Life wouldn’t be here if mitochondria only accumulated damage. We can do in the lab what biology does in the wild - introduce selection pressures. Either by sequencing iPSC clones and picking the best, somehow inducing the natural purifying selection, or simply using a donor mitochondria.
It’s not different if you’re used to. Heat acclimation is a real thing, but it won’t magically beat physics if wet bulb temperature hits body temperature.
This feeling of being defeated by and trapped inside the “machine” and seeing the “truth” is exactly what the “machine” would want you to do. The actual red pill is that there’s no “machine”, there’s only people and shared social constructions held together by our compliance and they’re contingent.
Derek Thompson keeps banging his neoliberal drum in the face of (what he sees as) literal extinction. We need GDP, growth, yada yada. Just another 1% of GDP growth bro, it’ll fix everything. It’s funny how we’re unwilling to move a single iota on our socio-politico-economic system and actually fix what people are SAYING the problem is. Actually free childcare, education, cheaper housing, more future security, etc. Yes, most of us grew up in a world where none of that was present, but we now understand how suboptimal it was on our psyches and want to break the cycle.
Is it? Literally nothing even remotely similar from the book is happening in reality beyond the lobsters’ broken command of language being similar to early GPTs, but even they seem to have had a better world model than our current SOTA.
It’s debatable whether data centers is “civilization”. Civilization, in theory, should be a a benefit to all. Data centers provide basically zero benefit to communities where they get built. They don’t even get to tax the value the compute inside creates. It’s just an ugly, loud, power and water hungry box as far as they’re concerned.
I agree, it’s just a failure of imagination. Some folks correctly foresee not being able to continue what we’re doing now in the exact same way in some new context and conclude everything is impossible. Life isn’t this fickle, it’s adapted before and will adapt again. This is why great science fiction is so valuable, as some people are better at imagining new ways of being more than others, and can show the rest of us the possibilities.