I'm young, and most older people I know have peace with the idea of death, so I could be totally wrong. Yet, I never understand the idea that curing death would be a bad thing.
There is so much in the world to experience - what does it feel like to:
* master tennis?
* hitchhike through snowy Hokkaido?
* craft an oak desk with just your hands?
* fall so deeply in love you feel whole?
* direct a movie with just your dreams?
* completely understand the ins and outs of a field of study?
* make friends with someone you've read for decades?
I would love to experience all of these things and more, but it would take huge amounts of dedication, risk, and luck to get close to a full list. By curing death, this gets way more achievable and accessible to everyone.
One of my favorite book quotes:
> “Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.” - Aldous Huxley
The practical problem is resource scarcity. We're already destroying our only planet with 7 billion people living only 72 years on average. If we manage to get through the problems we've already created, it'll be a miracle, and it is safe to say that without a lot of other problems besides longevity being solved, there is zero chance that a significantly larger population would make it.
And those problems have to be solved first, we couldn't just say "well, let's multiply the population, then figure out what to do about it later".
I'm also very skeptical that, given an indefinitely extended lifespan, people would suddenly do all of those nice-sounding things you list. More likely they'd just do the exact same things they do now, for longer.
It sort of reminds me of the philosophy around the early internet: imagine if people could get access to all information and communicate with anyone, anywhere. Imagine how smart we'll become, how civilized! That's what we thought would happen, but look at what we actually did: yell at each other and watch porn. My guess is that if we lived forever, we wouldn't suddenly become interesting, enlightened people if we weren't already.
> We're already destroying our only planet with 7 billion people living only 72 years on average.
Because we only live a short while, we don't take a long view and there's a soft cap on society's accumulated wisdom. (In a smaller scale it's like companies losing "institutional knowledge" when employees leave.) People would act differently if they knew they'd be around for 700y instead of 70.
> That's what we thought would happen [with the Internet], but look at what we actually did
You're not seriously suggesting humanity is better without the Internet…
> You're not seriously suggesting humanity is better without the Internet…
I cannot speak for karaterobot, but that seems to be an unwarranted inference from the post you are replying to, which merely points out that the internet did not lead to the more cooperative and altruistic world that some idealists predicted.
You posit that humanity would step up to the challenges of a ten-fold increase in longevity, but I haven't seen what I would regard as persuasive evidence for that view. The fact that the internet has been a net benefit (a view I accept) is not that evidence, IMHO.
The argument by analogy, as I understood it, was the following.
Internet idealism : Internet negatives¹ :: longevity idealism : longevity negatives²
¹flaming & porn ²scarcity & overpopulation
In the context of a discussion about whether or not to undertake a societal change (widespread longevity), bringing up an example of a prior societal change (The Internet) where the result didn't live up to the ideal is more likely than not an argument against making the change in favor of maintaining the status quo (killing statistical 72 year-olds).
Statistical 72 year-olds? What are they? And the status quo is that they are killed? You appear to be inventing some bizarre argument that has not even been mentioned up to now.
The practical problem is resource scarcity. We're already destroying our only planet with 7 billion people living only 72 years on average. If we manage to get through the problems we've already created, it'll be a miracle, and it is safe to say that without a lot of other problems besides longevity being solved, there is zero chance that a significantly larger population would make it.
The problem is not resource scarcity, it's pollution. For example, Americans pollute far more than Indian, despite having a smaller population.
It’s not about a single person - aka mastering tennis.
How are we as a species suppose to take to the stars if our lifespan is relatively short?
I would wager that this is another step in becoming an interstellar race. Aka the challenge is not just about bending space-time.
What if Einstein lived to 500 or was still alive?
Anyway, I think people need to step way back on the true necessity of solving aging. At a minimum it’s about ensuring we have a high quality of life while living out our final days and long term it’s about the human species viability as an interstellar civilization.
> What if Einstein lived to 500 or was still alive?
The flipside would be, what if Aristotle or Ptolemy lived to 2500 and were still alive? Would we still be arguing if everything revolves around Earth, or if fire, earth, water and air constitute everything?
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
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if you want to improve the net intellectual progress of humanity solving inequality will do a lot more than solving aging.
well, if current trends are any indication, anti-aging research will tend to disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and if anything increase the percentage of resources that flow upwards. the potential einsteins labouring in a mine or field are even less likely to be helped if they are not made a systemic priority.
I've always been a fan of this story and on the side of "it's logical to spend all human effort curing death" but lately I've just developed hesitations around the argument for that.
Mainly stemming from all of the societal issues we have that ultimately are based on human nature and our tribal instincts. Living longer isn't going to make things like universal basic income happen or accelerate us into some post-scarcity economy.
Humans already behave poorly enough when provided a knowingly limited lifespan, I can't see people improving provided an unlimited natural lifespan. We're not wired for it.
These questions were explored somewhat in the Scythe trilogy[0]. Natural death was conquered so some people are tasked with going around and enforcing unnatural death. I enjoyed reading it and thinking over some of the implications.
> > “Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.” - Aldous Huxley
This is what AGI will go. It will know everything, and at an above best-human level at that.
1. Maybe, but I’m sure there’s more that I want to do in life than what I listed out in about 10 minutes
2. My point isn’t that they should experience those things, it’s that there’s so much to experience.
3. What’s the point of anything?
4. When I think of the relationships in my life that went too long or too short, the ones that went on for too long I don’t feel too bad about. The ones that went too short are a completely different class - I feel far more regret and sadness.
Curing death would have obvious downsides. Most people would not be able to procreate - the world would overcrowd. The really bad people of history could find themselves in permanent long-lasting power (think Putin for a modern example). I think you can come up with 100 reasons why curing death would be bad. As Steve Jobs said, death is life's greatest invention.
Yeah, there are downsides to everything, the question is whether pros > cons.
Imagine tomorrow, some mystical cosmic event made it impossible for people to die of natural causes. Would you institute a law that once someone made it to 100 years old, they should be executed? This would prevent most of the downsides curing death would spring.
I think the answer to this is obviously no, that would be completely foolish, if not immoral. But when we start with the status quo of death existing, puzzlingly, most people think death is a good thing.
Honestly I think if we got to a point where death were eliminated, we would also be able to eliminate personological "badness", or at least it wouldn't be too far behind.
If it weren't, it would certainly become a focus, and probably within reach.
>Most people would not be able to procreate - the world would overcrowd.
This isn't quite true. Suppose no one dies. Starting from a population of 10 billion, suppose every person can have one child.
The population after one iteration is 15 billion. If those 5 billion then each have one child, the next iteration's population is 17.5 billion. This converges to 2x the original population. In fact, so long as not everyone has 2 kids, it will converge to a finite value.
(Edit: also, this problem takes places on the timescale of HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of years. The year 2500 is not going to look like today.)
>The really bad people of history could find themselves in permanent long-lasting power (think Putin for a modern example).
In many cases, dictatorships do not end with the dictator's old age. This is true both in the sense that they sometimes die early, and in the sense that they're prone to dynasties. The system of a dictatorship already has agelessness, just not indestructibility.
>I think you can come up with 100 reasons why curing death would be bad.
You can indeed do that, but it's worth keeping the screaming torture of the default in perspective. It's really hard to do worse than aging. I wouldn't want to see my parents wither, suffer, and die. I don't want to die knowing my children would wither, suffer, and die. I don't want you to wither, suffer, and die. I don't want people to have to grieve the loss of their loved ones.
We can just... get rid of the ultrabadness, and have more of the good things. There are new problems that would have to be addressed, but they are addressable! Sometimes, things just aren't that complicated.
The really bad people of history could find themselves in permanent long-lasting power (think Putin for a modern example). I think you can come up with 100 reasons why curing death would be bad. As Steve Jobs said, death is life's greatest invention.
On the contrary, Putin showed how dictatorships are vulnerable to defeat, if not collapse.
It seems more like we're justifying death rather than solving challenges.
Hilarious to hear that we are justifying something that naturally occurs, but let's indulge the train of thought--
The elimination of death would necessitate that each individual would consume indefinitely, whereas the planet has finite resources. So, at some point, children must stop being born, and governments must either enforce infertility or make having sex illegal.
Animals viciously murdering each other for food is also natural, that doesn’t mean it’s preferable.
I would imagine if death were cured, a very small percentage of people would actually want to live forever. I imagine most people would want to live between 1x and say, 5x an average lifespan.
Do you think about where you will go to the restroom 20 years into the future? No. Same thing with lifespan questions. You'll presumably die in some sort of accident.
Why is it not preferable for animals to viciously murder each other for food? There's nothing wrong with it. It's quite a beautiful thing once you understand the natural world.
It's a bad analogy. Ironically, this story flips the assymetry of death on its head. It is always easier to destroy than to create something durable.
It's not a coincidence that when the story flips the difficulty on its head such that the job was killing (bringing death) to a dragon, intuitions flipped too.
Every programmer knows that getting his program to crash is always an easier job than to keep it running indefinitely. Every probablistic bug eventually will happen on long enough timescales, and defeating death isn't defeating a single bug, it's defeating all of them. It isn't a single dragon but infinite bugs.
I preferred Blade runner take on it: when they tell the replicant that there was no built in destruction mechanism, they built him as best as they could, and that was simply it.
The story isn't about whether or not curing aging is difficult, it's about whether it's desirable. It turns the real-life scenario on its head to prompt reexamination of the desirability of the undertaking.
I'm not very impressed by the article. I'm sympathetic to the idea behind it, but the analogy is misleading and intended to make an emotional appeal.
The Dragon is an external malevolent force. The Dragon wants to eat more just because. People often die due to the natural evolution of their own bodies or choices other people make, and death is impersonal (Prachett books aside). Replacing Death with Dragon is a rhetorical device to allow hate to colour our judgement, and make the issue simpler than it is (you can't 'kill' death. Even a perfect medical science will still have the problem that some people may want to kill other people).
The effects and choices here are also a tiny bit more complicated. We could spend a lot more on health after all. Presumably the author isn't fine with redirecting 100% of the budget to the health sector, and I don't think he judges each allocation decision by 'this could have gone to health!'. How about merely winding down all AI research and redirecting the funds to hospitals? So there must be some limiting principles.
By the same token, I doubt anyone (even a 'deathist') thinks 'We should have a lower average lifespan'. So it's just an allocation decision, and the criteria are probably boring and political.
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This does leaves us with the 'sexy' issue, that of mortality itself. It's actually not much of an issue in practice? Barring absurdly extreme scenarios*, even people who favour mortality won't kill anyone who refuses to die, or prevent Bostrom et. all from trying. Given the wealthy are just as subject to the 'Dragon' as the rest of us, I'm sure they'll have no shortage of funds. If they succeed, society will 'suffer' the consequences, no matter what theoretical discussion may think.
* e.g. a life extension tech based on parasitism. Or an uploading tech that warps the subject to the point we can't say they have anything nearing a morality allowing them to participate in society.
I think it is a mercy that corrupt despots die of old age. Every tyrant with an iron grip on their society eventually succumbs to the ‘dragon,’ offering a chance for reform and renewal.
I thought about pointing out that Bostrom doesn't actually consider the strongest arguments of the other side. But I decided it doesn't matter practically.
For example, we can't stop despots from investing in longevity research. This is probably better then them investing in more repression or a bigger army, so we won't stop it even if we could.
Without death and scarcity we could never have evolved. That fierce and terrible dragon is mother to us all. Before killing mom we should figure out what she's good for. Like hugely accelerating biological adaptation. Do you think that we're all grown up now and only require cultural adaptation going forward?
As terrible as death is, as much as I too miss Grandma, it is an evil necessary to fend off the higher order of evil, the greater dragon, extinction.
> Without death and scarcity we could never have evolved.
Without disease, we would have never evolved an immune system. Therefore we shouldn't try to cure disease.
I think the flaw is very clear in this analogy: human ingenuity and science is better than evolution by natural selection in pretty much every way. Now that we've evolved science, we no longer need evolution by natural selection.
The story anthropomorphizes death as a dragon (dracomorphizes?). I'm pointing out that it is doing so to an essential mechanism of biological evolution. That gives evolution a moral valence, per the story.
In general, it should be clear that to cut a species off from a primary source of biological evolution would not usually be beneficial to that species' survival prospects. Maybe that is no longer true of Homo sapiens, but I doubt it.
We are already cut of from general evolution as long as we have a society that relies mostly on factors externally to genetics. Those factors are so much more rapid and impactful than the slow evolution by procreation and death statistical processes that it makes little sense to even consider them.
Destroying death doesn't cut off evolution, since humans are able to reproduce, which is our primary source of variation. Moreover, the story is about aging, not death. Although the ultimate outcome of aging is death.
How is death by dragon an analogy to death in general? While I understand the general concept, the metaphor is way too forced -- you can't just toggle something in your universe and keep everything the same.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang for instance is a great short story that deals with mortality more effectively, since the characters are not exactly human and the concept can be explored better.
Making this pivot is not so easy as Bostrom's fable tacitly suggests. From his publishing history, over the 17 years since its publication, it does not seem he has personally prioritized this goal to the extent that he chides the population of his story for not so doing.
If it turns out to be more dystopian than the reality of watching our loved ones fade and disappear while we ourselves grow weak and fade, we can always bring death back.
> If it turns out to be more dystopian than the reality of watching our loved ones fade and disappear while we ourselves grow weak and fade, we can always bring death back.
Usually the dystopian aspects of immortality revolve around power imbalance/inequality; in such scenarios its not obvious that death can be brought back
Haitian Revolution, unambiguously. Arguably, depending on if you count feudalism as "basically slavery" by modern standards, also the Russian and French revolutions.
Saying that's fine, let alone for that reason, is so fundamentally at odds with every aspect of my experience of reality you might as well have said សូម សម្លាប់ ពួក គេ ទាំង អស់ ព្រះ នឹង ទទួល ស្គាល់ ប្រជារាស្ត្រ របស់ ព្រះអង្គ.
We don’t really know that though, do we? Imagine how much more people would worry about climate change if they were going to be here to experience the wrath of it. The wrath of running out of oil, the wrath of the oceans and air polluted. Old people know it is real and coming for their descendants, they just don’t care because they won’t be here. Most humans care about things that will directly affect them only.
> but, by constitutional law, nobody, not even the king himself, could put off their turn indefinitely.
I'm not sure that any real-life moral imperatives could be based on made-up story about obviously utopian society.
For me, immortality does not sound as a good idea even as a thought experiment. We already have problems with wealth and power imbalance. The invention of immortality would just deepen these problems exponentially.
So solve the problems of wealth and inequality too. I fail to see why these must be intrinsically linked. If anything, the compounding effect of immortality on wealth inequality would almost certainly lead by itself lead to a structural revolution.
There is so much in the world to experience - what does it feel like to:
* master tennis?
* hitchhike through snowy Hokkaido?
* craft an oak desk with just your hands?
* fall so deeply in love you feel whole?
* direct a movie with just your dreams?
* completely understand the ins and outs of a field of study?
* make friends with someone you've read for decades?
I would love to experience all of these things and more, but it would take huge amounts of dedication, risk, and luck to get close to a full list. By curing death, this gets way more achievable and accessible to everyone.
One of my favorite book quotes:
> “Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.” - Aldous Huxley