I wasn't aware of this! It's funny because when we were taught Conceptual Dependency (in a GOFAI course as part of my Masters), this is something we used to joke about, that so many of the examples are violent.

Yes, a great loss. I had hoped that Conceptual Dependency (CD) would be revived by marrying it to deep learning systems - I still hope someone works on it. I still own a copy of the CD book "Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures".

Why is it a great loss? He was 77 years old (a fairly normal age to die), had lived a rich and productive life, had some real impact on his chosen field, and was no long actively working. Why do we keep talking about people's death as a loss when they've already made their contributions to the world, and leave behind them a wide and/or deep legacy for the future?

IMHO, the longer someone is around to experience and relate to the world, the greater their loss to those who can never connect to their past. In this case, it’s also losing a living connection to the roots of AI and computer science.

It is a way to say all you said, and more, is now gone.

Yes, that's how I feel. I admit it was a trite expression that didn't capture what I meant.

It's a better loss than if he died at 70 or even 60. But every year that went by with him were immeasurably great. Basically all human loss of life is great loss. It's not really possible to measure the value of human life other than vague terms like "great." So when the human life is gone the loss is similarly difficult to describe.

I just don't agree. Living things are born, they live, they die. It can be a loss when they die unexpectedly early, due to disease or injury. But this pattern of birth/life/death is the very essence of what living means, and I just don't think it is useful to think of it as a loss when one iteration of it completes. That's even more true when the life part of that cycle resulted in such contributions to the world.

I understand that some people have a spiritual understanding of life that has death as a requirement for meaning, however I don't have that. I can accept that I'll almost certainly one day die and I can apply the proper psychological and spiritual techniques to not be very stressed about that (finding meaning in death does this, which is almost the same thing as saying life had meaning because we die)... BUT I firmly believe death is a tragic disease we absolutely must continue to mitigate for those that wish to do so, indefinitely if possible.

I simply can't see how it wouldn't be better if everyone could get a few more decades or even centuries if possible. Imagine the value of two centuries of physics research, two centuries of artistic development and expression. Life is so precious I don't accept that just 80 years is anywhere near enough of it.

I can relate to this idea. IMO ee have a bias towards the future and tend to think of the destruction of something as erasing all the value it ever had. But if you think of all of spacetime rather than your specific point in it, any life that's ended compared to those still ongoing is exactly as real and has as much "value", which isn't lost.

Considering a completely different meaning of "loss", there's certainly benefit to the constant renewing of the world by death and birth, but there's still a very real loss in our best and brightest growing old and dying (mainly due to the former), because of their lost experiences (hence skills, etc). If everyone lived half as long but the birth rate doubled surely the world would be a far worse place. So I do think "it is useful to think of it as a loss."

Thanks for discussing, regardless of some people apparently being displeased.