Artificial life and artificial mind, yeah.

Ah, humor. Ar! Ar!

My point is this it is easier to simplify, redesign, refactor and optimize a device you designed and built yourself rather than to try to do that with a set of undocumented black boxes emergent from billions of years of blind selection.

"I'm not saying "human" isn't a state that would not benefit from a considerable amount of rethinking, especially on a global scale."

Well, technology is a little easier to simplify and optimize than organic tissue and this can reduce points of failure, right?

First let me say that, at 50, it's highly unlikely I'll live to see any of this stuff. I've long made peace with my human frailties—at least insofar as any can claim to do so. That not at issue here.

I barely remember that anime, seeing it in an art house theater way back in high school in 1981. I don't remember its plot.

Obviously not. Nothing is perfect or foolproof. Nonetheless, we do strive to make things as reliable as we can, at least with reasonable bounds, right?

And I agree. It is a mistake to explain any of this stuff as dodging death. It's only better durability made possible by medical technology improvements. That's it. It's impossible to make anything indestructible or immortal.

I'm just saying the problem is much bigger than post-industrial attitudes towards death.

The modern world seems to have equated existence itself with failure, let alone death. I blame marketing and capitalism.

If you put my handle into a search engine, you'll see that's a cute, or at least funny, take on this subject too.

For some, mere existence itself is enough for some of us to rage—I think. It's not the dying of the light. It's the light itself. Existence is absurd. Death itself is only one aspect of that absurdity. Our defiance against the absurdity of existence is itself absurd. But we do it anyway. Like all organisms do.

Ah, one of those cross-gawktopus posts to draw us io9'ers out, eh?

Tinfoil hat: ENGAGE!

Well, until you or someone can find me some pages on the Wikipedia, university or or a decent science magazine sites, I can't take this assertion of Fourthletter's seriously.

Well, I support Wikipedia because it's built on open source technology and is fully compliant with the progressive and fair Creative Commons set of IP licensing. This makes it a far better, adaptible and long lasting source of information than something like the World Book, Encyclopedia Britannica. It's not bound to…

Still need some citations before I'll believe it. I think you're oversimplifying here.

The people who complain that we alienate ourselves from nature seem to always overlook that human nature, the human tendency to do this, is part of nature too. By creating all these distractions we ARE appreciating existence.

If I could give a billion stars of recommendation for this. I would.