[extropy-chat] Boredom in old age

[Charlie Stross]

On 3 Dec 2003, at 16:10, Harvey Newstrom wrote:

> BillK wrote,
>> On the mental side, the 'seen it all before' syndrome is also
>> very real. Computer techies will have seen the 'burn-out'
>> effect on whiz-kids who just can't do it any more.
> I have this.  I get sick of seeing all these "new" ideas that are 
> rehashes
> of stuff we did decades ago.  Most of these fail or have the same 
> problems
> that were encountered earlier.  (Those who don't know history are 
> doomed to
> repeat it, etc....)  That's why I am so pessimistic all the time.

Me too. 39, burned-out as a programmer. (Luckily I've found a second -- 
third? -- full-time career as an SF writer.)

>  I am a professional pessimist.  As a security
> expert, auditor, debugger, investigator, hacker, etc., my job is to 
> see the
> problems that no one else sees.  I literally get paid for, and spend 60
> hours per week trying to brainstorm how things can go wrong rather 
> than how
> they can go right.  I see obvious flaws that everybody else seems 
> oblivious
> to.  Other engineers explain how great their projects can be, whereas 
> my job
> is to explain how horribly they can go wrong.  I really do not believe 
> I am
> being unrealistically negative.  I really see real problems that 
> everyone
> else ignores.  I am very good at my job.  However, it means that I see 
> a
> much darker and more dangerous world where technology is not as stable 
> as
> people think.

There's nothing quite like subscribing to COMP.RISKS for a few years to 
take the edge off your enthusiasm for novelty for its own sake!

> However, I think the enthusiasm of youth is automatic because things 
> are new
> and different.  Transhumanism used to be new and different.  But after 
> being
> on these lists for over a decade, there aren't very many new ideas 
> going
> around.  Older people also feel like they are running out of time.  Ten
> years ago, people were predicting the singularity, moon bases and
> immortality in a decade or two.  Now that we are half way there, the 
> goals
> don't seem any closer, yet time is running out.

If we achieve physiological cures for senescence we'll need to find new 
strategies for dealing with a surfeit of experience. Memory excision? 
Facilitated un-learning?

It may be that natural forgetfullness will save us from our own sense 
of anomie over deep time (for values of deep time measured in decades 
to centuries), but I suspect we'll need something a lot better -- 
especially once memory prostheses become available and widely used. 
We've also got the problem that our legal and information systems 
aren't designed to forget over time. A person who is public enemy #1 in 
their first century may well be someone completely different in their 
third. How do we deal with this?


-- Charlie