As often happens when watching The Tek I think back to Sam Landstrom's Metagame. It's a very strange sci-fi world where an alien (software?) overlord has split humanity into a medieval like structure where "Houses" exist in competition (but not war — war has been eliminated) with eachother. Work has become a "game" that the alien software (Oversoul) manages. Everything is integrated; the technology runs everything and for high level "players" can, if they're productive enough (accumulate enough 'points'), gain the status of immortality.
It's an intriguing world that showcases a lot of strange ideas, and even though I've read it a few times I'm not sure if it's depicting a utopia or dystopia. On one hand, suffering is generally minimised — though so is freedom. Crime is basically impossible, though so is privacy. If you're interested in the book but don't want to sling the author the ~$6 for a copy I believe if you google there's a slightly older version of the book the author posted online for free somewhere.
Back onto the aging thing though, here's a relevant section from the book you can treat as a sampler:
MetaGame (Sam Landstrom) - Highlight Loc. 979-85 | Added on Friday, September 30, 2011, 10:47 PM
It is wrongheaded to think of medicine in terms of ‘fixing’ or ‘repair.’ Treating our bodies like old-time automobiles whose parts wear out is a primitive paradigm. Cloning organs as though they were spare parts or injecting nanobots to fix tissue were stopgap measures for previous generations, but in the long run, an uphill battle. Rather than growing old and trying to piece us back together as we fall apart, is it not more desirable to simply remain young? Using the divine wisdom of The OverSoul to instill youth at the cellular level, we now ‘heal thyself.’ Aging is a disease, no more, no less, and once you cure it, everything else falls in line. --Excerpt by Dr. Arrest_Ya_Hart in her ‘Kickass Address’ to players of Medical Game.
living forever would be a problem as the brain, even in a non-degenerative state, would have limits to what it can store. As more and more memories get written to long-term memories, more and more early memories would be lost. Makes me wonder what would happen the effectiveness of conscious thought when the brain has to struggle to hold on to that many memories. My prediction is that it would purge those memories least accessed; if that is the case, we would eventually forget who we were, albeit, after a very long time.
I believe I see where you are coming from with the distinction between the two. Because the TV broadcast is not individualized it consumes much less bandwidth per channel. If 1000 people watch a broadcast channel which consumes 15 Mbps, that is still all the required throughput that is needed. However if 1000 people want to stream that same channel it becomes addressed to them specifically and so even though they are all watching the same thing they are still each independent of each other and thus becomes 15 Gbps of total required throughput.
I'm looking forward to the future of "The Tek" with both Qain and Logan, this episode was really good, you guys make a good pair. The part where Logan talked about needed to sell LAN Syndicate tickets really makes me sad, I might buy a ticket even though I won't be able to make it. Need to support the community more!
The internet that they (Comcast) define, is the level of traffic that leaves your NAT'd network. Anything that comes from your public IP is charged on your bill, and so the streaming should be too
Yes I know. Both options would be there. However it would potentially 'steal' some of the people who would already be willing to participate in the traditional Kickstarter model. Assuming they would throw in a similar amount of money, these would then end up being a drain on future revenue that otherwise would not be there.
Again it all goes down to a proper evaluation and business plan. My GUESS though is that the investment model would attract money from outside of the Tek Syndicate community. I think you already have most of the core community at "Shut up and take my money!" as it is. Profit sharing with them is great for the community, but I would argue that reinvesting back into the business for expanded content would be even better (and in line with what you guys have been saying what you want to do).
Should we live forever - yes. Should we live forever now - no. The problem is that as a society we need new ideas and perspectives to make constant progress. That's where children come in (ideally). But if we were immortal then we'd risk overpopulation. So how can we fix the problem. First way is obvious - populate other planets. The second one is a lot closer to reality and often times ignored - AI. I don't think that we'll have an AI that is autonomous and that can just do whatever it likes. Technology never seems to go in the most obvious route. We always find a way to integrate one technology with another to create what is most useful to us. Just look at what happened with phones in the last 10 years. What I think is most likely to happen is that when we finally create it, we'll find a way to merge with it. To become human+AI. We're practically destined to merge with technology and control our own evolution. In that scenario you would no longer need children for fresh ideas and perspectives that old minds can't create. And with the help of an AI level intellect we'd reach for the stars a lot sooner probably, so if you still want to have kids after that for some reason, you could.
It has been heading this way for a while now but it seems to be falling into place, that the 'world' vision for the internet is to turn it into a corporate intra-net, kind of like cable TV with different tears of service and full government oversight for broadcast / content control including down to the user submission level as well potencially ring fencing what we know as the internet to be limited to only the 'free world' countries.
It was probably only a matter of time before a bunch of suits screwed it up.
The interesting thing with this Comcast internal network is not the internet thing is if all other ISPs and backhaul carriers go full inspection mode and then Stream TV content turns up on the wider internet. Then their argument would be done and the legalities go back to the originality, data is data.
On eternal life, If we made it so that we can extend or even make permanent our life, then we should also have the control over how short out lives can be. You know within consent age of 18 or so like everything else.
Sorry Logan, your movie idea was taken 10 years ago in 2005 in The Island. Clones were raised as 'replacements' on an island, and 'taken away' from the island to be killed for their new host/donor organs.