What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Learning

"Squeeze your glutes"
"Don't let your knees go over your toes"
"Push your bum back"
"Keep your back straight"
"Look up"

 These are some of the most common phrases you'll hear most fitness trainers utter at a person whom they are trying to teach how to squat. But are these helpful? What if they were at best a waste of time, and at worst, sabotaging people's progress and a borderline danger to them?

As Fitness trainers, we are told from the start, our job is to teach our clients the right technique. Most people would agree with this. The idea of correct technique is everywhere from #formcheck to the highest levels of sports training. But what is technique? [Pause and think] [1]

Some common definitions of technique are:

• a way of carrying out a particular task [Oxford]

• a particular method of doing an activity [Collins]

• a way of doing a thing that works better than others [my mom]

First, lets notice how all these definitions mention "A way" of doing something, whereas in physical training, technique is usually described as "THE way".

• THE correct way to do a squat is to not let the knees cross the toes

• THE correct way to lift something is with a straight back

• THE correct way to do a push up is with elbows in/out

But is it? What does it mean to be "the correct way"? Firstly, correct for doing what? Maximizing performance? Mitigating injury? We all want to give our students what's best for them, right? So as coaches, we try to search for "the best way" of doing a thing. But did we ever stop to ask ourselves, is there a single best way? How do we know? [Pause and Think]

These are clearly important questions, and if you'd like to take a stab at answering them, read on. We'll try to find some answers through some very clever experiments in a field far outside of fitness. Let's start by asking ourselves some questions.

Question 1: Are there any single techniques that are 100% effective? [2]

[Pause and Think]

 Taking our example of the squat cues again, it's quite clear from everyone's experience that no single cue/technique helps a person squat 'perfectly'. I don't think anyone would contest this. So then we have to look at the next possibility. 

Question 2: Are there any single techniques that are significantly more effective than others?

[Pause and Think]

While we're all inclined to think of our personal favourite techniques as more effective than others, we have to ask ourselves two important questions about those: 

Question 2a: Is the technique I have in mind statistically more effective that others? ['statistically' : holds true when applied to a larger sample of people and independent from person of delivery (you)]

 Question 2b: Are there other different techniques that may be similarly effective?  [Pause and Think]

Often we're inclined to see the techniques we personally use as more effective because A) we're all biased whether we like it or not and B) because we may only (or preferentially) use and teach the techniques we like, and if we see success from it, then assume that this singular technique could be the effective one. And without trying or teaching other techniques, we may never know or acknowledge how effective they are in comparison.

Another simple argument that can be made to answer Question 2 is that IF there was a technique that was undeniably better, it would be used extremely commonly out of pure selection pressure. But we don't really see that happening, so we can assume that no single technique like this exists.

I know that it may seem a little strange and disheartening to see the things that we used to help people being regarded as not particularly effective, but if you read on, you'll see why there may still be plenty of hope.

Question 3: How does the effectiveness of that technique change over time?

Initially, an effective technique may help improve performance significantly, but soon, as we've all experienced as coaches, it doesn't remain as useful as it did on day 1. Either the student understood it and imbibed it as much as they could, or they didn't and don't find themselves able to.

Here's what that would look like on a graph

Now we're going to ask a bit of a difficult question.

Question 4: What is the effectiveness of no technique?

By no technique, I mean telling them what the task is, but not HOW to do it. For example - the squat, the task would be to sit down and get back up, without losing balance from the feet. For a deadlift, the task would simply be to pick the object up (also, without losing balance). How effective would that be? To rephrase this question, how good would the people who received no technique be, in comparison to the people that did? [Pause and Think]

I'll admit, it's hard to just think of an answer to that question. The better way to find out would be to actually do this as an experiment and find out some more real answers. If you're a coach with access to students, I would highly encourage that you try it, just to see what happens. It can be a bit daunting at first to not give any instructions (most students basically expect it at this point), but if you can both overcome the initial apprehension, something interesting may come of it. But it's also clear that most people can't do this on a large enough scale to yield really broad answers. So what do we do?

Here's where I want to take you on a journey outside the world of fitness - and into artificial intelligence research. Why? Because artificial intelligence research is all about trying to teach computers to do what humans do. And maybe by observing how they do it, we can learn a thing or two ourselves. (You don't need any background knowledge in the area of course, I'll try to keep it as simple as possible)

Artificial Intelligence

First, artificial intelligence is nothing mystical. It is essentially a computer program. All programs are just machines following instructions. Artificial intelligence programs called this because they try to exhibit 'human-like' capabilities (recognising something from a picture, understanding speech or making decisions). We're going to look at a sub-field of artificial intelligence called 'machine learning' - the field which gives computers the ability to learn by themselves without being exactly programmed.

Regular programs are created with detailed instructions about what to do in all the situations they encounter. Your web browser will show you what you type in, your text messaging app will send the message you type to the person you want, etc. And most importantly, those instructions can't be changed by the program itself.  Sometimes circumstances do come up where the program ends up stuck doing something wrong, but it is helpless there and can't do much about it, even if it reaches the same state again.

This works well enough for most things that we use our computers for these days, but there are some tasks that are practically impossible for us to create precise instructions for: recognizing faces, having a conversation, or driving a vehicle. The tasks are too complex, with too many different situations and possibilities.

So how can humans do all these things? This is the beautiful process that we call LEARNING. Somehow, humans that are born with no skills (think of how useless babies are) can develop into adults that are able to competently do all these things - and more. So, computer researchers tried to take this idea over to the computer programs. Just like us, the computer starts out with the task not knowing how to do it, but through trial and error and improving from those trials and errors, it gets better at the task, eventually good enough to be considered competent (the technical term for this is called reinforcement learning).

Now let's take an example of computers learning to do something this way. I'm going to choose the game of chess, because computers have been playing chess for a long period of time, and in many different ways. We can also compare the efficacy of each of those ways very easily - by making them play against each other. Most people have heard of some computers that play chess as well. The 1997 match between reigning human world champion at the time Garry Kasparov vs IBM's Deep Blue was the first time a computer defeated the strongest human under tournament conditions, and they've been getting better ever since.

The interesting thing is, computers were first taught to play chess in a very technical way. Top human players would basically encode strategies that they had developed, when and how to use them. The computers would then search through enormous possibilities to find the best moves, but using the information provided by their human trainers to make decisions. Furthermore, these programs, can only specifically play chess. To try to play another game, you would have to start redesigning the entire program from the ground up.

Along came a group called Deepmind, that generally works in machine learning to solve problems. They wanted to create a program that could play chess. What was unique in their work, was that instead of teaching the program how to play chess, they taught it HOW TO LEARN BY ITSELF. The program was only given the rules of chess, and then made it play against itself to practice. All that the program was set up to do, was change itself after playing each (set of) games - to try to be a little bit better. As it started with no knowledge of chess, it played pretty randomly (and therefore extremely poorly) at the beginning. How good do you think it could get just playing on its own with no guidance whatsoever?

 To the amazement of everyone not only in the artificial intelligence community but also the chess community, after just a few hours of self play, this program (called AlphaZero - because it had zero human knowledge) was able to beat not only the best humans, but even state of the art computer programs. By the end of the training period, it was the strongest chess entity in history.

What's more amazing however, is HOW it played. When the games it played were analysed, AlphaZero played in an exceptionally UNIQUE and CREATIVE way, with ideas that were never seen before in human or computer chess play. By learning without any human interference, it had learned most of what we know, but also discovered NEW and powerful ideas. Chess, a game studied by the brightest humans for hundreds of years, and this computer was able to surpass it all from breakfast to dinner. All by practicing with itself, and trying to improve.

And there's more. This same program was - without any additional help - able to also repeat this historic feat in the games of Go and Shogi.

Ok, that's all we're going to hear about machine learning details.

But what does this mean for us?

What does this mean for learning? And what does this have to with fitness techniques? Well, if an entity can develop the same (and even greater) competence as collective human knowledge with just self practice, is that the thing we should be prioritizing in our teaching?

Why do we always start with technique?

I asked myself this question in my teaching, and the answers I came up with all had something in common. I wanted my students to learn fast. I wanted my students to be successful. I didn't want my students to get hurt. I wanted to teach more students together. I wanted to show how much I knew about the subject. I wanted to teach them. But were they learning?

It's important to remember that teaching happens in the teacher, but learning happens in the student.

And since they happen in different people, they are different processes. We have to ask ourselves: how much teaching is really required for learning? And how much are we doing just because "a teacher has to teach something"? This brings us back to Question 4: What is the effectiveness of no technique?

AlphaZero shows us that technique helps, but is not as crucial as we thought. We, as humans, have some handicaps that we have to work with, like a finite amount of energy, degradation with fatigue, and quite a fallible memory. We also have a fairly low input-output speed and limited time to work with, so we need to be somewhat efficient with our learning processes. But in over-optimizing for efficiency, are we losing out on a vast landscape of possibility? By teaching everyone how to play the game the same way, are we missing out on other approaches? By over-teaching, are we wasting our time as teachers? By micro-managing the learning process, are we robbing students of control, responsibility and independence?

What CAN we take away?

The first time I reached this stage, I felt a little silly. I felt silly for potentially wasting my time and my students’ time. I felt bad for potentially robbing them of their self-sufficiency.  But what do we do?

I think the first thing we can take away is a sense of relief that students will eventually learn by practice, despite whatever we teach them. Once we let go of the need to hold their hands (or bodies), we can start to think ourselves not as deliverers of information, but as guides. Not TEACHers, but facilitators of the learning process. Instead of the programmers that specified what to do in every situation, we can be more like the Deepmind team - creating a structure where the students can learn through practicing, evaluating their actions, and then trying to improve them. We will definitely have to share ideas with them, give them suggestions and feedback. The experienced eye of an expert will often help reveal things that the learner may miss. We must be there to keep them on track, keep them motivated, and of course, keep them safe. But we must remember that the learning happens in them, not through us.

The good news from the latest artificial intelligence research is that they also agree with this approach. If you look at the strongest modern chess programs today, they are indeed a hybrid of the two approaches.

Taking this light-handed approach is not easy, but remember, we never hold a babies legs or tell them to flex their quadriceps while teaching them to stand or walk. One of the most complex bodily movements that we make. It involves a multitude of joints (the ankle, knee, hip, twisting of the spine, arm swing, etc...). It involves strength but also balance, stabilization and multitasking with other movements: walking is really complex. Then we decide to add momentum to the mix and try to run as well. As if that wasn't enough, we also rapidly change direction and orientation on surfaces that are sometimes extremely uneven. And how do all the humans on the planet learn how to do this? Do we teach everybody through technique? Do we tell them : lift left knees, then push heel ahead, then lean forward, then put the foot down, then push with the back leg toes pushing from the calf and glute, then lift the foot and kick back... Does this seem practical?

How do babies learn to walk and eventually run? We show them, and if they are interested, then they try it. Of course, they fail at the start, but since they're interested, they'll try again. And they will probably manage a second of stumbling before they fall. And do that 20 more times immediately after. But they will learn something from each of those 20 times, so that by the 21st, they now are wobbly but upright for a good 3-4 seconds before they plonk down again. To the baby, it may seem like a small feat, but you know the parents will be over the moon watching this.

It may take a while, but the baby eventually learns to stand, walk, and even run really fast after a few months and years. As teachers of both physical and intellectual disciplines, I think that we can actually take solace in that we don't need to explain every action, but inspire them, encourage them when they succeed, create feedback when they fail, and let them LEARN. The hardest thing we have to do is stand back and watch this beautiful process unfold.

[Pause and think]

How can you as a teacher/practitioner try this out in your own practice or teaching? Drop in your ideas as comments or send me an email if you found this interesting and would like to chat about it.

Annotations

[1] This article has a lot of places where the way to get the most from it is to pause and try to think of your own answers to the questions before going forward. I hope you will try it here, and I'll leave this little note at all the other places where I think it will be useful.

[2]  Let % effectiveness be number of people that when instructed with the technique achieve the desired change in performance

Science and Critical Thinking in the Information Age

It is evident today that the sheer vastness of information available about practically any topic is barely comprehensible.  This is due to both an exponential increase in both the quantity of material produced and it's availability to ordinary people anywhere in the world. Most of the credit of course goes to the development and spread of the Internet, but also to the downstream effects it has caused. The availability of a nearly costless distribution platform has incentivised a growing industry of content creators (think of bloggers, wikipedia contributers, et al) that would otherwise have been dissuaded by the gated community of the legacy publishing industry. 

The result of this rapid unorganised growth is a body of information that is largely unfiltered, uncategorised, and unconnected. Search engines solve one crisis by being like a universal index (and in certain cases, a glossary), but they are only effective for locating information when you know exactly what you are looking for, unable to constructively assist when you require an idea, information to form your own opinion or an overview of the landscape.

Let's think of the experience of walking around in a dense rainforest. If you were looking for a particular flower, an army of manual labourers (search engines) could undoubtedly scour the land looking for it and find it faster than you alone. But if you wanted to ascertain whether your the breeding of an insect was affecting the spread of a plant species, that same group of inert labourers who can only follow simple instructions wouldn't be able to assist you with that kind of task. The most that they could do was follow simple instructions to quickly bring you certain types of plants of your choosing and leave you an abundance of information to make your decision.
This is what search engines do in a simplified reality, even excepting for things like the results being biased by the buying power of the result hosts (akin to labourers getting you large numbers of false flowers because a biased party wanted to influence your decision in a particular direction).

The critical skill necessary here now is not the ability to gather or retain information, but the ability to parse through large quantities of it (of somewhat questionable quality) and draw useful conclusions.  This is what is commonly called and I will continue to refer to as 'critical thinking'. 

If we look at an education as the process of equipping ourselves with the toolkits using which we generate value in the world for which we receive compensation, then the efficacy of parts of the current system of eduction is serious doubt. By equipping students with a skillset (data memorisation and regurgitation) that has almost no value anymore, it cripples the student's ability to be valuable and leaves them hanging dry in the department of preparation for an actual career. 

 The skill of critical thinking is not only relevant in the workplace, but increasingly critical in the general populace with the spread of fake news and blatant exaggeration and misinformation from what used to be sacred sources like the mainstream news media and elected officials. The ability to be constructively skeptical grants a degree of immunity from being hoodwinked by misleading claims or statistics. The ability to at least ask the question of "why is/isn't this arguement credible" and remember to apply it not only to the big questions but also the little ones we come across every day. It could be an unbelievable advertisement in the newspaper or a claim about a shocking new medication forwarded to you by a friend.  
Having the skill of critical thinking allows one to perform these cursory analyses routinely and almost subconsciously, which is necessary for their effective deployment.  Because the beauty of the technique that it doesn't have to yield all the answers to be useful, but simply act as a sixth sense humming away in the background. And in a world where most people simply believe what they see, having it is a veritable superpower.

 - "For in the country of the blind, the one eyed man is king."

 In theory, the process of science is really one of skeptical thought and subsequent experimental verification, applied to claims about nature. And the emphasis on process. Not the body of knowledge, but the process. And the first part of that process is exactly this kind of critical thought that asks the kind of basic 

Using Money Well - Removing a Negative

The conundrum that strikes every detailed thinker that starts to earn enough to have disposable income is how to spend it in a way that positively enriches their lives. But care must also be taken  to avoid the consumerist mind trap of starting to believe the assumption that your life can be made better by adding things (that you can buy). ​

Everyone has done this at least once with Monopoly money

Instead of nebulous advice about the relation between money and happiness, I came across a useful corollary to the overused adage (in a Tim Ferriss podcast with Mr Money Moustache http://tim.blog/2017/02/13/mr-money-mustache/). 

The thought-provoking line was, " Instead of using money to add more positives to your life, use it to first remove the negatives.  
This simple shift of the goalposts (or rather simply repainting of it)  brought about a flood of useful ideas about how to spend the money, and I invite you to try the exercise right now as well. 

Gave it a thought? There are some useful examples in the podcast as well, but some of the easy ones that I came up with were: 

• Improve commute experience when necessary
• Spend on tools that improve work efficiency because they pay back in the long run.  
• Consider hiring help for business admin work that you detest.  

I've found a lot of these follow the theme of exchanging money for time, because in almost any body's calculus time is a far more valuable resource.  

Especially for people who have just started earning, parting with that money for non-essential things might seem treacherous to do, but a lesson I quickly learned was that the best strategies for making money grow were to let it go into channels that allowed it to multiply. Simply storing it doesn't have much more than an additive effect but loss aversion is a hard demon to fight. 

When you hear the phrase "Never gonna give you up", it usually not a good sign.  

Investing it, (especially in yourself early on) seems to reap much greater returns in the long term. Whether that's through education (formal or informal) recreation, or just simply improving the quality of your life. 

Is curiosity a luxury?

There are few traits more common among good scientists than curiosity. Almost by definition, people working in the field of finding out new things must have the desire to seek out new things. And yet, everyone treats it like a congenital gift. You are either a curious person, or you are not. I've rarely heard anyone say they would like to become more (or less) curious.

Even still, I googled the question "How do I become more curious?" and all the answers could be summed up as :

• Ask questions
• Ask more questions
• Keep asking questions
• Be humble and persevere 
• Ask a few more questions.

And indeed, the act of questioning is central to curiosity. Humility is also important because one does not ask questions if one thinks they know all the answers. But today I want to probe what the circumstances are that lead people to be curious. An easier group to investigate would be children up to school age, because they all go through basically the same routine till age 15. We know that young children are naturally curious; their every behaviour is exploratory, their every action an implicit experiment, the little tykes are learning machines. But as those same individuals leave their secondary schooling, you start to see that natural instinct wear away in a large percentage of them. In the quest to increase the working scientific community and improve science literacy in the general population, this is a systemic catastrophe. How does our education seem to dull the very blade it seeks to create, and how do some sharp ones still emerge?

There are a few more qualifying factors that might help us tease open this mystery. But first, a little background. 
One of the ways I channel my drive for science communication is by being a part of the outreach team at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), an advanced research facility in my city. A few times a year, they invite the public into their campus and labs to showcase the kind of work that researchers do, how and why they do it. A large portion of the audience is usually school and college age students, and I frequently assist in escorting the boisterous groups through their visit. Over the years, I have had to opportunity to observe a not insignificant sample of kids in this environment, and some of the observations I have made from this have prompted this line of questioning. 
There have always been distinguishable groups of people, some who did have this elusive trait of curiosity and seemed to probe their surroundings with the prongs of their questions, and other who for whatever reason didn't seem to exhibit the trait. (Notice that I'm consciously not saying that they were not curious; because they may be in a different environment, just not this one).  So what causes this preferential exhibition? Let's take a few pot shot guesses and try to dismantle them (like any good scientist would) and see what we can scrape together from all the remains. 

Let's get the easy ones out of the way first.
Maybe they did have questions, but either lacked the communication skills or the confidence to display it in the situation. This is not an unreasonable thought because I know from first hand experience that TIFR can an intellectually intimidating place to be, surrounded by people who objectively know more than you. But categorically, if you never express your curiosity and attempt to find answers to your questions, is there any utility to the curiosity in the first place?

Another hurdle may have been prior education. If you don't know how to box and step in the ring to spar with a competitor, you're going to have a bad time. Considering the sorry state of education in a lot of schools here in India, it's not a stretch of the imagination to assume that they were not well informed about any of the basic fundamentals, or more critically, never told that they could know more than what was in their book/exam or ask for it. A significant number of children seemed to come from this schools that institutionalised this idea within them, and couldn't seem to fathom that they should be questioning the person speaking. 
Here is where some interesting separation started to occur along other well defined boundaries. It was statistically apparent that the groups of children that came from "better" (read: from a higher socio-economic stratum) schools seemed to be more open to the idea of questioning what they saw/heard. (This was by no means a universal phenomenon, and we will discuss the [large] exceptions later) This might sound obvious since I used the word 'better', but let's unpack it.
These schools were not government aided public schools, but more privately run newer institutions. They followed different syllabi, probably attracted better teachers, and as a result created a different learning experience. But before we give all the credit to these uber-schools, there is an important dependency to note. The children with access to these schools came from a completely different socio-economic class that those that attended the public schools. To evaluate the causal factors of the development of curiosity, we must try to isolate the effect of the tuition and the socio-economic background (because one can be much more easily replicated than the other).

It seems valuable to try to unpack what characteristics of the better socio-economic upbringing allow this trait to foster, because maybe it can be replicated for people outside this group as well. 
One would seem to be the likelihood of the parents being well educated as well. The existence of a couple of experienced mentors to guide one through the process would intuitively improve the learning experience, by proving support and direction. 
Children who are first generation learners in their family are less likely to receive this support. But if we know what is lacking, we can try to provide it. Intelligent mentoring could fill the role and provide a role model for the children to aspire to outside of their teachers.
People from the former group also categorically have access to more resources, allowing them to tap better sources of information and direction (like continuous access to the internet, libraries and subject experts). This can be replicated in part for the latter group, but as some of the exceptions will show, it may not be all that necessary.
Another factor could very well be that the safety net provided by a providing family can supply the security required to aspire to pursue less secure ventures for their future careers instead of having to aim for a less ambitious but more stable job that guarantees them standard employment and income. And the pressure to get a job sooner rather than later would rule out exploratory higher education as well.
From a few more empirical observations, it has come to my notice that the school also has a large role to play. By acting as magnets for both brighter students and teachers, they are able to have a far higher than average standard of education, and because they are less pressured to pass standard competitive exams, can focus on the true learning process instead of rote memorization. 

But now, let's visit the exceptions, and see which traits are necessary, but not sufficient. 
It is another frequent observation that students who come from such schools are not remotely interested in the learning process at all, possibly because the safety net provided to them shelters them from the need to perform or work hard. For these people, all the resources and guidance available to them is practically wasted. So clearly just resource availability is not enough, the internal motivation to do it must also exist.
Is the desire and drive to do learn both necessary and sufficient? Not entirely, but maybe. As we enter a more information dense age where access to knowledge is more egalitarian, people with fewer resources can access learning tools previously reserved for the ultra-elite (an excellent example of which is the free availability of lectures from world class institutions of topics of every subject now, sharing the knowledge of the world's best teachers with the world). 

So then the question becomes, where does this internal motivation come from, and how can it be created and nourished?
Obviously the question that all of education is trying to answer, but I'll take a stab at it from my view and experience.
A number of people in my life have asserted that I am an internally driven person in a few areas (like science/parkour). To me, I don't usually think of an abstract force inside me that inextinguishably drives me to do more of these things. I only hazily remember how it developed from being something I found cool, to getting better at it over time and through work, till I reached a point where I no longer needed any external support and sustained itself. Almost as if motivation was a fire that needed to be lit by a spark, nurtured in it's early stage, provided with adequate kindling early on and protection from stray breezes (because that's when it's most likely to be easily extinguished). Once the fire is well and truly going, it is mostly self sustaining. It still needs more fuel every now and then, but by then its large and warm enough for itself and to light a few other fires as well.

So if you feel that fire within you about something, light a few more.

Death and the Internet

Wandering along an empty main road, I walked along the divider. No cars, no noise, cool breeze drifting along. The sun hung like an oil painting, almost lazily. The atmosphere was that of a set without any actors. A lonely man sat restlessly against a tree. The wind rustled a few leaves into his lap. He was content. 

Standing in the middle of a street, even with no cars in sight, is a slightly uncomfortable endeavour. The years of conditioning that this is not a place to pause leave you with a slight twitch in the stomach, nothing painful, but just enough to remind you that something is not right. But like all urges, it eventually subsides. 

A lone cyclist is visible in the distance, glancing at his surroundings. Two people with nowhere to go experience a strange attraction. We chatted for a while, about the obvious lack of happening, the joy of solitary exploration, and the verisimilitude of it all. Parting ways with a glancing smile, we continued on our journey to nowhere.

It was the day after someone died.  

Not just any someone, a particular somebody with a long beard and orange clothes. A lot of other people with orange clothes were not happy with his deadness, and so they started shouting at things. Nothing specific, just a general shouting. 
This disturbed everybody so much that they refused to leave their homes; even those who didn't really care about the affairs of men in orange clothes.

What was puzzling about the entire situation was how violently the people in orange clothes reacted to deadness. There was nothing violent about the death of the one with the beard, or anything controversial at all. But even this completely natural occurance created a frenzy, and the effects were palpable.

Which really begs the question:
Have humans really learned to deal with death?

Of all the aspects of the human condition, death is one of the few, that is undoubtedly universal.
Of the roughly 70 billion humans that have ever existed, only 7 billion are alive today. All the humans of the past have inevitably undergone the process of deadening, from one process or another. There are few things of which we as a collective species are more sure of.
And yet, we don't really act like it.

Very little of our behaviour takes this fact into account. We joyously consume unhealthy food, deliberately inhale poisonous smoke, and lead a sendantary existence mindlessly consuming what the establishment throws our way. Most know that it is detrimental, and most could even be prompted to agree. Most would also say that they don't wish to die. They would probably even do other things to try to extend their living time, and still not make the connection. 

Even though it is abundantly clear that we don't factor in our eventual death into everyday decisions, it is not as transparent why. 
Beings like that may have some sort of evolutionary advantage, and might lead to greater survival, but it's not too much of a stretch for the imagination to think that this wouldn't be a pleasurable existance. (Or would it?) 

But that is more of idle speculation. 
What is observable and testable, and therefore more interesting, is how death is thought about, right now. 
For those not living under a cultural rock our society has dramatically changed the way in which it connects with the wider world. The advent of social media has, in less than a full generation's time, altered the dominant medium of communication between people, and in doing so, necessitated the formation of new norms for certain behaviours.
A lot of this was visible in the early days of the internet, when bullying and abuse was far more rampant. I think it was mainly because the usual norms for treatment of other people that we are conditioned with growing up didn't effectively transpose into the new medium, where the participants were far more physically detached. The inhuman treatment was prompted by the suble notion that we weren't really interacting with humans.
This has, of course, changed and fortunately improved over time (barring a few cess pools like YouTube comments and certain other forum threads), possibly due to the technology being more accepted into common life. As we grew up with the technology, it integrated with our physical lives more coherently than ever before. All aspects of our physical lives effectively made the transitive step to binary, at least in part. 

But what about death?

This revolutionary change has not been in place long enough to witness the death of its adopters, but that point is not too far away. However, the few anomalous deaths of non-natural causes give us a glimpse of what it might be like. 

One of the first companies to deal with this on a large scale was Facebook. Logically, it would have been among the first, since its product was the most personal of the group. Their current protocol allows users to have a Memorial page for deceased users, where at certain times friends can post comments, condolences and other messages. xkcd also has an interesting What If article about when the number of dead people on Facebook will eclipse the number of living.

But another, arguably more important question may be, what should happen to all their data? Not just their Facebook posts, but their email, their cloud storage, their webpages, or other miscellaneous social media accounts.
We have entered an era where we store a tremendous amount of information about and around ourselves, but what should happen to that information when we cease to biologically exist?

Should it just be stored for posterity, practically infinitely until practically unfeasable or accidentally erased?
Should any data not accessed for say 10 times the human lifespan be automatically deleted?
Will extension of the human lifespan rush into the world with a solution before this problem even arises?

Whatever happens, it's almost guranteed to be interesting. And that is a world I'd like to live in.