I agree that probably you’d be fine starting today, and it’s a much safer bet than starting 1,000 years ago, but is it a safer bet than waiting say another 200 years?
I’d be concerned about dictators inciting violence against precisely the people they most perceive as threats. e.g. I don’t know the history of the Cultural Revolution well, but my impression is that something like this happened there.
The thing that’s hard to internalize (at least I think) is that by waiting 200 years to start anti-aging efforts you are condemning billions of people to an early death with a lifespan of ~80 years.
You’d have to convince me that waiting 200 years would reduce the risk of totalitarian lock-in so much that it offsets billions of lives that would be guaranteed to “prematurely end”.
Totalitarian lock-in is scary to think about and billions of people’s lives ending prematurely is just text on a screen. I would assume that the human brain can easily simulate the everyday horror of a total totalitarian world. But it’s impossible for your brain to digest even 100,000,000 premature deaths, forget billions and billions.
I certainly feel like it’s a very stakesy decision! This is somewhere where a longtermist perspective might be more hesitant to take risks that jeopardize the entire future to save billions alive today.
I also note that your argument applies to past cases too. I’m curious in what year you guess it would first have been good to grant people immortality?
(As mentioned in the opening post, I’m quite confused about what’s good here.)
I agree, it feels like a stakesy decision! And I’m pretty aligned with longtermist thinking, I just think that “entire future at risk due to totalitarianism lock-in due to removing death from aging” seems really unlikely to me. But I haven’t really thought about it too much so I guess I’m really uncertain here as we all seem to be.
“what year you guess it would first have been good to grant people immortality?”
I kind of reject the question due to ‘immortality’ as that isn’t the decision we’re currently faced with. (unless you’re only interested in this specific hypothetical world). The decision we’re faced with is do we speed up anti-aging efforts to reduce age-related death and suffering? You can still kill (or incapacitate) people that don’t age, that’s my whole point of the great minds vs. dictators.
But to consider the risks in the past vs today:
Before the internet and modern society/technology/economy it was much much harder for great minds to coordinate against evils in a global sense (thinking of the Cultural Revolution as you mentioned). So my “great-minds counter dictators” theory doesn’t hold up well in the past but I think it does in modern times.
The population 200 years ago was 1⁄8 what is today and growing much slower so the premature deaths you would have prevented per year with anti-aging would have been much less than today so you get less benefit.
The general population’s sense of morals and demand for democracy is improving so I think the tolerance for evil/totalitarianism is dropping fairly quickly.
So you’d have to come up with an equation with at least the following: - How many premature deaths you’d save with anti-aging - How likely and in what numbers will people, in general, oppose totalitarianism - If there was opposition, how easily could the global good coordinate to fight totalitarianism - If there was coordinated opposition would their numbers/resources outweigh the numbers/resources of totalitarianism - If the coordinated opposition was to fail, how long would this totalitarian society last (could it last forever and totally consume the future or is it unstable?)
I don’t buy the asymmetry of your scope argument. It feels very possible that totalitarian lock-in could have billions of lives at stake too, and cause a similar quantity of premature deaths.
Of course, it would, but if you’re reducing the risk of totalitarian lock-in from 0.4% to 0.39% (obviously made up numbers) by waiting 200 years I would think that’s a mistake that costs billions of lives.
I think Matt’s on the right track here. Treating “immortal dictators” as a separate scenario from “billions of lives lost to an immortal dictator” smacks of double-counting.
Really, we’re asking if immortality will tend to save or lose lives on net, or to improve or worsen QoL on net.
We can then compare the possible causes of lives lost/worsened vs gained/bettered: immortal dictators, or perhaps immortal saints; saved lives from life extension; lives less tainted by fear of death and mourning; lives more free to pursue many paths; alignment of individual self-interest with the outcome of the long-term future; the persistent challenge of hyperbolic discounting; the question of how to provide child rearing experiences in a crowded world with a death rate close to zero; the possible need to colonize the stars to make more room for an immortal civilization; the attendant strife that such a diaspora may experience.
When I just make a list of stuff in this manner, no individual item jumps out at me as particularly salient, but the collection seems to point in the direction of immortality being good when confined to Earth, and then being submerged into the larger question of whether a very large and interplanetary human presence would be good.
I think that this argument sort of favors a more near-term reach for immortality. The smaller and more geographically concentrated the human population is by the time it’s immortal, the better able it is to coordinate and plan for interplanetary growth. If humanity spreads to the stars, then coordination ability declines. If immortality is bad in conjunction with interplanetary civilization, the horse is out of the barn.
I agree that probably you’d be fine starting today, and it’s a much safer bet than starting 1,000 years ago, but is it a safer bet than waiting say another 200 years?
I’d be concerned about dictators inciting violence against precisely the people they most perceive as threats. e.g. I don’t know the history of the Cultural Revolution well, but my impression is that something like this happened there.
The thing that’s hard to internalize (at least I think) is that by waiting 200 years to start anti-aging efforts you are condemning billions of people to an early death with a lifespan of ~80 years.
You’d have to convince me that waiting 200 years would reduce the risk of totalitarian lock-in so much that it offsets billions of lives that would be guaranteed to “prematurely end”.
Totalitarian lock-in is scary to think about and billions of people’s lives ending prematurely is just text on a screen. I would assume that the human brain can easily simulate the everyday horror of a total totalitarian world. But it’s impossible for your brain to digest even 100,000,000 premature deaths, forget billions and billions.
I certainly feel like it’s a very stakesy decision! This is somewhere where a longtermist perspective might be more hesitant to take risks that jeopardize the entire future to save billions alive today.
I also note that your argument applies to past cases too. I’m curious in what year you guess it would first have been good to grant people immortality?
(As mentioned in the opening post, I’m quite confused about what’s good here.)
I agree, it feels like a stakesy decision! And I’m pretty aligned with longtermist thinking, I just think that “entire future at risk due to totalitarianism lock-in due to removing death from aging” seems really unlikely to me. But I haven’t really thought about it too much so I guess I’m really uncertain here as we all seem to be.
I kind of reject the question due to ‘immortality’ as that isn’t the decision we’re currently faced with. (unless you’re only interested in this specific hypothetical world). The decision we’re faced with is do we speed up anti-aging efforts to reduce age-related death and suffering? You can still kill (or incapacitate) people that don’t age, that’s my whole point of the great minds vs. dictators.
But to consider the risks in the past vs today:
Before the internet and modern society/technology/economy it was much much harder for great minds to coordinate against evils in a global sense (thinking of the Cultural Revolution as you mentioned). So my “great-minds counter dictators” theory doesn’t hold up well in the past but I think it does in modern times.
The population 200 years ago was 1⁄8 what is today and growing much slower so the premature deaths you would have prevented per year with anti-aging would have been much less than today so you get less benefit.
The general population’s sense of morals and demand for democracy is improving so I think the tolerance for evil/totalitarianism is dropping fairly quickly.
So you’d have to come up with an equation with at least the following:
- How many premature deaths you’d save with anti-aging
- How likely and in what numbers will people, in general, oppose totalitarianism
- If there was opposition, how easily could the global good coordinate to fight totalitarianism
- If there was coordinated opposition would their numbers/resources outweigh the numbers/resources of totalitarianism
- If the coordinated opposition was to fail, how long would this totalitarian society last (could it last forever and totally consume the future or is it unstable?)
I don’t buy the asymmetry of your scope argument. It feels very possible that totalitarian lock-in could have billions of lives at stake too, and cause a similar quantity of premature deaths.
Of course, it would, but if you’re reducing the risk of totalitarian lock-in from 0.4% to 0.39% (obviously made up numbers) by waiting 200 years I would think that’s a mistake that costs billions of lives.
I think Matt’s on the right track here. Treating “immortal dictators” as a separate scenario from “billions of lives lost to an immortal dictator” smacks of double-counting.
Really, we’re asking if immortality will tend to save or lose lives on net, or to improve or worsen QoL on net.
We can then compare the possible causes of lives lost/worsened vs gained/bettered: immortal dictators, or perhaps immortal saints; saved lives from life extension; lives less tainted by fear of death and mourning; lives more free to pursue many paths; alignment of individual self-interest with the outcome of the long-term future; the persistent challenge of hyperbolic discounting; the question of how to provide child rearing experiences in a crowded world with a death rate close to zero; the possible need to colonize the stars to make more room for an immortal civilization; the attendant strife that such a diaspora may experience.
When I just make a list of stuff in this manner, no individual item jumps out at me as particularly salient, but the collection seems to point in the direction of immortality being good when confined to Earth, and then being submerged into the larger question of whether a very large and interplanetary human presence would be good.
I think that this argument sort of favors a more near-term reach for immortality. The smaller and more geographically concentrated the human population is by the time it’s immortal, the better able it is to coordinate and plan for interplanetary growth. If humanity spreads to the stars, then coordination ability declines. If immortality is bad in conjunction with interplanetary civilization, the horse is out of the barn.