CoderKat

CoderKat, hace 1 año

It's not in kbin. It's a Microsoft Office form (similar to a Google Form or Strawpoll).

CoderKat, hace 1 año

I filled it out, but let's discuss in the comments because filling out a one sided form isn't as fun as being able to have a multi sided discussion.

I personally find biological immortality super appealing. Despite the word "immortality" in it, it actually just means you can live as long as you want, which takes away many of the downsides to immortality that often get discussed. Since I'm not religious, I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, so scientific advancement letting me live longer is the only way I can avoid death (which I'm afraid of). And more than just avoiding death, I want to avoid being a frail senior whose quality of life is severely diminished.

That said, for me, I ranked the positive advancements with the disease prevention, medical advancement, and QoL above simply extending human life. I think these all do of course go hand in hand. But fewer people dying young is better than fewer people dying old. Dying young is really tragic, because there's so much of life you won't have experienced. Similarly, the big issue with growing old is age related diseases, which impact your quality of life. At a certain point, Alzheimer's and dementia seem worse than death. I feel conflicted because I don't want to die but if I had a disease like one of those, it seems like I'd no longer be myself and it's unlikely there's any hope for recovery before the disease eventually kills me. There's also the fear that perhaps I would be myself, but feel trapped inside a body, constantly confused and afraid by what's going on, which sounds horrible.

On the negative impact side, by far my biggest concern is imbalance in access to this immortality. My fear is that regular folks (including myself) won't have access but billionaires will. That's worse than not having immortality, since billionaires are generally terrible people and not who we want living longer. Overpopulation is a bit of a concern, but one that I think we can eventually solve. e.g., with social changes to expectations about having kids, automation improvements to reduce our need for people to work, and eventually moving beyond just living on the surface of earth. Wealthy nations already have a declining birth rate, anyway. As well, I'm a bit skeptical about true biological immortality, as opposed to, say, extending life on earth for a good chunk of time, but eventually moving to a digital afterlife, where overpopulation is less of a concern.

I didn't know how to answer the regulation question. I think most things need some level of regulation, but the options were "strict regulation" vs "unrestricted", neither which sound right to me. As well, regulation would likely be completely situational. e.g., obviously safety is a vital part of any form of medical treatment. We shouldn't be reducing any existing regulation there. But I certainly don't want research into the area to be unnecessarily held back. For a large part, I see this as no different from researching a cure for any other disease. Aging can be viewed as a disease.

CoderKat, hace 1 año

Agree. I added something like that in the "other negatives" box. There's that saying, society advances one funeral at a time.

I like to think that myself, I'm very good at being open minded and adapting to the times (though honestly only time will tell). But I know many people don't do that. This is clearly evident in electoral polling as well as polls for social issues (eg, US 2023 support for same sex marriage is 89% among 18-29 but only 60% among 65 and older).

Perhaps social changes could help with this problem. Clearly older folks can still change because the stat I just quoted was far worse in the not too distant past. Maybe our problems are with how we run news media or how we basically write off old folks as unlikely to change. Maybe it's because our society focuses on education being something you only do when young and you're never really expected to go back to school after that. Maybe we need to better teach empathy from a young age? Maybe us losing religion will make the biggest difference.

Maybe we don't deserve this kinda advancement yet. To quote one of my favourite parts from the show The Orville:

Technology and societal ethics have to progress hand in hand, each one supporting the other incrementally. Anything else is begging for disaster.

• a member of an advanced, "space communism" version of humanity, talking to someone whose species has not yet advanced to the same point and wondering why they don't share their advanced tech with less advanced people.

CoderKat, hace 1 año

Reddit does give a fuck, though. If they didn't give fucks, they wouldn't be trying to fuck with the protests (eg, by forcing subs open or removing mods). Whether or not Reddit would actually do any of the things protestors want is a different question, but clearly the protests do at least hurt Reddit and Reddit would dearly like them to stop.

CoderKat, hace 1 año

I've also mentioned this in numerous threads, but downvotes also are extremely useful against bigotry. When bigoted comments can't or won't be removed (or removed quickly enough), downvotes are reassuring. It sucks to see bigoted comments being expressed and the only thing that can make it better is seeing that the comments are not accepted.

CoderKat, hace 1 año

It's genuinely hard and needs to be improved. Subscribing to a magazine that someone else on kbin has subscribed to already isn't too bad. Go to the magazine (eg, click what looks like the subreddit name in the post) and scroll alllll the way down and there'll be a subscribe button.

But if nobody has subscribed yet in the instance, it's hilariously hard. You have to search in the general search (not the magazine search) for specifically "magazine@domain.com" and you should see a subscribe button then. You will not content in that magazine that existed before you subscribed. If that sounds terrible, it's because it is. Thankfully, most of the time, you won't be the first to subscribe to a magazine and thus can just use the magazine search or browse the front page to see posts.

PS: the subscribe option is also as the bottom of each thread. So you can alternatively just open a thread in the magazine instead of the magazine itself.

PPS: I've mentioned the subscribe button being at the bottom because that's the placement on mobile and I think many of us are on mobile. On desktop, it's in the sidebar.

CoderKat, hace 1 año

Yeah. The unethical bots will just use scrapers, as they already do for the many websites that don't offer APIs. They're already violating ToS, so they don't care. Ethical ones won't have that option (at least not past the fairly low quota).