Any time immortality is mentioned, the commentary inevitably focuses on the goal itself.
This is natural, but also, myopic.
The dividends of research into immortality are incremental, but each breakthrough has the same outcome: increased quality of life. Humans become healthier; eventually, we last longer.
Yes, at the limit, there are problems with immortality: Sterling's Holy Fire is a great exploration of the problems a gerontocracy could pose, as is Morgan's Altered Carbon. Without older generations dying off, would there be any room for the young?
I submit that these would be excellent problems to have, that there is no guarantee we will ever have them, and that the dividends from trying to earn ourselves such problems would be considerable.
Unfortunately, projects and discussions focused on immortality, or life extension in general, do not necessarily improve the aggregate well-being of all humans. (One could argue that capitalism does improve the aggregate well-being of all, but that is a different topic.)
Across the entire planet there is unimaginable suffering everywhere one looks. Some of that suffering is obvious, while other suffering is hidden behind an illusion of prosperity. When considering how to invest finite resources, and claiming to seek a positive outcome for all, why not address the immediate problems?
Technology is knowledge of tools -- tools that provide leverage for solving (or causing) problems. As for why we have those tools, why we improve the ones we have, and why we invent new tools, aspirational goals are nice, but it seems callous to ignore applications that could significantly improve the quality of lives today; raising quality of life would also accelerate the rate of innovation.
Should we actively advance technology, and potentially spread out into space? Yes, I think we should. However, the more we spread out, the more advanced certain segments of humanity become, the more potential there is for others to be left out of the equation and relegated to the role of wasted human potential.
The problem of aging is an immediate problem for every human being on the planet.
There is no problem more immediate.
There's no reason, at all, to sacrifice work on this problem to work on any other problem. There are plenty of industries and practices which actively make things worse. Let's divert resources from those instead.
There are a lot of problems. How do you decide which one is the most "immediate"? Should everyone work on that one problem until it's solved then move to the next?
So, if we're so close, why isn't immortality capturing public interest yet? Ideas:
Religion - Among other things, religion's goal is to help people endure the inevitability of death. Thus, to many, this is a solved problem.
The age divide - Older people have the immediate need, but their ideas about tech are by now set in concrete. The young are open to more radical tech, but dying of old age isn't an immediate threat to them. Nor do these two cultures tend to mix.
Technological pessimism - There was a lot of overblown technological optimism in the mid-century, but the pendulum has since swung the other way. The word "chemical" no longer has positive connotations in popular culture, for example.
Maybe I’m missing something, but how can immortality, even a theoretical one be achieved? Say you find a way to cure all diseases and reverse aging, you can still be killed or die in an accident. Say you find a way to transfer your consciousness to a machine (ignoring all philosophical implications). That machine can still be shut down and destroyed. All you get is just a longer life, which still ends at some point. And given the fact that it’s not time that actually matters, but the perception of time, one might still view their life as being short.
I find the article a bit naive, this question lies deep in the realm of philoshopy. What if technology and life merge at some point? It’s not hard to imagine that technology and life might become indistinguishable in the far future.
The quest for immortality isn't a 0 or 1 objective. Using technology to reduce or reverse aging is one aspect. Using technology to reduce the accident fatality rate is another aspect. E.g, what was the car fatality rate 100 years ago and what is it now when you account for safer cars and better medical tech.
Unless you bypass the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Greg Egan's Permutation City provides a possible example), technology will get us asymptotically closer to true immortality. But even if we don't reach true immortality, reducing suffering caused by our current level of mortality is a noble goal.
I disagree that technology will get us asymptotically closer to true immortality. It is far more likely that technology gets us asymptotically closer to a theoretical maximum lifespan that is determined by our relationship with the environment. Radical changes to our form might extend that theoretical maximum, but it is not clear that someone who wants immortality would be satisfied with a form radically different from human.
As an example, an entity with a fractured consciousness that spans tens of thousands of lightyears (yet not necessarily dispersed enough to be considered immortal) would have a radically different concept of self. If one was uncomfortable with the concept of a few dying for the many, in order to perpetuate the species, then a dispersed consciousness devoid of a self seems equally unpalatable.
Think of backups and redundancy, f.i. like in Battlestar Galactica (the reimagened one from 2004) and the Cylon resurrection ships. They had immortality by instantly uploading, as long as there was coverage by a resurrection ship/ark in range.
The phrase I use is: Technology supports technique. If the technique is to play piano, a well-maintained acoustic piano is the ultimate instrument. If the technique is to play music, a toy keyboard will suffice.
What technical studies often lose track of in their quest for perfection is a sense of balanced technique. If you want an immortalized thought you can very nearly achieve that by publishing a book. But an immortal body and mind is at odds with a developing body and mind. When we say immortality we surely don't mean "I can continue to be a glum and unfulfilled soul staring at a screen forever." And yet, with respect to our digital technologies it really is somewhat like that - more and more gets captured and archived. Does life improve? Depends on the measure. We address one set of traumas only to uncover others, at first dismissing them, and then gradually coming to afford them respect. It's extremely common not to recognize how screwed up we are.
If we were to say, instead of the preservation of your exact form, you get to be healed of past trauma and remain full of energy, but without controlling exactly where you end up, how you evolve, and maybe forgetting some of your past - would that still be immortal? And if so, then a existing healthy, fulfilled life is very near to that.
And I do believe philosophical thoughts like those are where we are going, since we have picked most of the low-hanging fruit leading to material comfort while still guarding it jealously and justifying a deficit in column A by pointing to spectacular achievements in columns B, C, and D. We have to realign the techniques and therefore the technologies to square it up.
Right now, the most effective possible activity to reduce mortality would be work to eliminate excess sugar from the human diet. The most effective avenue for that would be to eliminate it from beverages.
Probably we would need to begin treating Coke'n'Pepsi like we treat tobacco: start with required warning labels, ultimately an advertising ban. Lead was a tough nut, but we cracked it. Tobacco was a tough nut, but we cracked it. Trans fats was a tough nut, but we finally got that one, too.
Immortality is totally selfish and uninspiring, and really just a bad comms strategy to recruit more tech progressives. We need a better vision for how it'll make the world more Good and Just, improve lives, and make things more egalitarian, instead of helping privileged people just continue to enjoy their status and wealth.
Aging and death is an enormous drain on society, emotionally, financially and in myriad other ways. Years leading to death are often uncomfortable or miserable. Extended friends and families are affected in their freedoms, finances, and mental health. Thus it seems reasonable to expect huge, across-the-board gains in human flourishing and well-being, if we could somehow eliminate aging and death. Nor does that mean we couldn't work in parallel to address inequality, oppression and suffering in other ways.
Regarding "huge, across-the-board gains in human flourishing and well-being," how do you envision economics and labor would play out? What does this look like with regard to resource allocation?
I'm not omniscient nor an economist, I have no idea.
Here's a comparison though: War is another of those realities—like aging and death—that we seem to have normalized and accepted at a cultural level. It's fair to ask how economics, labor and allocation would play out once a civilization stops dumping a third of its resources into the destructive act of war, but to ask whether we should end the war, just because we're uncertain of the answers, strikes me as absurd.
Mortality is inevitable and necessary. I posit that the purpose of technology should be to reduce suffering. The purpose of technology should not be the redistribution of wealth from the masses to those who are adept at manipulating the systems employed by civilization.
"At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no."
Though it may be depressing to contemplate, death is an essential element of a fitness function, a requirement for evolution in the broadest sense. No death would lead to either depletion of resources or a stagnation of growth that would inevitably lead to extinction due to inevitable and unanticipated catastrophe.
That said, a reduction of suffering may naturally lead to extended lifespans. However, the elimination of mortality is something altogether different.
You don't need to wait around for natural selection to make changes (we don't do that for medicine).
We have an entire universe to grow and expand into, along with the capability for long-term thinking. These problems are solvable problems and a critical part of reducing suffering.
This sounds to me like someone looking at premodern child mortality and saying "well, you know, families would have too many children if a quarter of them didn't die as babies". I have no doubt that a society where people don't die would require other major changes to compensate - but it's hard to imagine those changes could be so tragic that death is preferable!
Why? Why not expand and build fucking O'Neill cylinders, Ark/Generation ships of hollowed out asteroids, Ring worlds, Dyson spheres, whatever, until the end of the universe? Then we can die, transcend, whatever!
With a partial tongue-in-cheek, I will defer to Max Planck, who said:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth." [0]
One can see Planck's Principle throughout human civilization, in practically every human endeavor. This is how we evolve as a species. Not just biologically, but culturally.
This is natural, but also, myopic.
The dividends of research into immortality are incremental, but each breakthrough has the same outcome: increased quality of life. Humans become healthier; eventually, we last longer.
Yes, at the limit, there are problems with immortality: Sterling's Holy Fire is a great exploration of the problems a gerontocracy could pose, as is Morgan's Altered Carbon. Without older generations dying off, would there be any room for the young?
I submit that these would be excellent problems to have, that there is no guarantee we will ever have them, and that the dividends from trying to earn ourselves such problems would be considerable.