The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
nickbostrom.com
nickbostrom.com
There is so much in the world to experience - what does it feel like to:
* master tennis?
* hitchhike through snowy Hokkaido?
* craft an oak desk with just your hands?
* fall so deeply in love you feel whole?
* direct a movie with just your dreams?
* completely understand the ins and outs of a field of study?
* make friends with someone you've read for decades?
I would love to experience all of these things and more, but it would take huge amounts of dedication, risk, and luck to get close to a full list. By curing death, this gets way more achievable and accessible to everyone.
One of my favorite book quotes:
> “Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.” - Aldous Huxley
How are we as a species suppose to take to the stars if our lifespan is relatively short?
I would wager that this is another step in becoming an interstellar race. Aka the challenge is not just about bending space-time.
What if Einstein lived to 500 or was still alive?
Anyway, I think people need to step way back on the true necessity of solving aging. At a minimum it’s about ensuring we have a high quality of life while living out our final days and long term it’s about the human species viability as an interstellar civilization.
The flipside would be, what if Aristotle or Ptolemy lived to 2500 and were still alive? Would we still be arguing if everything revolves around Earth, or if fire, earth, water and air constitute everything?
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
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if you want to improve the net intellectual progress of humanity solving inequality will do a lot more than solving aging.
On the contrary, Putin showed how dictatorships are vulnerable to defeat, if not collapse.
It seems more like we're justifying death rather than solving challenges.
The elimination of death would necessitate that each individual would consume indefinitely, whereas the planet has finite resources. So, at some point, children must stop being born, and governments must either enforce infertility or make having sex illegal.
I would imagine if death were cured, a very small percentage of people would actually want to live forever. I imagine most people would want to live between 1x and say, 5x an average lifespan.
Do you think about where you will go to the restroom 20 years into the future? No. Same thing with lifespan questions. You'll presumably die in some sort of accident.
Imagine tomorrow, some mystical cosmic event made it impossible for people to die of natural causes. Would you institute a law that once someone made it to 100 years old, they should be executed? This would prevent most of the downsides curing death would spring.
I think the answer to this is obviously no, that would be completely foolish, if not immoral. But when we start with the status quo of death existing, puzzlingly, most people think death is a good thing.
This isn't quite true. Suppose no one dies. Starting from a population of 10 billion, suppose every person can have one child.
The population after one iteration is 15 billion. If those 5 billion then each have one child, the next iteration's population is 17.5 billion. This converges to 2x the original population. In fact, so long as not everyone has 2 kids, it will converge to a finite value.
(Edit: also, this problem takes places on the timescale of HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of years. The year 2500 is not going to look like today.)
>The really bad people of history could find themselves in permanent long-lasting power (think Putin for a modern example).
In many cases, dictatorships do not end with the dictator's old age. This is true both in the sense that they sometimes die early, and in the sense that they're prone to dynasties. The system of a dictatorship already has agelessness, just not indestructibility.
>I think you can come up with 100 reasons why curing death would be bad.
You can indeed do that, but it's worth keeping the screaming torture of the default in perspective. It's really hard to do worse than aging. I wouldn't want to see my parents wither, suffer, and die. I don't want to die knowing my children would wither, suffer, and die. I don't want you to wither, suffer, and die. I don't want people to have to grieve the loss of their loved ones.
We can just... get rid of the ultrabadness, and have more of the good things. There are new problems that would have to be addressed, but they are addressable! Sometimes, things just aren't that complicated.
If it weren't, it would certainly become a focus, and probably within reach.
1. A lifetime is enough to experience everything that you listed.
2. Honestly, not everyone is interested to experience everything that you think everyone should experience.
3. What is the point of experiencing them?
4. Experiences and relationships are valuable only because they are time-limited, either by change or death.
Not true by any stretch of imagination.
2. My point isn’t that they should experience those things, it’s that there’s so much to experience.
3. What’s the point of anything?
4. When I think of the relationships in my life that went too long or too short, the ones that went on for too long I don’t feel too bad about. The ones that went too short are a completely different class - I feel far more regret and sadness.
Nope. They would be more valuable if they where not time-limited.
> > “Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.” - Aldous Huxley
This is what AGI will go. It will know everything, and at an above best-human level at that.
And those problems have to be solved first, we couldn't just say "well, let's multiply the population, then figure out what to do about it later".
I'm also very skeptical that, given an indefinitely extended lifespan, people would suddenly do all of those nice-sounding things you list. More likely they'd just do the exact same things they do now, for longer.
It sort of reminds me of the philosophy around the early internet: imagine if people could get access to all information and communicate with anyone, anywhere. Imagine how smart we'll become, how civilized! That's what we thought would happen, but look at what we actually did: yell at each other and watch porn. My guess is that if we lived forever, we wouldn't suddenly become interesting, enlightened people if we weren't already.
Because we only live a short while, we don't take a long view and there's a soft cap on society's accumulated wisdom. (In a smaller scale it's like companies losing "institutional knowledge" when employees leave.) People would act differently if they knew they'd be around for 700y instead of 70.
> That's what we thought would happen [with the Internet], but look at what we actually did
You're not seriously suggesting humanity is better without the Internet…
I cannot speak for karaterobot, but that seems to be an unwarranted inference from the post you are replying to, which merely points out that the internet did not lead to the more cooperative and altruistic world that some idealists predicted.
You posit that humanity would step up to the challenges of a ten-fold increase in longevity, but I haven't seen what I would regard as persuasive evidence for that view. The fact that the internet has been a net benefit (a view I accept) is not that evidence, IMHO.
Internet idealism : Internet negatives¹ :: longevity idealism : longevity negatives²
¹flaming & porn ²scarcity & overpopulationThe problem is not resource scarcity, it's pollution. For example, Americans pollute far more than Indian, despite having a smaller population.
Mainly stemming from all of the societal issues we have that ultimately are based on human nature and our tribal instincts. Living longer isn't going to make things like universal basic income happen or accelerate us into some post-scarcity economy.
Humans already behave poorly enough when provided a knowingly limited lifespan, I can't see people improving provided an unlimited natural lifespan. We're not wired for it.
Every programmer knows that getting his program to crash is always an easier job than to keep it running indefinitely. Every probablistic bug eventually will happen on long enough timescales, and defeating death isn't defeating a single bug, it's defeating all of them. It isn't a single dragon but infinite bugs.
I preferred Blade runner take on it: when they tell the replicant that there was no built in destruction mechanism, they built him as best as they could, and that was simply it.
The Dragon is an external malevolent force. The Dragon wants to eat more just because. People often die due to the natural evolution of their own bodies or choices other people make, and death is impersonal (Prachett books aside). Replacing Death with Dragon is a rhetorical device to allow hate to colour our judgement, and make the issue simpler than it is (you can't 'kill' death. Even a perfect medical science will still have the problem that some people may want to kill other people).
The effects and choices here are also a tiny bit more complicated. We could spend a lot more on health after all. Presumably the author isn't fine with redirecting 100% of the budget to the health sector, and I don't think he judges each allocation decision by 'this could have gone to health!'. How about merely winding down all AI research and redirecting the funds to hospitals? So there must be some limiting principles.
By the same token, I doubt anyone (even a 'deathist') thinks 'We should have a lower average lifespan'. So it's just an allocation decision, and the criteria are probably boring and political.
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This does leaves us with the 'sexy' issue, that of mortality itself. It's actually not much of an issue in practice? Barring absurdly extreme scenarios*, even people who favour mortality won't kill anyone who refuses to die, or prevent Bostrom et. all from trying. Given the wealthy are just as subject to the 'Dragon' as the rest of us, I'm sure they'll have no shortage of funds. If they succeed, society will 'suffer' the consequences, no matter what theoretical discussion may think.
* e.g. a life extension tech based on parasitism. Or an uploading tech that warps the subject to the point we can't say they have anything nearing a morality allowing them to participate in society.
For example, we can't stop despots from investing in longevity research. This is probably better then them investing in more repression or a bigger army, so we won't stop it even if we could.
As terrible as death is, as much as I too miss Grandma, it is an evil necessary to fend off the higher order of evil, the greater dragon, extinction.
Likewise, 'accelerating' biological adaptation is neither good or bad, it just is. There is no moral character unless we give it human intention.
In general, it should be clear that to cut a species off from a primary source of biological evolution would not usually be beneficial to that species' survival prospects. Maybe that is no longer true of Homo sapiens, but I doubt it.
We have generic engineering, albeit limited. Direct genetic engineering will be driven by memetic evolution within a generation or two.
It's not essential though, is the point.
We can do better than the sloppy process of evolution.
I'm optimistic that all the supposed benefits of death have other, better, alternatives.
Without disease, we would have never evolved an immune system. Therefore we shouldn't try to cure disease.
I think the flaw is very clear in this analogy: human ingenuity and science is better than evolution by natural selection in pretty much every way. Now that we've evolved science, we no longer need evolution by natural selection.
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Exhalation by Ted Chiang for instance is a great short story that deals with mortality more effectively, since the characters are not exactly human and the concept can be explored better.
We can't bring the dead back, though.
Usually the dystopian aspects of immortality revolve around power imbalance/inequality; in such scenarios its not obvious that death can be brought back
I'm not sure that any real-life moral imperatives could be based on made-up story about obviously utopian society.
For me, immortality does not sound as a good idea even as a thought experiment. We already have problems with wealth and power imbalance. The invention of immortality would just deepen these problems exponentially.