machines though through what means I know not.