I updated the section about unborn people and I am going to read and add more links on the topic. Currently it is:
2) Life extension will take resources and fewer new people will be born, thus unborn people will lose the opportunity to be alive. It is not easy to measure value of unborn people without some ethical axioms. If this value is very high, we may try to increase population as much as possible, which seems absurd as in would decrease the quality of life.
While life extension seems to mean fewer new people born each century, the total number of new people is still infinitely large in the situation of constant space exploration (Bostrom, 2003b). Also, fewer newborn people in the 21 cnetury could be compensated by much more people which will be born in the next centuries in the much better world with higher quality of medicine.
If the explorable universe is infinite, the total number of newborn people will not change, but these people will move to later epochs, where they will live even better lives. Tipler (Tipler, 1997) suggested that at the end all possible people will be created by enormous superintelligence in Omega point, and thus all possible people will get chance to be alive. However, we can’t count on such remote events.
But we could compare potential 21th and 22th centuries from our model. In 21th century, fewer people will be born because of life extension, but after superintelligent AI or other power technology will appear, supposedly at 2100, much more new people could live on Earth on much better conditions.
Also, it is not obvious that life extension will affect reproduction negatively because of the “grandmother effect”: the decision about reproduction people typically take in early life, but if they have available grandparents which could help them with babysitting this would increase the willingness to have children as also less strain economy outside the family
I updated the section about unborn people and I am going to read and add more links on the topic. Currently it is:
2) Life extension will take resources and fewer new people will be born, thus unborn people will lose the opportunity to be alive. It is not easy to measure value of unborn people without some ethical axioms. If this value is very high, we may try to increase population as much as possible, which seems absurd as in would decrease the quality of life.
While life extension seems to mean fewer new people born each century, the total number of new people is still infinitely large in the situation of constant space exploration (Bostrom, 2003b). Also, fewer newborn people in the 21 cnetury could be compensated by much more people which will be born in the next centuries in the much better world with higher quality of medicine.
If the explorable universe is infinite, the total number of newborn people will not change, but these people will move to later epochs, where they will live even better lives. Tipler (Tipler, 1997) suggested that at the end all possible people will be created by enormous superintelligence in Omega point, and thus all possible people will get chance to be alive. However, we can’t count on such remote events.
But we could compare potential 21th and 22th centuries from our model. In 21th century, fewer people will be born because of life extension, but after superintelligent AI or other power technology will appear, supposedly at 2100, much more new people could live on Earth on much better conditions.
Also, it is not obvious that life extension will affect reproduction negatively because of the “grandmother effect”: the decision about reproduction people typically take in early life, but if they have available grandparents which could help them with babysitting this would increase the willingness to have children as also less strain economy outside the family