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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Never thought I would ask something like this, but here goes:

What's Y Combinator's stance on the death requirement? Nectome was at demo day last month and Sam Altman is (or was) on the waiting list.

Following the example of electric-vehicle maker Tesla, it is sizing up demand by inviting prospective customers to join a waiting list for a deposit of $10,000, fully refundable if you change your mind.

So far, 25 people have done so. One of them is Sam Altman, a 32-year-old investor who is one of the creators of the Y Combinator program.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610456/a-startup-is-pitch...

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First and foremost cryogenics has a PR problem. It is somehow more popular to say that you're glad people are dying by the billions than to align yourself with the people trying to make an earnest effort to stop it (now imagine how fast I would be banned for the same position around genocide).

I'm not sure whether this will just further the kneejerk anti-cryogenics sentiment or if it will seem to more normalise normal post-death cryogenics, but it does seem a rather dangerous play. I don't want cryogenics to find itself tangled up in crazy legal issues.

At an object level I'm not all that concerned with the ethics of people taking this bet, given the science is pretty sound. It does not make sense to allow people to take medical treatment that have a significant chance of serious harm for the chance of a few years longer health if it pans out, but then ban a bet as safe as cryogenics.

Can you imagine what this planet would be like if people didn't die? How much more crowded we'd be? How much more of a strain we'd be placing on the earth's resources?

Can you imagine a better incentive for off-planet migration and terra-forming?

Why is incentivizing that a priority? If it is something that needs to happen, then it will need to happen regardless of the incentives.

Well in an argument between "everyone should die by 150 years" and "lets have the happy problem of people not dying of old age" I'm in the latter camp. Similarly having all of your species susceptible to any out of context problem that destroys a planet... yeah planetary existential risks are low probability with game ending penalty I'd like to see mitigated.

Sure, but if you put half of humanity on Mars, you'd clearly be increasing our risk, as the difficulty of surviving on Mars is nearly insurmountable. If you want people on other planets, they need to be self-sustaining. And if we can't even be self-sustaining on Earth, why would we be elsewhere?

We're a very very long way away from being able to survive if Earth fails. It is foolish to bet on any kind of interplanetary survival strategy at this point. Getting humans to other worlds is by far the easiest part of that equation.

I wouldn't put half of humanity anywhere right now. You just need enough to keep a population (with immigration) after they face a horrific mortality rate as they figure out how to lower the risk; hopefully highly trained and well equipped as sparse mitigation, but exploration and pioneering are hungry gods that will be fed human sacrifices. I'm personally more partial to an O'Neill cylinder or a Lunar colony than Mars and the lunar colony will probably come first, Mars is a big step backwards in delta-v, but yes the mass required to get that going is currently prohibitively expensive, and the biosciences are going to be really tricky.

Are you suggesting we not save lives so that we can avoid some unrealized fear of overcrowding?

Suppose humanity attains indefinite life spans in the near future. Would you then advocate murder in order to save space?

Should we outlaw antibiotics because they save lives, and those lives take up resources?

I find this argument both unimaginative (improving technology changes the nature of our challenges) and repulsive (it's advocating murder through inaction).

Are you seriously suggesting that anyone who does not want to preserve all humans indefinitely is a murderer?

"Are you suggesting we not save lives so that we can avoid some unrealized fear of overcrowding?"

No, and putting words in my mouth like that is extremely uncivil. We're talking about people who have already died.

"I find this argument both unimaginative (improving technology changes the nature of our challenges) and repulsive (it's advocating murder through inaction)."

And I find your tone repulsive and uncivil, as you're making extreme assumptions about my positions.

Not to mention, you're only advocating that we save the rich. I don't see you setting up a GoFundMe to preserve homeless people.

> How much more of a strain we'd be placing on the earth's resources?

If the immortality is based on "brain uploading", maybe just an extra EC2 instance per family of four.

There will be challenges and struggles and costs to be paid to significantly reduce death, but my personal philosophy is that involuntary death is bad and should be fought, and that the costs of increased crowding are worth paying to cut down on the deaths of billions.

The general principle, to me, is that whatever the "ideal" rate of death is, for any given set of values and preferences, it would be an astonishing coincidence if it coincidentally happened to be exactly the current rate today.

If we woke up tomorrow to a world where humans didn't suffer degenerative aging and the vast majority of fatal illness (cancer) were treatable, would you start by advocating for mass executions, or would you advocate for increased birth control, renewable energy, reduced resource consumption rates, finding ways to make productive use of otherwise-uninhabited areas of earth, space travel, etc. before you started advocating for murdering billions of humans?

"would you start by advocating for mass executions"

The very idea that this would cross your mind after reading my comment shows that you are not interested in having any kind of serious discussion about this topic.

Re-reading your comment, I did overreact, and assumed that you were implying a position that you didn't actually assert. I'm sorry for assuming that you were advocating for a pro-death position.

If your comment wasn't intended to advocate for pro-death policies, I'm very confused about what you were trying to communicate here.

My reading of your comment is that you first asked the reader if they can imagine what the planet would be like if nobody died, then implied through what appears to be rhetorical questions that it would be much more crowded and much more of a strain on the earth's resources.

There's a lot of diversity in the use of English, so we may have experience with different rhetorical traditions, but my experience is that rhetorical structures like that are pretty exclusively intended to express condemnation of the subject and anyone who would support it, implying that they're ignoring the disastrous consequences of their policy.

The assumptions I inferred from your questions, stated directly, are something like the following. If you're uninterested in engaging with me after my earlier reply, I understand, but if not I'm curious which of these you disagree with.

1) If life-extension technology manages to dramatically reduce nonconsensual death, we will have a population explosion on Earth.

2) If we have a population explosion on Earth, quality of life for most humans will drop significantly.

3) If we have a population explosion on Earth, consumption of nonrenewable resources will increase dramatically, leading to resource shortages dangerous to human civilization.

4) In order to avoid a population explosion, we should stop work on life-extension technology.

5) It is better for the majority of currently-living humans to die after less than 100 years of life than for Earth civilization to undergo a population explosion.

By my best attempts at moral reasoning, withholding life-saving medical technology is morally equivalent to murder, and although I've fortunately never been in a situation to make such a decision, I hope that I can be the kind of person who would never decide for people to die through inaction that I wouldn't be theoretically willing to kill myself for the same benefits.

I hope that's given you enough perspective on my position that it doesn't seem completely hostile to serious discussion.

[edited for formatting]

For a fascinating and realistic exploration of what that might look like, I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. In the series, a longevity treatment is developed that significantly extends lives. Beyond the strain on resources, there are the issues of older generations delaying progress by not relinquishing power (much like the current octogenarian U.S. congress) and other issues.

I would also recommend The Postmortal, by Drew Magary. It explores a world where the cure for aging is found, so no one has to die through natural means anymore.

there's nothing sound about the 'science of cryogenics' in fact there barely is such science at all if we're talking about the central sales pitch, which is actually bringing you back to life again in one form or another. Freezing you admittedly is straight-forward enough

The brain upload thing is a complete fantasy and science fiction, but even the traditional promise of somehow resurrecting you has never been proven with the exception of a 30-year-old tardigrade two years ago if I remember correctly.

I think there are a few explanations:

(1) The idea that the ultra-rich may be able to survive into the future cryogenically while 90+% of the rest of the world dies is morally abhorrent.

(2) Fearing death so much is viewed as cowardly.

(3) This is a bit more abstract, but the implicit assumption in cryogenics that death is a universal bad is troubling. Thousands of years of human thinking have determined that the prospect of death is an integral part of the human experience and may be the thing that provides life meaning. I don't know about anyone else, but the idea that the coming natural death of me and probably everyone else in this thread is on par with a genocide is upsetting (and I personally choose not to believe it). From Epictetus: "Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates." [0]

[0] http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

> Thousands of years of human thinking have determined that the prospect of death is an integral part of the human experience and may be the thing that provides life meaning. I don't know about anyone else, but the idea that the coming natural death of me and probably everyone else in this thread is on par with a genocide is upsetting

To me, this sounds like the naturalistic fallacy. Is there a better argument than this one?

How about a utilitarian one: it's most likely that everyone alive right now is going to die, so from a quality-of-life perspective most people should try to accept their death.

(1) You could have said the same thing about cell phones, cars or any other technology which started out expensive before it scaled to the point where most people could afford it.

(2) If you fear death to much, you might not fight to the death in a war. Not everything in our culture makes sense in the modern world.

(3) https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

(1) Yes, but from a utilitarian perspective cell phones, cars, and any other technology offered finite utility over their alternatives, whereas immortality offers infinite utility over the alternative of death.

(2) ? unsure about what you're saying here.

(3) Okay yeah, sure, I've read that before. I don't think he offers a (currently) practical alternative to "resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and personal relationships." The harsh reality is that we'll probably die--why would I choose to conceptualize this as a violent death from a dragon? That'd surely lead to despair in my last years.

(1) Are you saying that immortality is bad because it's infinitely good? That seems like an argument for bringing immortality to everyone as soon as possible.

(2) I'm saying that one of the reasons why death is viewed as cowardly is because that belief is promoted by generals in order to make their soldiers more willing to die in battle. If that's where the idea comes from, then we should reject it, because willingness to die in battle is no longer a good thing.

Yes, I’m saying that because immortality is infinitely good, the inequality of some people (super-rich) getting it while others (the poor) don’t is (infinitely?) more unnacceptable than any wealth inequality there has been in the past.

Epictetus was friggin insane though. Taking life advice from him is pretty awful. I doubt his death advice is any better.

>Epictetus was friggin insane though.

What do you mean?

He says don't hope for anything, because you can't control that. Just decide you're happy as-is, because all you can control is your own mind.

A) Not hoping for anything is a great way to stay in shit situations, and B) Yeah, no, you can't actually control your own mind that well.

If it's not possible without induced death then is the concern really the "death requirement" or whether it makes sense for consumers to gamble $10k+ that in a future you a) will not die suddenly, b) your brain will not have deteriorated significantly, c) you are fully capable of making a decision to die, d) the company is still around, and e) the science somehow works out to allow "brain uploading"?

Then yes I say there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's their money and their body.

Schopenhauer has the very best treatise on the morality/philosophy of each persons right to suicide: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/pessimi...

First off, again we are currently conducting research and are not preserving people.

Our early supporters have shown their support for Nectome’s research through fully refundable deposits, and we hope that they will live long, healthy lives, creating the very memories that they hope can one day be preserved.

> Sam Altman, a 32-year-old investor who is one of the creators of the Y Combinator program.

Sam Altman co-created Y Combinator when he was 20?

He most definitely did not found YC but he is indeed 32.

No, the article is incorrect. He wasn't a creator; he was in an early batch (the first I believe), and then became president some time after his company was acquired.

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