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Comment by stiff | Hacker News Reader

There is something very weird about people routinely speaking of immortality as something that is actually a thing. For all we know, stars die eventually, the sun will burn out eventually, the universe as we know most likely comes to an end and so forth, you can not cheat basic physics. To me this is the same kind of refusal that makes some people believe in god, and that shows how hopelessly biased we get on topics we are emotionally involved in. On any other topic with the information available everyone sane would asses the likelihood of success as maybe less than 0.001%, but if you ask about this specific thing, it's more like 50%...

(Speaking in advance: I understand this is in fact about life extension)

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Due to these circumstances, I suspect that this having possible applications into life extension is a really good way to get funding for your research, because death is 100% certain, and a .0001% chance of evading it sounds so good to some people that you can just about write your own check. Agreed though, death can be terrifying, but the idea of immortality is flawed in more ways than one. Are you really the same person you were 10 years ago? 10 Months? Weeks? Days? Minutes? Seconds? What is it, other than one's own fragile ego, that people are trying to perpetuate into eternity? A few extra years is one thing, immortality sounds like a fool's paradise to me.

> A few extra years is one thing, immortality sounds like a fool's paradise to me.

Feel free to pass on it then, assuming you'd actually make that decision if you really had the choice. That problem will naturally solve itself: the set of people still alive will trend towards 100% rejection of having a limited lifespan.

"Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, _died_, a generation before. [...] didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them." -- Cory Doctorow, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".

So you're going to volunteer for the sterilization and family-size controls necessary to make an indefinitely-living population feasible on a finite planet whose resources we're already overconsuming?

Or are you just full-on into the Google-executive mindset where you use life extension to live long enough to deliberately invoke every other Singularity/transhuman/futurist douchebag trope in the damn book and go sailing off to space to find more resources for your exponentially-expanding population to consume?

Those are obviously problems, but there are solutions. Among them, "everyone dies" is just about the shittiest. Yes, I would happily volunteer to be sterilized in exchange for living forever. In a heartbeat.

And you've already refrained from having children?

Then, ok, fair enough. The question is, how do you make that fully general so that our ecosystem doesn't collapse and kill the lot of us?

And then, how do you make the economics work out? Immortal transhumans need to eat, too, but once they get some kind of capital base going that expands faster than inflation, as long as they've got even the barest livable income, they'll eventually live long enough for their wealth to grow into "OWN EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE" levels.

And we thought today's asset bubbles were large!

Meanwhile, the young of the future will be even more screwed than we young are today, for precisely the same reasons but more so.

The thing is, none of these problems happen the instant we solve death (and "solving death" is not itself going to be instant). Life expectancy will increase, population will gradually increase with it, and we'll be able to see the problems we have to deal with as a result a very long way off.

It's similar to an argument people sometimes give me when I tell them I'm vegan, which goes along the lines of "If everyone suddenly became vegan, imagine what that would do to the world economy! How would we feed all of these people when our food producing infrastructure is animal based?"

And the reason I don't worry about that is that I know that scenario isn't going to happen. When people stop using animal products, which I think will happen - not for ethical reasons, but for economic reasons as cheaper, more authentic substitutes arise, and the sustainability of animal farming dwindles - it will not be an overnight process, and the world will have plenty of time to adjust.

It's basically the same with extreme longevity. We don't have to solve these problems with the tools we have today, because we don't even know when they will be problems that need solving. And we have no idea what tools will be available to us once we actually do have to solve those problems.

But if you flip the scenario around, and imagine that everyone already lives forever, and these problems start to show up, do you really think that anyone would even think to suggest "Let's have everyone die after around 70 years or so"? That idea would be grimly hilarious in a very Modest Proposal sort of way.

The problem is that the economic and ecological problems are problems we already have today, even before the application of any life-extension therapy more powerful than Good Old Fashioned Diet and Exercise.

Add me up.

Also, we are nowhere near being immortal and in many developed countries people already have stopped reproducing (Germany, Japan, Spain, etc)

> Yes, I would happily volunteer to be sterilized in exchange for living forever. In a heartbeat.

A world without kids and young people is a really, really sad state of affairs. I don't know and I don't care about what others would do, but I think I will just choose to end my own life rather than continue to live in such a dystopian future.

A couple things.

1. There wouldn't be zero kids and young people. Just not very many. The death rate will always be non-zero, and our ability to support new people will grow over time.

2. I get that no more children is a bummer, but I'm not really understanding how it is so awful that it could be described as "dystopian", much less something to kill yourself over. The world is vast and interesting, and children are just one neat facet of it.

In any case, I can see how it might work to give people a choice. If you'd rather die sooner and also have children, you could opt out of both the sterilization and the immortality.

The problems of an ageless population are not worth lining up and machine gunning 100,000 random humans per day with no regard to innocence or value.

And so neither are they worth permitting age to kill 100,000 random humans per day with no regard to innocence or value.

And what is your solution to not getting hit by a truck over an infinite period of time?

That's a technical problem, not a moral one.

More seriously, we could scan backups. Or we could live in the Matrix, not as meatbags plugged through the neck, but as programs –which could be backed up as well. (Don't ask me who gets to be root.)

It's funny, because Eli was making a moral argument, but I was not, yet that seems to be the default argument against immortality. I think you last question is actually close to what I was striking at - who is it that's immortal? What does it mean to be a consciousness freed from its humanity? I honestly am not sure that many people would end up being happy in such an arrangement, or necessarily actually survive in any sense as "themselves" for very long, despite the persistence of a body or simulant or whatever.

We should be able to do digital backups of a brain within the next century. If we can attach robotics directly to the spinal column and regrow dead / damaged neurons with stem cells, we can also put people in a literal brain in a jar robot, which would hopefully have the brain effectively reinforced (or better yet, just be a brain in a jar in a secure vault remote controlling an avatar robot).

Improving truck-exterior safety standards: deformable impact points, robot drivers. Combine that with environmental improvements - fewer places to get squished between a truck and arbitrary railings, say. And add medical improvements to the point where you'd have to splat a brain to get a sure kill. Safety standards that require a Culture-style life-support collar on all trucks.

All engineering. It's not good against infinite time, but it ought to make traffic fatalities rare and remarkable.

I think it's even simpler than that - if you are a billionaire life is pretty good, and the only thing that can get in your way is death so it's a natural place to want to invest - it's basically one of the only problems you have left!

I'm not a billionaire, but I love my life and death/ageing is one of the few real problems I have. I'd rather have billionaires thinking like me and investing their money in solving real problems than buying yachts and marrying/divorcing every year.

You can't cheat physics, but there's a great deal about fundamental physics that we don't yet understand. Given solutions to the most fundamental bug of biology, we'd have a few million or billion years to solve the cosmological limitations on lifespan, and that's ignoring the possibility of improvements to the speed of thought or to the subjective experience of time.

So, yes, the ultimate battle is with entropy, but we have a long way to go before that's the actual limiting factor.

Please point out even the slightest indication that entropy is beatable.

Otherwise, make an ethical argument that covering every inch of the planet in people is a good idea.

Otherwise, explain how you'll get the proper sterilization procedures working to control population growth and get resource consumption down to sustainable levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

So a prediction exists, with some evidence towards it, that it's possible to do computation that doesn't consume negentropy?

Well, I'll grant you one thing: not quite sure what it is you're computing, but assuming your plan works, that was a surprisingly short path to conserving the universe's resources until your computational substrate suffers proton decay.

I still have only hunches of what computation has to do with actual lives. Please, explain your Evil Plan out loud.

Evil Plan, first draft: Build a Matrix, scan and emulate everyone, recycle the meat.

In others words make a domesday robot that remembers people before it kills them.

As they die, some will take solace in a religious belief that numbers in the machine represent everything they were and ever will be. Others will just die.

A digital tombstone to a dead race.

In his defense, if you're dying anyway, you might as well leave a "ghost" behind. The ghost might not be you, and it will certainly have some psychological issues to deal with due to knowing that it's one ontological level "down" from a real, flesh-and-blood person, but you were going to die anyway.

Why do you assume the implementation hardware matters?

If it does, why assume brain-meat is better, as opposed to worse?

The question is not really whether such and such implementation is best. The question is, does changing implementation preserves subjective identity?

I bet many people here would not doubt the moral value of the emulation of a human (feelings and such are simulated to the point of being real), but would highly doubt that it would be, well, the "same" person as the original.

That's actually a good point, if a confusing one. I'd like to know the answer as well, though I believe there's a chance the answer will be "mu".

When the robot points the flamethrower at you, and announces using the Siri voice, "Fear not, a backup has been made", you will no longer be confused.

Yeah, by that point I'll know the AI is an Unfriendly AI, and I'll be deeply sorrowful and scared for the future.

I assume that ontological security matters. If I know my consciousness runs on meat, I know that I have my own personal substrate. If I know I'm in the Matrix, I know that whoever has `root` access can alter or deceive me as they please.

The one thing nobody ever specifies about these crazy schemes, which would otherwise be a great way for humanity to get the hell off of Earth and leave the natural ecosystem to itself in our absence, is who will be root, and how he's going to forcibly round up everyone who doesn't like your crazy futurist take-over-everyone's-minds scheme. Hell, what's going to stop him from rampaging across the real Earth and universe, destroying everything in sight, while everyone else fucks around having fun in VR?

I'm really wondering why this nasty, insane idea has been cropping up more frequently lately in geek circles.

And that's not even starting into the sheer ludicrousness of claiming people's consciousness is pure software when we know that all kinds of enzymes and hormones affect our personalities!

> And that's not even starting into the sheer ludicrousness of claiming people's consciousness is pure software when we know that all kinds of enzymes and hormones affect our personalities!

That's a bug to fix in implementation accuracy. I'd obviously prefer more accuracy, but if it comes down to a choice between less-than-perfect available implementation accuracy or dying of old age, I'll happily take a less accurate implementation, especially one that preserves enough information to fix that issue later.

The much more serious bug I am concerned about is the continuity flaw: a copy of me does not make the original me immortal. I'd like the original me to keep thinking forever. Many proposals exist for how to ensure that. The scary problem that needs careful evaluation before implementing any solution: if you do it wrong, the copy will never know the difference, but the original will die.

No human should ever be root. But we might just trust a Friendly AI. Well, provided we manage to make the AI actually Friendly (as in, does exactly what's good for us instead of whatever imperfect idea of what's good for us we might be tempted to program).

And if we don't, we all die (at best), but that's nothing new. Nor is it avoidable by other means than FAI.

The route to unfriendly AI is revenue-positive right up until it kills us.

At least you're openly admitting that's your plan. So, you know, we can drag you behind the chemical sheds and shoot you for Criminally Irresponsible Use of Applied Phlebotinum.

The problem of population growth exists regardless of life extension technology. The solution we are headed for already is that a lot of people will simply starve to death.

Isn't that lovely? The poor can starve to death and the rich can live forever!

When such issues come into discussion I always think about this island off the coast of Alaska, called St. Matthew Island:

> In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to the island by the United States Coast Guard to provide an emergency food source. The coast guard abandoned the island a few years later, leaving the reindeer. Subsequently, the reindeer population rose to about 6,000 by 1963[5] and then died off in the next two years to 42 animals.[6] A scientific study attributed the population crash to the limited food supply in interaction with climatic factors (the winter of 1963–64 was exceptionally severe in the region).[1] By the 1980s, the reindeer population had completely died out.[2] Environmentalists see this as an issue of overpopulation.

(from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Matthew_Island)

There's no particular reason that everyone has to be on Earth.

Use the Dyson computation. If we uploaded to a matrix that ran on some Dyson-computation approach, then as time went by we'd run slower and slower in real time, but that wouldn't matter to us (and if our population continued to grow that would slow the time factor even further, as the simulation would have to run slower to compute us all - but again, who cares?). But we'd still be able to perform an unbounded amount of computation, so we'd be fine.

What if the hard drive goes on the fritz?

How about the probability of some accident killing you (however small) multiplied for the millions or billions of years you're alive?

Negligible, once you care to make backups of yourself. Continuous backups, ideally. In time, it will probably possible to blow up half a Jupiter Brain without killing anyone.

But there is not continuous "consciousness", so what is the difference between that and a clone of you with your memories?

Why not have thousands of them? What are you?

It would be awesome to get to the point where we're worrying about the thermodynamic death of the Universe. But we're not quite there yet. Let's take the first steps first.

And yes, "immortality" is a figure of speech. Much like "the infinite space" - we don't know if it's really infinite.

I'd happily take the 5,000 million years (or whatever physics say) lifespan now please.

If I can't call it immortality, well, it'll have to do.

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