DONT_DIE_by_Zero - Blueprint  ## Metadata - Author: **Blueprint** - Full Title: DONT_DIE_by_Zero - Category: #articles - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/94642921 ## Highlights - I wondered why that was the case. Is it a biological limit? A physical limit? A resource constraint limit? Why wasn’t I told all this earlier in life when it would matter more? Why doesn’t society mobilize gargantuan effort to defend against the one enemy which comes for us and wins? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdat357hrm6pvqh5hvgdbw0s)) - The Mexican salamander, the axolotl, can regenerate. The tiny “immortal” jellyfish, T. nutricula, can regenerate. You can cut a worm into hundreds of pieces, and each will regenerate into a full worm. Greenland sharks have been discovered in the wild living for at least four hundred years. Technically, turtles never stop growing. Biology has proven time and time again that aging is a choice, not a fate. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdat8ggaac28xv1d5sxe0kck)) - Some people are born into this world and never once question their narrative. To them, the world is not a causal nest of discoverable principles—it just is. However, the mindset of an explorer is altogether different—a wondrous thing. It wants. It craves. It is never satisfied until it encounters something different and never before seen. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdatmz0kdsda7665wcergetw)) - We must accelerate evolution. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdav3hzsncfjd0kw7cwbemdg)) - I am right now in my house in Venice, California, waiting for everyone to arrive. This is most of the group I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with, some of my closest friends. Everybody said yes to the invite. I’m delighted. On the mountain, we persisted together despite some of the hardest struggles of our lives along the way. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdav7gb8j8ehh6fqpjqd1z0m)) - Finite struggle. Infinite reward. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdfmg6wt368n61n3b5zadh1j)) - “It means that once I took true stock of the permission structures that run my body and mind, I was able to ask a few real questions. Which part of me understands the whole the best? And if no one part does, who do I trust? Do I trust the immediacy and reward of a late-night craving for cake just sitting in the fridge like a temptress? Or do I hold off for some sort of long-term ideal of better sleep, weight, fitness, and health? Do I prioritize social interaction now or deep sleep tonight for tomorrow’s unknown gauntlet of activity? Is my future self the final arbiter of all decisions? It’s got a sort of Zeno’s paradox to it, doesn’t it? If I’m always meeting Future Self halfway, did I ever really decide anything for me?” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdfzf2mhfawm3jf2k6yj3697)) - “It’s an alignment issue. It’s a society of mind issue. A permissions structure issue. The conscious mind is used to not having to ask permission. It just sits there, like a God-king, thinking what it thinks and shaping behaviors and preferences for some unspoken, poorly understood goal that may or may not be reproduction, but it’s not like it’ll ever just tell you that, will it?” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdfzhn1427e2kx26z9ax8c7b)) - Mormonism was the only reality I knew existed, and in that belief system nothing exceeds the conscious mind in importance ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdgg289j23dk5f6rhrrnqwbr)) - And so for about the past two years I have been working with top physicians, scientists, and technologists with the goal of adding a layer of automation to my body and mind. Today I methodically track hundreds of biomarkers each day in order to measure all seventy organ systems and use my body as a vehicle for extreme health experimentation. The goal is to push the boundaries of what we know about why a body breaks down, which starts with being able to predict when.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdjmx806c9htgkq9akpybsjd)) - What is the ideal balance between automation and free will? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdjn5h3cas8wzegh2g8gwq77)) - If the twentieth century was the century of programmable physics—the atom, silicon, and so on—then the twenty-first century is the century of programmable biology. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdjna2r1cqs22kbwf2zkrhq7)) - Every building block of life will be programmable. And eventually we will have a kind of objectoriented programming for biology that intervenes at the organ or system level. It is easy to then imagine that, as more of the software becomes algorithmic, society will too as decisions get stripped away from us more and more. We can get a rough estimate of the progress of such velocity from how quickly during just the last decade alone AI has become part of the decision-making loop for almost all aspects of society and governance. Advertising, purchasing, banking, law, medicine, manufacturing, transportation, and city planning—all are AI driven these days. That’s just the start. It’s everywhere now. Almost literally everywhere. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdkk2823cvmd0jgnzjhjz5w6)) - Goal alignment is thus essential to the relationship between humanity and to all automated systems. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdkk92xgcpnjk3b35h6sga5c)) - “This reminds me of what the mathematician and philosopher A.N. Whitehead once said, that civilizations advance by extending the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdkkdt34k1yhv49jk0f73sas)) - We can call it ‘Whitehead’s law.’ The idea being that things always tend toward rather than away from automation. But how fast? I think it is safe to say that, roughly, for a given system, there seems to be a halving of manual operations required for a human per decade. Or, thought of in the inverse, the rate of new operations one can perform without thinking about them will double approximately every decade. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdkkkmk919azb6n5vm46c2dd)) - e ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdmwzsqv6dt7r1zbmy5zmfp9)) - Nothing complex or complicated can do that. Mammals need to hunt or forage and eat almost all day, every day, just to keep the lights on. This is the price we pay for our extreme mammalian intelligence. We have to eat constantly, and we have to breathe constantly to break apart air molecules like little fission and fusion reactors into something we can use to keep our bodies buffered against environmental temperatures. The very price you pay for consciousness is your need to constantly stoke the fire, so to speak. There is no one without the other. That feeling of hunger you decry is the very essence of consciousness. It was probably the first sensation. The first conscious experience was probably being hungry, and we haven’t turned back since.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdn3thpvgj5jsjp1pn4wtrhf)) - Would each of you give over your free will to an algorithm optimized to give you your best physical and mental health? If an algorithm told you exactly what to eat when, and you were promised that you would never feel hungry again and that it would be antiaging, anti-inflammatory, and let you live naturally and healthily as long as possible, would you do it?” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdn417nqgdhpw2exmpx919ta)) - I tend to have to care for the diet and nutrition of all the animals on my farm because they either don’t have the knowledge or ability to understand or care for themselves. So in a sense, am I just their algorithm? Because I know better? Because I have control? Who am I really to say? I tell them when to eat and what to eat. How different is it?” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdqm0yvxg7je87tpcetakaap)) - s life worth living without suffering? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdr52mj852avy1p82btqemkq)) - “And so, when you say adventuring is over, I say: ‘It has just begun.’ Why? Because we are still struggling with the outside. Because we are shackled and bogged down by all the manual tasks required to live day to day. We are still trying to do everything. Instead, we should hand everything over to automation and our AI symbiotes so we may sit back and let our minds take care of what they are best at.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdrs47r68jehm6tk0xbsmv8y)) - “It was neither evolved, made, nor honed for many of the modern Herculean burdens we put it through. It fatigues easily. It is a victim to the whims of temporary lacks. It cannot imagine what it cannot experience. It deprioritizes information that flies in the face of its prior beliefs. It is irrational, irreverent, and lies all the time. We are stuck with all the cognitive quirks of all our ancestors before us who lived in very different environments. Our bodies and minds are riddled with a hodgepodge of genes from viruses and bacteria that we stole and randomly shoved into our genomes somewhere. Imagine doing that with software or with code. Imagine having a data center that powers the most important computations on the planet and it just randomly has bits and pieces of computer virus code sprinkled in its source code. That’s what a human mind is. Flawed and error-prone because it wasn’t made or designed, it was cobbled.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdrss94ehwjphtrr8p1ad9wn)) - t ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdvjwhvv73gsqq73yr9vgpz0))