I think that immortality would be a disaster, personally. That we die is a critically important aspect of life. I'd prefer that we work on ways to make the death process less traumatic.
If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.
Not even talking about the fact that we live in a very finite system
purge the xenos
We certainly have not.
> If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.
True, but if you lived forever that would mean that it wouldn't be realistic for new people to come into the world, which means far fewer new ideas and ways of looking at the world. That would a net loss for humanity.
2) Trivial argument: if people already lived indefinitely would you advocate murdering them to "make room"? Telling people they shouldn't be able to pursue a longer life is equivalent. Making that decision for yourself is perfectly fine; making it for others is not.
3) 150k people die every day, nearly 2 people per second. If fixing that tragedy creates new problems, bring them on; we'll solve those problems too.
2) Not true from most moral perspectives, including 'common sense morality'. In a pure utilitarian sense, sure, but most people don't subscribe to that. For example, choosing to not save someone from a burning fire is not the same as choosing to burn them to death. Both the actor and their intention matter.
3) I don't disagree with the first half of your point (that this is a tragedy) but I cannot share your optimism re.: us solving the consequent problems. If there's anything that the last fifty years of modernity have shown, it's that we're actually quite bad at solving broader social problems, with new and even-worse problems often arising well after we thought the original problem settled. Consider global warming (to which the 'solution' looks to be the further impoverishment of the third world, and probably mass deaths due to famine/drought/heat waves), or how we in the US 'solved' mobility by destroying main streets and replacing established public transportation with cars and mazes of concrete. Now we've "solved" loneliness by giving everyone a phone and -- well, I'm sure you know how that went.
2) The equivalence here isn't "choosing to not save". Choosing to push someone back into a burning building, or preventing them from trying to escape, is equivalent to choosing to burn them to death.
3) I am an incorrigible optimist and don't intend to ever stop being one. Humanity is incredible and it's amazing what we can solve over time. I don't believe that any potential solution we might come up with is worse than doing nothing and letting 150k people die every day.
Spoiler: The haves are not going to get any more generous when they've got thousand year lifespans. You would just have end up having to spend hundreds of years grinding away at the bottom of the ladder instead of 30 or 40.
A transcended/uploaded mind won't have the earthly needs and would be a lot cheaper to maintain, leaving it to achieve otherwise impossible results.
The only thing to gain by abolishing biological death is perpetual civil war.
If you could put an 80 year olds mind in a 20 year old body they would probably approach life with the same optimism of other young people.
I think our behavior is more a product of our environment than some internal 'self' that is built over our lifetime. If you altered the environment from "75 years old, achy and slow body, limited future" to "25 years old, infinite future, healthy body" I would be amazed if there was not a humongous shift in behavior as well.
Ok, that maybe part of how 'WE' define life, but, for me, that looks a lot like an arbitrary definition.
It's much simpler to accept and live within your constraints than to waste your life and mental energy wishing you could be/do something you will never be/do.
If you think about it most of the things we "fix" are extremely wonky, even something such as a bone fracture isn't guaranteed to heal 100%, most medicine have massive side effects, organ transplants have something like 50% survival at 15 years on average, &c. We think we're getting more and more control on things but most of it is a hack job temporarily delaying the inevitable
Also, anyone thinking being uploaded to a computer forever is heaven on earth must live a pretty fucking terrible life to begin with
Nothing says "life" like being dead.
I choose life.
- We currently only have one world that all living humans must share. - Imagine the sickening amount of power some people would be able to gather given a few centuries. That can't be good for everyone else.
It doesn't matter how much you like sci fi, even if it was technically possible it would be reserved to the 0.001% and you'd still be grinding your whole life just as you are doing now
They say science advances one death at a time. Looking at congress, I think you can say the same for politics as well.
Success of something like this entails a way to regulate reproduction at a far more draconian level than even China's one-child policy. I don't think any civilized nation could impose a "no child" policy and remain intact.
I don’t think this is a given. Most developed nations have bad birth rates for example
Some folks are scared of rogue AI, when biggest threat to mankind always was, is and will be other, properly messed up humans with certain capabilities.