Everytime I read about longevity research and how many people are in favor of it I can't stop thinking about this speech.
And one of the endings of Cyberpunk 2077.
I think people generally, and the Silicon Valley set in particular, have a hard time abstracting from “would I like” to “would the world be a better place if”.
Would I like to live a thousand years? Yes, with the obvious caveats.
Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today. There’s a great many people around right now who’s primary redeeming quality is their impending mortality - it’s not just science that advances one funeral at a time.
How many times has your life or someone close to you in your life not died from something they would have died of 100yrs ago? If you're happy medical tech saved their lives then you're arguably for life extension because all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.
I don’t know if this is supposed to be a dunk or something, but - yes, my grandma lived to 93 because of modern medicine. I was happy she did. That’s the tension: things that are good for me personally can be bad for the world at large (I mean, not my grandma’s longevity specifically - she was a lovely woman), and a big part of emotional and intellectual maturity is recognizing that indeed the world is full of tradeoffs and I can’t have everything I want.
Specific to:
> all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.
No, that’s not all it really means, not in our society, not in our time. As Ted Chiang put it, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us,” and that’s also the case here: the outcome of this technology isn’t that my grandma lives to 150, it’s that Vladimir Putin lives to 150. If my grandma needs to die at 90 so we don’t have immortal god-emperors - if I have to die at 90 - then so be it. Some day we may live in a world where longevity technology is an unalloyed good, but until that day, we don’t get to just put the good stuff on the ledger and ignore the bad stuff.
Most notably Rupert Murdoch- while I do not wish death on the man, it's certainly true that he has a grip on the hearts and minds of people and often uses his media empire to convince people to go against their own interests.
He will be replaced by someone similar, but seldom are people as effective as their predecessors.
The fact that you would even make this joke shows how absurdly far we have fallen.
Obviously they exist for that purpose, studying the foundations of news media and journalism... for even a day... shows concisely that it was painfully created for this reason.
> He will be replaced by someone similar, but seldom are people as effective as their predecessors.
I'm not a real believer in the "Great Man" theory of history - I think the ground needs to be set for an event for it to happen, I don't think the will of one person is truly sufficient to bend history - but there are certain people who you would have a very, very hard time replacing in a given scenario.
Rupert Murdoch is definitely one, and Donald Trump is another - without getting into specific judgements of the man, there's nobody else within easy reach who could do what he's done, and I don't really see his movement surviving him. He's a particular person for a particular moment, and it's hard to see anyone else doing what he has.
“All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” – Clarence Darrow
“a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” – Max Planck
1) Possible solutions aren't binary (true vs false) but trinary (true vs false vs indeterminate)
2) The devil is always in the details. The world is fucking complex and and a first order approximation isn't going to get you there anymore. We've had 100kyrs to solve problems, we got most of the simple ones down (appearing simple does not mean simple)
2.5) A clique wouldn't be a clique if it wasn't something practically everyone knows and can recite but is not something people demonstrate an actual understanding of by observing their actions. (Just like LLMs: just because you can repeat some knowledge does not mean you're able to (ineptitude), or have the will to (malice), use the knowledge in any meaningful way)
> Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today
If you want to sacrifice your life for a better world, that is your decision. But do not force that decision to other people.
We could live for 20 years or 200 and it wouldn't matter - entities will emerge that will attempt to consolidate and abuse power. Those may be individual dictators, tyrannical governments, or global conglomerates. The answer is the same, and it doesn't involve hampering scientific progress.
