I'd hate to die, for so many different reasons. Why can't we all just keep on living? Any change of immortality in the coming 60-odd years? Or is that just not far enough into the future? Are we doomed to die?
Here is why you're being downvoted: human longevity is an extremely difficult, multifaceted problem. Research doctors are not even trying to slay a dragon but a hydra: combat one way to die of old age and another one pops up.
Lastly, attempting to forecast "chance of immortality in the coming 60-odd years" is asking a question that relies for its answer on extremely controversial ideas. Particularly, attempting to answer requires us to forecast whether the rate of advancement in ageing research is speeding up or slowing down. This is hard, and can be affected by a bunch of different factors: funding breakdown in non-corporate research, Great Stagnation Hypothesis, breakdown in public acceptance of science, economic decline in some places, economic growth in some places, public uptake of anti-aging ideologies, attitudes towards the retirement crisis we're already facing even before anti-aging research comes in. Oh, and then we face the issue of whether we can or are improving our quality of scientific findings through better research training or data science/machine learning techniques. And then we get to the really out-there stuff "immortalists" are often secretly thinking of and can't stop yacking about: the chance that we manage to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence and trigger a Singularity, thus rendering us all immortal utopian transhumans before many of us on this board even hit retirement age.
TL;DR: I have no bloody idea, but I still regard contributing to my Roth IRA as a pretty sensible move.
EDIT: The one trend I'm willing to say I observe is that average life expectancy is a fairly good tracker of social and economic development, even once you've gotten over the infant-mortality hump. If you want to be immortal, you should encourage society to act in ways that result in longer average lifespans and also to fund anti-ageing research in hopes of achieving the fabled "ageing escape horizon" where medical science advances faster than you die.
How about a simplification: chance that computational technology will increase by 3 orders of magnitude in 30 years: almost 100%. Chance that increases in computational power lead to increases in biological breakthroughs: 100%.
Therefore, we should not measure the current rate of anti-aging research but rather project it exponentially in some fashion to match the likely trajectory. This has been true for DNA sequencing for example.
>chance that computational technology will increase by 3 orders of magnitude in 30 years: almost 100%.
Define "computational technology". If you mean something along the lines of storage space or parallel processing power, I'll grant you that. We're probably not getting another 1000x increase in processor clock-speeds (serial processing power), though.
>Chance that increases in computational power lead to increases in biological breakthroughs: 100%.
This is exactly why I mentioned data science/machine learning. These are the tools we use to turn increasing amounts of computer processing power into significant, reproducible scientific advancements.
Besides, if I want to be ludicrously optimistic and base everything on computing I could simply yell, "Chance of solving the FAI problem in 30 years: almost 100%! EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE, GUYS!".
Your point about sequencing is a good one, but this is the only area of biological research clearly improving exponentially...
Without being too argumentative, I'd put the odds of increases in computer power leading to biological breakthroughs at much less than 100%! I'd be surprised if it was as much as 5-10%.
What areas of biological research are fundamentally limited by computer power? I can think of a few where more power would be nice to have, but none where that power would be transformative.
The possible exception is the example you mention---DNA sequencing--but the problem there is that the rate of growth of sequence information is greater than More's rate; slightly ironically, this field really needs computer scientists to help develop new algorithms much more than it needs computers...
But your question is specifically about computational power. Any area that requires modeling or methods that must be over-simplified in order to run on today's hardware are candidates for benefit from computational power. That seems to leave a lot of room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelling_biological_systems
But I will grant that development of new algorithms is also important. It's just that computational power itself assists in the discovery of new algorithms via the development of better research platforms.
Any time ^_^. The first step is to come out and say that longevity research is a scientific project, not a mystical one (there's no Truth of This Universe saying we can only live 80-something years no matter the scientific might we throw at the problem). That also carries some acknowledgements we need to make: biological immortality being discovered in 2060 will do you no good if you died of a heart attack in 2030, so eat healthy, exercise, and de-stress if you're really so devoted to long life!
The question really is: what aspect of you do you want to preserve? You will most certainly change over the years. You now will be very different from you in 100 years. Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years?
The solution to immortality is to embrace the idea that you won't stay the same anyway and that instead of caring so much about your host body, it might be more efficient to preserve what you value in other forms: e.g. your genome and values in your children or your ideas in books. If you write down your thoughts into a book today, these thoughts are more likely to be preserved for 500 years than if you were immortal and relied on your memory.
> Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years?
As somebody with no kids ... yes.
This is a strange argument since at no time between now and 500 years from now will there be a point where I want to grow old and die. So asking me if I care about 500 year old me is irrelevant, I don't want to die.
Love? I want to live too, very much so. If it came to risking my life to guarantee the safety of my son, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'd give my life to save his if it came to it. I'd probably do the same for my Mom or Dad too so I don't see it as a "perpetuation of the species" thing at all.
Well, to be honest, I'm not going to run around sacrificing myself for just anybody. And I'd definitely not just going to jump into such a thing without thinking there aren't any other options. And it'd only be a close loved one. A distant friend would be a tough call. A stranger? Probably not.
It seems almost borderline Sociopath to not love at least somebody that you'd be even willing to consider sacrificing yourself for. Have you ever been tested? (not trying to be insulting, genuinely curious)
Yeah, I didn't really mean willy-nilly sacrifice on-a-dime.
No, I've never been tested for "sociopathy" (I cannot imagine that this is something that a lot of people do), and I'm not sure that I wouldn't sacrifice myself for somebody else, but regardless of my personal feelings on the matter, regardless of whether or not it is sociopathic, isn't it still a little silly?
No, not really. If a car is barreling toward my son, and I can only push him out of the way by jumping in front of the car and getting hit myself (but pushing him free of it), I'd do it, and wouldn't consider such a sacrifice silly at all if I witnessed another doing it.
Now think about the reverse: Several people see you watch somebody you know and personally love get hit by a car, and notice you could have saved them and one of them asks you about it. Would you feel bad at all saying "Yeah, I could have jumped out and saved him, but I would have died and that would be silly?"
I could see myself being pressured into feeling bad about not sacrificing myself (societal pressures/norms and all of that), but it really doesn't make sense to me to feel bad, and I sort of hope that I wouldn't. After all, why should I effectively doom myself to save them? Why should I feel bad? Why should I trade my life for theirs?
The answer to these questions seems obvious to many people, but I don't get it. Why is this virtuous? Why is this sensible? Why is this rational?
Why should one care about themselves more than others? There's nothing intrinsically valuable about the self. Accumulating resources or accomplishments? Sounds pretty pointless to me.
Well, you're saying that there's no point (intrinsically) in self-sacrifice. I'm saying there's no point (intrinsically) in self-promotion. So the value judgement is relative.
Nah, that's way scarier. Looking at the sweep of history, I can take comfort that my mortal shell won't last long enough to witness much more of the damn stuff, but I'm terrified that my thoughts and values are simply going to be swept away in a tide of blood and a return to a more miserable human condition.
Another question: what happens to a brain that stores so many years of memories? If there are serious complications, and I'm pretty sure that there are, chances are that they're going to be next to impossible to solve, unless some serious alteration (more brain capacity or memory erasing) happens.
I'm also assuming that any life expanding treatment would tackle senility issues (maybe with brain-repairing nanomachines? Who knows). If not, it would be far, far less useful.
If only it were merely technically and scientifically super-difficult.
The biggest hurdle is cultural and social, as many comments show. The first step towards ending death is to consider the fight possible and positive. But we are still deep in deathism, "Death is inevitable (with current science), ergo death is good". The biggest case of sour grapes or Stockholm syndrome ever, the most awful meme.
The sociological problems of immortality are more difficult than the technical problems. The entire sweep of human history has rested upon the same solid foundation: death takes everyone eventually. Kings fall down as dead as peasants, and the dirt nap of a saint lasts as long as a sinner.
Imagine what would happen if the people who held certain beliefs never died off. Imagine the result if large estates never passed to any heirs, or debts never cancelled. Imagine copyrights that never expire, since the authors never die. The young, vital, and innovative do not prosper, since they are forever dominated by their elders who become increasingly conservative and risk-averse. Money and power do not pass from one generation to the next.
The problem is only made worse if biological immortality is itself an expensive product that is only accessible to the wealthy. Down that path I can imagine dozens of dystopias.
I used to raise that objection when debating immortalists. What got me to stop raising it was the realization that in the form of business corporations or multigenerational trusts, we already have those problems.
It's almost comforting, knowing you already live in Dystopia.
Given that my logical conclusion was for the mortals to murder every immortal they can expose as an existential threat to themselves and their progeny, it is hardly surprising that I would also like to forcibly dissolve perpetual-duration corporations and trusts, particularly those chartered for "any lawful purpose".
You shouldn't have stopped raising the objection. You should have trusted your logic. As yet, corporations have no free will of their own, being directed by only semipermanent boards and managers. When you have a full-blown immortal, with its own interests and decision making abilities, the problems of those perpetual legal structures magnify.
Note that this also means it would be wise for the lifespan of artificial intelligences to be tied to that of specific humans.
At some point in the future, we as a species might be able to handle immortality in a more reasonable fashion, but for now, everyone should get the same deal from Death: one lifetime, with a beginning and an end.
Actually, my logic is not to let immortal corporations exist with single immortal decision makers. My logic is, "if we want to go for immortality, we need to get rid of capitalism." This is simply yet another reason, on top of many, that we need to get rid of capitalism.
Evil Plan:
1. Smash capitalism.
2. Futuristic scientific research and technologies.
3. Civilization worth being immortal in.
4. Actual immortality.
5. Go directly to the "FUN" square of the board. Enjoy.
If any of these steps results in death, well, I'm actually pretty ok with that. I want goodness more than I want to personally be alive.
Maybe if we didn't have the absurd excuse of "the tyrant is evil, but at least he'll die someday" we would be more inclined to do something, instead of sheepishly obeying and letting time pass.
The tyrant can build a fortress to slaughter 99.999999% of attackers and be safe until a million men or more oppose him at once, but no stronghold can protect against death itself. And as long as he fears death, the fortress can be invaded in sufficient numbers through the personal physician's private entrance.
Besides that, if I and the tyrant were both immortal, I think I would still prefer to wait, at least until my odds of success were better.
Don't think of it as doom, though. If you look around you, pretty much any Life, itself, involves the cycle: start -> do something -> finish.
Do your absolute best to do the best for yourself, and others, while you are Alive. Life is the most precious substance in the Known Universe, and believe it or not: you are in control.
So, think about it not at all, or often, but know this: you will reach the end, no matter what. You're in the 'do something' stage right now.
I get what you are saying and totally agree. However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important? My life being good or leaving others in a better place when I'm gone? Should I just live for myself until I'm 45, than start giving back?
There is a school of thought called Vedanta that I learned about from reading Alan Watts. It holds that all is "oneness" or "connectedness" and that the lines that appear to separate ourselves from each other are merely illusions and that helping yourself is helping others and helping others is helping yourself.
At first read, this sounded like hippy dippy nonsense to me. But then I started seeing "practical" manifestations of this in my life over and over again.
For example, I did a bunch of Pro Bono web development for a non-profit because I liked the non-profit. Besides the good feeling I got from helping a worthy charity and the thanks and friendships I gained from the people who worked there, I also ended up getting three web consulting gigs.
I gave a friend some money to start a creative project and their level of happiness has increased. And that happiness level is contagious and I find myself feeling some of that happiness spill over onto me whenever I hang out with them.
And when I started eating right, exercising, and following my goals and dreams, I was happier and that happiness spilled over to all around me. And as I became more successful, it opened up economic opportunities for those around me to take part in my business and to partner with. And it inspired those around me to follow their dreams. And that's spilling over to the people around those who were helped by me in an outward circle.
In a very grounded way, I'm really starting to believe there is something to this connectedness idea.
> However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important?
Question of the ages, that is. I tend toward contributing toward the general good as best I know how. But I came to that conclusion through a fair bit of contemplation, some selfish living (which still continues in degrees), and philosophical and religious thought. (And I'm still no Ghandi, I can play the part of "self-centered asshole" pretty well, and regularly.) In short, it's a journey you get to take all on your own, no one else will figure it out for you.
Keep in mind, too, that the two choices you laid out are not at odds with each other. As a personal example, I volunteer at an animal shelter. My wife and I walk homeless dogs, pick up their poop, and take some to training classes if it would make them more adoptable. For dogs that have been there a while, we'll take them on field trips to the park, maybe stop by Wendy's for a burger and fries. We'll each put in at least 100, sometimes over 200 hours/year there. We give the shelter arse loads of money (yea, high tech salaries!) We do it because we believe if we (society) have domesticated the animals, we have a responsibility to see that they are taken care of and treated humanely. Damned noble of us, eh? Except I find it to be a hell of a lot of fun to hang out with the mutts, teach them commands so that they're civilized members of society, go run around in the mud at the park, and ultimately see them get adopted. It ain't all selfless.
Dishing up food at a homeless shelter? Makes you feel good, right? That you're doing the "right" thing? It's still about you, because of how it makes you feel, or that you think that you are doing what's "right". Ultimately you should be removed entirely, and it's done because it's what the world needs right now. I'm still a long way from that ideal, but I keep trying. In the mean time at least some effort is expended toward making the world a little better, whatever the motivation may be.
Alas, you have to decide for yourself, but I can tell you my personal decision is to be as good a person to myself as I am to others, roughly in that order, with some compensation for personal privilege, perhaps, in the late-night fridge visits. That has improved things immensely in my life.
If I had to choose a society with all young people, all old people, or a healthy mix of each... i'd choose the later. Young people provide new thinking, they're essential to society. Old people provide foundation, and wisdom, they're essential too. We live on a planet with finite resources, to support the right mix, we should accept that its just not RIGHT to live forever, even if it were possible. I'd like to live until i'm 100, and I hope science makes it so i'm just as productive at 100, as I am today.
If society included lots of immortals, they'd be pretty driven to make sure that we're not stuck living on a planet with finite resources. There are plenty of untapped resources laying on the ocean floors and deeper into the Earth's crust than we typically mine today, and lots more off-world. Those are all technologically within our grasp today, they're just not cost-effective. But if we had to support an immortal society, the ROI terms change: it becomes reasonable to invest in an infrastructure that will take a few centuries to pan out, because people will live to see it completed and get the benefits from it.
Re: finite resources - Constraining the human race to a single planet puts a pretty small upper bound on our species' potential.
Humans evolved a desire to explore and adapt to new environments as an evolutionary advantage, this advantage doesn't need to be bound to one tiny little ball floating in space.
I assume there are only 3 sustainable paths for the human race. The first, is the norm. We continue as we are, we don't adjust to climate change etc in time. Society eventually collapses under the magnitude that it has swelled up to. We enter a second "dark age". The second, is we find a way to to sustain with the resources we have on this planet alone. Population finds a balance, and we go on living another 5000 years, just like we did for the first... except now technology plays a bigger role. The third, is we expand to space and limits become boundless.
The only scenario where we can think about super long life spans is the later. My point is, this is like deciding how to spend your millions of dollars before you've made them. My personal opinion is that the singularity is as close to inevitable for as long as we as a society choose to pursue technology. To me the likely scenarios are either A or C, and it really depends on which happens first... an environmental collapse or the singularity.
We haven't made any progress in lengthening the maximum human life. We can simply help more people so that they live closer to the maximum, so it's highly doubtful that we're anywhere near extending life beyond the 100-120 limits of our bodies.
Consider, for example, that work on artificial intelligence started in the 1950's. We've made lots of progress in 60 years, but it's definitely not a solved progress, despite the incredible progress.
I don't think it's such a black and white issue. Apart from some nerd rapture/uploading the brain scenario (which I find preposterous, just IMO) true immortality is just not possible. Even discounting the extreme view of the heat death of the universe, I don't think even the most careful people would live to be more than a couple thousand years. Most would probably die of something in 2-3 hundred years - war, famine, disease, natural disasters, or just even dangerous activities (driving, skiing, hiking, skydiving, etc) would at least on average, keep a steady rate of deaths.
But I agree with trying everything we can to extend the life as much as possible. I just feel in the end, a 500 year long life would represent a pretty lucky person.
edit: just FYI though, I'm not a hater; I'm even a futurist and a tiny bit of a transhumanist.
I suspect that when a car accident means a loss of 450 years of life instead of 45 years we'll probably end up requiring cars to be ten times safer, or roads to be inherently safer, or since we have all the time in the world, maybe no need to ever drive above 10 MPH other than recreational use.
This is a problem often not discussed about the utopia of a world filled with self driving cars... its very hard to make an AI that can handle 85 MPH on a crowded interstate, but once "everyone" has a self driving car, we'll probably just lean back and watch TV/movies/podcasts or do desk work or whatever so going 10 MPH is fine, at which point its not so hard of an AI problem anymore. So there's a hump to break thru after which the tech gets a lot simpler and lower risk.
Also the nature hike at the park is a wee bit less risky than hiking Mt Everest. Given an infinite amount of life, I think you'd see a lot more patience, and nothing kills people like impatience.
This is a problem often not discussed about the utopia of a world filled with self driving cars... its very hard to make an AI that can handle 85 MPH on a crowded interstate
Aging is a much harder problem than getting self-driving cars to 85 MPH.
In fact, 85 MPH would be pretty safe with (a) high-quality cars on the road, (b) low speed variance, and (c) efficient lane use (German-style, no passing on right, no camping in the left lane). 85 isn't safe in high traffic under current conditions, but that's because there are enough cars that can't handle it, and your 85 + someone else's 60 = speed variance (which is more dangerous than raw speed).
The superior reaction time and efficiency of self-driving cars could easily get to the point where they can drive faster than typical humans can safely go.
One note (that has nothing to do with driving speed) is that any society that can prolong life will be technically far ahead of where we are now. I think this is an important note. You'd be insane to want to live for 500+ years in current conditions, with economic scarcity and plenty of unsolved, rare health problems-- one of which would inevitably take you down. Immortality is completely undesirable without humanitarian advancement; the question is whether it's desirable with the extreme technical advancement (and, one hopes, political progress) that it would require.
True but there is the opposing force where if you live ten times longer, and you don't have to do the driving, its just as "effective" to sit in the back of some kind of conversion van going 5 MPH playing video games or reading or sleeping than to drive at 50 MPH.
There is a justification for raising speed limits even if death rates increase slightly because the aggregate total loss of life at 55 might be higher than at 65, assuming loss of life due to sitting around driving is as bad as loss of life due to being dead is equal. On the other hand if you live "forever" and you're not doing the driving anyway, then its hard to justify going more than 10 MPH or so. At which point its probably about 8 times less bandwidth required at 10 MPH than 80 MPH.
Its also more economical WRT gas or solar electricity use or whatever propellant solution.
Or at least a right to a dignified and peaceful death.
I do think a society that 'solves' death would need some way of identifying when life prolonging therapy should be withheld and that this should not just be a function of income.
In effect our current "do not resuscitate" clause.
Life expectancy only a few hundred years ago was about 40 years. Its about 78 years in the US currently. Human longevity is extremely difficult problem but there is no physical law stating that you can't live up to 200 or 500 years. Biological science is advancing at an extremely rapid rate and its possible that we may see doubling of life expectancy in next 50 years.
How much of that life expectancy 100 years ago were affected by child mortality? We haven't really doubled our longevity, we just took care of some things that lead to a lot more children reaching adulthood. The bulk of that might have been pretty simple, like better hygiene.
Are you suggesting modern medical science not helping people live longer by treating Cancer, Organ Transplants, Bypass surgeries etc ?
I am seeing so much pessimism on HN , it seems unlikely that majority of people here are hackers.
I don't particularly want to die, but knowing it's going to happen makes life a whole lot more interesting. For me, the looming finitude of life keeps my inclination to procrastinate in check - Why do today what can be done tomorrow? Because otherwise the things to do add up faster than the tomorrows on which to do them.
On the other hand, there's what you could call the Homer Simpson reaction[1]. If you know you're going to die, and you don't even know if it won't happen soon, you might be discouraged from doing things with a longer time frame.
Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy?
I firmly believe we're just a hologram, an experiment, with only one defined condition in our environment, death. Our overlords have watched us evolve and under the condition of death, and once we solve it, we will have won.
Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy?
For the same reasons they often get life-saving treatments? Why would the people who own the therapy refuse to be handsomely paid by common folk and/or the State for providing it?
Of course, it won't come cheap. Maybe a 500 year loan per treatment?
