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 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?)