The fact that sleep initially evolved for temporal niches doesn’t mean that no important machinery was connected to it later. Evolution is not a programmer, following single responsibility principle. It has a tendency to hook more and more functionality to the same module with time.
So, while safe sleep reduction may be possible, it’s very much not clear whether it’s the case just based on this evolutional argument. And it can be quite dangerous in the worst case. Research in this direction is interesting and promising, but it seems we should start with better understanding of sleep in general before trying to reduce it.
Yeah I think sleep probably serves other roles, I just don’t see why those roles require 7 hours of sleep rather than say 5 hours.
I do agree that basic research is what will actually get sleep need reduction therapies to work at scale. I’m hoping that citizen science and discussion of the topic will encourage more work on this.
Those other roles require that much sleep is because they were designed for that amount. Evolution designed them around however much those animals were sleeping. And of course sleep started way, way, way before humans.
Sleep probably does a bunch of different things. There’s not going to be one drug that suppresses the need for all of it. Or even a whole suite of drugs we can locate now.
Maybe you could cut it to half as much on average without severe downsides, but I’d expect first attempts to fail in subtle ways.
Of course you might not need to live that long naturally if you’re young and take AGI seriously.
The fact that sleep initially evolved for temporal niches doesn’t mean that no important machinery was connected to it later. Evolution is not a programmer, following single responsibility principle. It has a tendency to hook more and more functionality to the same module with time.
So, while safe sleep reduction may be possible, it’s very much not clear whether it’s the case just based on this evolutional argument. And it can be quite dangerous in the worst case. Research in this direction is interesting and promising, but it seems we should start with better understanding of sleep in general before trying to reduce it.
Yeah I think sleep probably serves other roles, I just don’t see why those roles require 7 hours of sleep rather than say 5 hours.
I do agree that basic research is what will actually get sleep need reduction therapies to work at scale. I’m hoping that citizen science and discussion of the topic will encourage more work on this.
Those other roles require that much sleep is because they were designed for that amount. Evolution designed them around however much those animals were sleeping. And of course sleep started way, way, way before humans.
Sleep probably does a bunch of different things. There’s not going to be one drug that suppresses the need for all of it. Or even a whole suite of drugs we can locate now.
Maybe you could cut it to half as much on average without severe downsides, but I’d expect first attempts to fail in subtle ways.
Of course you might not need to live that long naturally if you’re young and take AGI seriously.