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Why Time Flies By As You Get Older
Ant notes a piece up on WBUR Boston addressing theories to explain the universal human experience that time seems to pass faster as you get older. Here's the 9-minute audio (MP3). Several explanations are tried out: that brains lay down more information for novel experiences; that the "clock" for nerve impulses in aging brains runs slower; and that each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.
Michio Kaku did a great show about time for the BBC and at the end of one episode he asked young/old people to count 60 seconds. The older people consistently counted for much longer than the actual minute while younger people consistently counted much faster.
I calculated it out, and If you factor in how slow time moves after you die this is pretty obvious.
I'm not falling for that one again.
I dunno, I think I'm getting older because I swear that audio sounded more like 6 minutes...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
The immortal Bill Watterson described that effect best.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
shit, that's a boredom-laced eternity.
If you are 1 year old, then 1 day represents about 1/365th of your life. If you are 10 years old, then 1 day represents about 1/3,650th of your life. Thus the older you are the faster time may appear to pass by. When you are 1 year old, 1 day may seem to last much longer than 1 day when you are 10 years old.
When you're one year old, your entire life memory is a year. Thus, a year's passage is a lifetime. When you're 100, a year's passage is 1/100th of the same time.
I always thought of it as filtering. As we grow older, our brains develop in the way they filter incoming stimuli.The fewer things that actually need our brain's attention, the faster time seems to go. One finds though that in a new and stimulating environment,say, in a new country, time feels slower, but in a boring or familiar environment, time often seems to rush by - especially if our minds are focused on one thing to the exclusion of other stimuli.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
"Life is like a roll of toilet paper: the older you get, the faster it goes."
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
On a related note:
The Secret Advantage Of Being Short
So if we grow taller with age, time will remain constant.
Brilliant!!
Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things. People also get more responsibility as they age, so more responibilities = less time. That's my thesis; I think it's pretty good!
For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. A Flock of seagulls, Wham, Adam and The Ants, Human League, Culture Club etc. I don't know how we did it, but we finally realized that just because a synthesizer could make nearly every possible sound, they didn't all have to be in the same song! And the fashion! Dear God, what horrors! - shoulder pads, big hair, jackets with sleeves rolled up, zip-up shoes (remember Ciaks?), scraps of brightly fabric tied everywhere, puffy shirts, skinny leather neckties, faux military uniforms, solitary white gloves. Oh, the humanity!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Also, when you're 5 years old, the maximum amount of time that you need to spend doing something in order to feel like you've achieved something worthwhile is probably in the order of 5-10 minutes or so (drawing a picture, writing your name, building a sandcastle at the beach, making something with Lego).
When you get to middle-age, things take much longer (achieving success in your chosen field, raising children, paying off a mortgage etc).
My theory is that it's the lengthening of the distance in time between major milestones that makes time appear to move faster as you get older. It simply takes a lot longer to achieve anything of significance.
I wouldn't trade my 65 years of experiences and my white hair for anything in this world.
I'd trade for some better teeth, though.
This ain't rocket surgery.
For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. (...)
Sometimes it feels I'm the only one who liked the 1980s...
Those were the times of Cindy Lauper, (young) Madonna, A-Ha and pop-things alike.
Those were the golden years of 8-bit computing. Machines like Amiga, Mac etc were created in that decade.
Those were the years of Gorbachev, Thatcher, Khomeini... The video of Genesis' "Land of Confusion" was hilarious.
The girls were colorful and with crazy hairs...
It was shamelessly stupid and joyful.
The 1970s OTOH, were overrated IMO (I'm glad I was too young to experience that).
Bell pants? Afro-power microphone-like hair? Beatles gone? Progressive rock? Hippies getting older?
Aarrrgh...
Full attention != Full processing capacity
He obviously has tons of background daemons running and was in a situation of "some degree of peril" and physical change (the skin graft thing) which clearly would have triggered several others. A more useful, relevant, pertinent (and I predict...) reliable benchmark would be something like "thoughts per second" or "operations per thought" (since different thoughts would have different operations and a different number of operations). "Thought operations" (or "thoughts") could be a standard for thinking-speed.
So - how an AI thinks is more important than how fast it thinks since "operation speed" can changed via hardware. Thinking-speed is a result of underlying algorithms that actually make up the "I" in AI. Thinking-speed is also affected by the AIs own growth and ability to change itself. IQ of an AI would also result from that.
Which also implies that AIs can be distracted from a task - simply by causing it to a) spend more operations about input received or b) making it think about something else simultaneously. An AI being able to manage that/reduce the effect of the distraction, again, is dependent on design, self-growth and self-modification.
It would be have sounded even more worrying if in those 0.68 seconds, he had as many "thoughts" as an intelligent person would in a year...or two. (Endless loops, non-breaks, etc. adds to the worry.)
Ofcourse, I do agree with your statement. It IS an eternity for any AI.
Sidenote with math-conjectures:
60 trillion OPS = 60 x 10^12 OPS (or in MIPS = 60 * 10^6 MIPS, since we are not assuming only-FLOPS) - and yes, many operations make up 1 instruction, so assume best case is 1 instruction = 2 operations. So 30 * 10^6 MIPS? An X9100 is 32472 MIPS ~= 32 * 10^3 MIPS. So only slightly-less-than 1000 times slower than Data.