I always like to remind people that the road towards immortality is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with immortal rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of.
Don't be surprised if they realize there isn't enough room for the rest of us. These new 1% immortals may also require a special country in which they are not at risk of being tragically harmed by one of us billion mortals. Watch you don't get bit by their 2 tonne Boston Dynamics guard dog...
"I always like to remind people that effectively treating heart disease is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with long-lived rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of."
[Back to the present]
Our age is characterized by the fact that access to types of medical technology is basically flat. Rich people get to hire better doctors, but there are no super-secret, ultra-restricted forms of medicine that are inaccessible to everyone else. Your chances of getting into clinical trials of the new new things are about as good as theirs, provided you are prepared to pick up a phone and put in the time.
I don't think that's true. To take one example, Steve Jobs famously gamed the organ donor system by buying houses in many states in order to get on multiple statewide registries. Now, most medical treatments aren't zero-sum in the way of organ transplants, but let's not pretend rich people can't buy better health than the rest of us.
Sure they can, but I think of it as rich people subsidizing the medical research for the rest of us. It trickles down, and as the progress continues, there's always another new expensive thing for rich people to pay for.
As for the organ transplants; somebody needs to pour more money into stem cell research and related fields so that we can start growing organs, thus eliminating the whole organ market (including the black one) and zero-sum dynamics of transplats.
What about the effects of over population? Predictions of food, water and clean air shortages don't seem to lend themselves to an even distribution of nano bio-technology.
Why is it awful? All new technologies initially cost tons of money. It is the rich early adopters who keep them afloat long enough so that there's time to make them cheaper and within reach of them masses, when scale advantages kick in. But if nobody buys it when it's too expensive, there might just not be a chance to develop it to the point when it's affordable.
Why is it not only bad, but worst you can think of? I, for one, can think of much worse things than immortal Bill Gates, however annoying it may be for some. Just turn on the news and watch long enough, I'm sure you'll see some of it. Then head to the library and open any 20th century history books. I guarantee you you'll find things much worse than an annoyingly long-living billionaire - such as genocide a of millions, for example. And not once but multiple times.
>>> Don't be surprised if they realize there isn't enough room for the rest of us.
Why there wouldn't be enough room for the rest of us?
It's awful because for the first time in human history there will actually be a race of people who are superior to the rest. Hasn't exactly played out great even when it's just in their imagination.
Put yourself in the mind set of a super rich and powerful immortal human being. The stakes are hard to imagine, you are trying to preserve your existence for an infinite future. People who stand in the way are not even going to have a chance, an immortal can't afford such a risk.
In what meaning it would be a "race"? Why would they be any more "superior" than now? There are a lot of things that rich people can have and poor people can't - if that is your definition of superiority, it has been happening for millennia.
>>> The stakes are hard to imagine, you are trying to preserve your existence for an infinite future
Human brain can not comprehend infinite, so it won't be much different from any regular person who's trying to stay alive - most people don't know when they'd die and don't think about it as a definite endpoint anyway, so it as well could be in infinite future.
>>> People who stand in the way are not even going to have a chance, an immortal can't afford such a risk.
Chance of what? And if the risk is so high, why would you want to alienate people that outnumber you million to one and on which your whole existence - since you can't personally produce any of the technologies needed to support your immortality, right - is based on? You'd rather try to prove them keeping you alive is a good thing and not start to murdering them in droves like you seem to imply. After all, even if medicine somehow reaches the level where all diseases could be cured (which is very improbable but let's allow it for a moment), one can still be murdered, and for a rich and potentially immortal person the risk here would be much higher than for a would-be murderer that has much less to lose. So the strategy you describe would be very foolish.
Great response. I just can't help but imagine an upperclass of immortals being extremely protective of their prospective infinite existence to the point that a large group of them would have no problem committing genocide to keep it that way. After all, it would be easy to cast mortals as a lesser being in a future in which others have become almost god like.
Hopefully there will be some sort of colonization of space at that point and they can at least leave Earth to us mortals.
Ultimately I just don't read enough sci-fi to have all the debate points down. I'm just trying to apply to marxist concepts to something which perhaps will have completely eclipsed Karl's reality.
For being godlike, mere longevity is not enough. And to commit genocide you need an army. Why the army would do it for you instead of killing you and dividing your enormous wealth between themselves? You'd need something more than longevity to manage that. Also, what would be the profit in committing genocide? You'd position yourself as an individual that is extremely dangerous and posing risk to everybody, so that more people would be willing to go to greater lengths to get the world rid of you. And longer you live, more chances are one of these people will get lucky. So why increase your risk? If I ever became an immortal rich man, first thing I'd do is to institute a huge philanthropic programs and advertise the heck out of them, so hurting me would be like hurting Santa Claus - only a completely depraved man would think of doing this, and if he did others would try to stop him. Why should I assume actual rich men are stupider than me and can't see it? After all they could see enough to actually become rich, unlike me - so I must assume their practical smarts exceed mine, and they won't behave in completely impractical way just to be evil.
Personally built and programmed by the said billionaire? Well, if he can personally produce, program and control an army of robots, he will be godlike. But then he also can produce an army of manufacturing plants to satisfy basically every need of the population. Why be a most hated being in the universe if he can be the most loved one?
Uhuh. Now here's the question though : which problem is easier, and will be solved first. Because the second problem solved will be stillborn.
a) make humans immortal
b) make a non-human conscious being that's immortal
I would argue that we're much closer to b), and that it's a much easier problem to solve.
Even if the above is wrong, an artificial lifeform would solve many more problems that merely immortality. How do you let humans operate in tiny spaces (e.g. in tubes with a diameter of 2cm). How do you let humans operate "in the large", e.g. moving 5000ton concrete blocks ? How do you let humans operate in unstable conditions (e.g. mining, handling explosives, on the battlefield, ...). How do you build a star-trek transporter (for computer programs, that's a solved problem). How do you keep them alive in space, underwater, in the ground ?
All of those are things where an artificial lifeform would have a massive advantage.
So I believe in the matrix prediction. We'll build artificial lifeforms. We'll get our collective asses handed to us by these lifeforms first economically, then militarily. And this lifeform will colonize the galaxy in ~1 million years.
Because this has really bad unintended consequences written all over it. When the people controlling a significant percentage of the world's wealth are more importantly concerned with their immortality than the well being of the rest of us, it will come out in many, many ways, and a lot of them won't be good for the rest of us.
Why you think that other people should be primarily concerned with your well being? I think your well being is your concern, and faulting some imaginary billionaire for not being concerned enough about you looks like extreme form of entitlement for me.
But I notice you can't name even one way that would be bad. All you can do is a vague prediction "oh, it would be so bad you won't believe". Not really convincing.
The amount of wealth controlled by top 1% in US stayed essentially the same for the last 100 years - about 1/3 (with some fluctuations, but roughly stayed around that). Some say US has an unusually high inequality, so if we take it as a top boundary, we can say that in the world top 1% controls no more than 1/3 of the wealth. Yet while one can say there are a lot of problems, no unimaginable horrors came out of it and society wasn't destroyed - on the contrary, life of virtually every person in all the strata of the society has become better.
"The amount of wealth controlled by top 1% in US stayed essentially the same for the last 100 years - about 1/3 (with some fluctuations, but roughly stayed around that). Some say US has an unusually high inequality, so if we take it as a top boundary, we can say that in the world top 1% controls no more than 1/3 of the wealth. Yet while one can say there are a lot of problems, no unimaginable horrors came out of it and society wasn't destroyed - on the contrary, life of virtually every person in all the strata of the society has become better."
I don't think that statistically follows - I've not done the math, but it reminds me quite a bit of Simpson's Paradox.
No harm done, I bet immortality will eventually come in the form of 'brain backups' in Google Drive and your physical body is merely a vessel which you can use to interact with the physical world.
Elysium is fascinatingly weird film - so they had all those ships packed with wonderful medical technologies and robots standing by on minute's notice and still refused to spare any of it because of pure spite, despite not even needing them at all, as they all have the same things in their homes, so only reason why they also had all those ships with medical robots would be to heal Earth people - but they never did, so why they built those medical ships in the first place? Just to taunt poor earthlings?
They have the technology to reassemble human body on molecular level and they still need millions of humans to work in degrading conditions to build those robots - because those molecular-precision technologies somehow not applicable to building robots? And yet despite their dire need of those workers - they not only dispose of them without second's hesitation but also allow their robots to mutilate them for no reason, thus degrading their productivity significantly.
This movie really doesn't led itself to any thinking - it just falls apart like wet toilet paper if you start to think about it.
Don't be surprised if they realize there isn't enough room for the rest of us. These new 1% immortals may also require a special country in which they are not at risk of being tragically harmed by one of us billion mortals. Watch you don't get bit by their 2 tonne Boston Dynamics guard dog...