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 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.