Defeating death is a great plot idea for a dystopian novel, but in reality it's the ultimate selfish pursuit.
Luckily death is really hard to defeat. Dying is always on the menu.
Also, there is something about compassion and love that we do not understand that are physiologically benefit to the person. I do believe we live in a world where niceness eventually prevails, and if someone is able to live a healthy long age, they likely have embraced death wholeheartedly, and are good and kind, (esp as they age and learn from their mistakes instead of getting stuck in behavioural patterns).
And so long existential time comes and goes at the whim of itself. Technology is never the cause, but merely an enabler.
More like a recipe for an omnipresent gerontocracy, locked into the culture and values of a millennium ago, but wielding immense wealth and power ruling over everything. Sounds like a conservative's wet dream.
Sounds like the thinking of a Tier 0 civilization in regards to the ruling class of a Tier 2 civilization (if one day we can prove that such civilizations exist
The very framing of dividing "civilizations" into "tiers" where one is clearly superior to the other shows some implicit assumptions that not everyone might share, as well as the idea that there will be or should be a "ruling class". If people reject this, we do not get to thinly veil "just accept your technological superior you luddite" like some 1920s robber baron. That's been done, and they got pushed back, and we have no obligation to enable the fabulous wealth and power of some elite to last forever without provable commitments that this will benefit all of us
A lot of things are going to be different if longevity tech is successful.
There will always be a "ruling class" the same way that there will always be dependency hierarchy in the cost structure of things (eg from compiler design to the way a solar system works).
> ... and we have no obligation to enable the fabulous wealth and power of some elite ...
Indeed. But let's be pragmatic for a second. What can an individual (or a collective of people) do to not enable (ie disable) existing wealth and power (ie the status quo)? Unfortunately the answer is by gaining wealth and power themselves. (eg in the cultural-economic form or socio-politically or militarily, etc). To change the dynamics of the system. Anything else is just ignoring reality and encouraging hypernormalization [1]. The world is in a huge mess now because many highly capable people chose not to make the hard decisions. (eg with the current RU & China situations)
... and the world will only become a better place (eg in the sense of reducing suffering, and for the pursuit of universal human & animal rights, etc) when hard decisions are made and executed to bring forth a paradigm shift (that which can be measured game-theoretically e.g. compare modern day France to 18th century France)
> ... without provable commitments that this will benefit all of us
Proof is useful but it is not enough in the same way the map is useful but it is not the territory.
In some sense I've just elaborated your points above but from the angle that the world is going to collapse soon if we don't reach Tier 1 as a cilivisation fast enough.
Second, I would like to point out some flaws I see in your argumentations:
On ruling class/"dependency hierarchy":no, there does not always need to be one. For a semantic example, it is perfectly possible to have no "dependency" in software systems (except the one to the underlying system, but this is not a power relationship). Closer to the subject, it is possible to structure systems such that there is no power concentration, "soft power" is effectively diffused and true consent (not necessarily concensus, just consent) is required to get anything done. Such systems still enable decision making to be delegated, but when push comes to shove, power is distributed and recalled easily. We see it in associations, we see it in anarchist social experiments, we see it in well designed teams and companies where employees have real leverage - such systems are often not as scalable yet, but they do generally perform better in terms of welfare and resilient - see the german company-union relationships which tend to be more resilient to economic downturns for example and generally treat their employees much better.
To blindly reassert "there is no other way" is to adopt as an axiom that is at best uncertain and at worst empirically wrong.
3rd, on pragmatism and the french, sure, pragmatically we can play that game while it exists, but the glory of the french revolution was not in it's pragmatic achieval of its goals (they failed after all, napoleon the post-metternich era reinstuted defacto monarchy) and but that it completely and radically did away with pragmatism and destroyed the old social order. So I'm surprised you would use it as an argument in a discussion about the inevitably of hierachy, if anything I would use it as an argument for the great good that can come from taking away power from old decision making structures.
4th, on game theory, I do my best to study game theory nowadays, and you can only prove what your assumptions allow you, so in this discussion it's out of bounds without a formal specification (I'm happy for references though if you can recommend good formalisations and studies of current political and economic systems).
5th, on the world collapsing, it is collapsing because our elite has so far not cared to save it despite the scientists warning them for decades, and its the populace and idealists (extinction rebellion et al) who are pushing for the radical solutions to save them - so again, I don't see why we should buy the argument of "oh no, actually, the elites need to be more powerful so they can save us".
Scaling and Growth at all costs without distributed power to alleviate the distributed ills has brought us here. So why should we not ask for solid proof before we give more power to a centralised few? Why should we assume a ruling class will survive the coming shifts? Why should we assume having a ruling class is inevitable when previous generations were told only the kings and royals had the divine grace to rule, that the plebs could never handle reading, women could never handle equality, colored would never be able to vote rationally?
And if you don't think natural selection is what powers nature, then the question becomes, why did God choose to kill his creatures?
So it would likely be pretty unchanged from our current levels. Just about everyone survives to produce children these days (with some people i wonder how).
Also i don't think when people say conquer death they mean true immortality, they mean Negligible senescence i.e. we are no more likely to die due to aging, people would still die (accidents, violence, natural disaster etc).
At some point you are just done, and if you accept that, you’ll die. It may be at 50, 100, 150, maybe 200. But I don’t think humans are mentally made for spans of time much larger than that.
But public goods like that are shared with other people; it’s not like you keep all the water in your single-family house. That house though…
But you’re going to have a hard time convincing every soul to drink the kool-aid.