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The Expensive Art of Living Forever

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Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#31

Post by eunoia »

matte_black wrote: post #28
eunoia wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the elite have always had a use for the "unwashed masses" so to speak. Maybe you need a large standing army to fight for your country's interests. Or maybe you need a large untrained labor force to fuel the industrial machine. Robots remove both of these "uses" for a large impoverished class of people. Are we entering the first era of human history where elites have no actual use for an underclass? Or does consump…

Perhaps the poor have outlived their utility. What’s next then? A culling?

I have no idea, and to be completely clear I think this is an incredibly dark and dystopian line of thought. I'm just very curious what the world looks like when the rich no longer have any need for the poor.

It feels like this is a novel situation in human history. Interested in being proved wrong...

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

Gatsky wrote: post #10
theothermkn wrote: post #4

I think what dismays me about this article is that it contains exactly the kind of profound vacuity that passes, inexplicably, for wisdom about the possibility and impact of life extension and the character of those who are interested in it. It's difficult to know where to begin. First, and most glaringly, death is not a solution to overpopulation, in any sense. It hasn't worked so far, for example. Additionally, the…

About your 3rd point, recent results (clonal haematopoeisis, single cell genomics) do in fact suggest that life extension interventions will be highly technical, ongoing and very expensive.

At first. Civilization develops through automating things; there's nothing suggesting the methods for longevity won't improve past initial stages.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#33

Post by ansible »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #20
ansible wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is good reason to be concerned about moving into a future where the wealthy get to live forever (or at least for a very long time) while the poor live short lives of labor. That really isn't going to happen. For good or for bad. Either practical immortality will be widely available and low-cost, or it won't. And if it isn't, then robots will be doing the work instead of people. The poor masses will just…

Attempts thus far in history by the wealthy to "manage" the poor have worked reliably only insofar as the poor believed they were OK. Beyond that, violent revolution with massive bloodshed is common.

Attempts thus far in history by the wealthy to "manage" the poor have worked reliably only insofar as the poor believed they were OK.

Or more properly, the poor were afraid of their own lives getting worse.

This is all speaking from an USA citizen's perspective...

If the elites had their own act together, they could easily avoid a violent revolution this time around. Get the masses all addicted to some new forms of entertainment, and slowly and carefully take away the means to resist.

I mean, that is sort of happening right now, but badly. And the elites in general seem to be, to put it bluntly, dumb as fuck. Most of them are so focused on their own narrow and short-term self-interest, that what they're doing is far from sustainable. Crossing over into the "outright destructive" category.

They are failing to think in the long term (i.e. not just "think of the children" in the abstract, but in the specific, "think of my own grandchildren" respect), and failing to pacify the masses effectively.

What's the point of being rich if you're not going to be around to enjoy it?

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#34

Post by [deleted] »

wonderwonder wrote: post #2

"In a world where a growing class of retired Americans are living in poverty and perpetual, insecure, backbreaking labor during what should be their retirement years, transhumanist visions of a future of “infinite abundance” (We’ll just 3-D-print food! Everyone will move to space!) aren’t inspiring, but perverse. Transhumanists are also almost exclusively white, as is borne out by the older, moneyed demographic at RA…

[deleted]

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#35

Post by chr1 »

vkou wrote: post #14
chr1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future where only wealthy get to live forever is indeed very bleak, but there is a future worse than that: the one where everyones life is short (like now).

You're assuming that: 1. A world where Ghengis Khan or Emperor Tiberius, or Joseph Stalin were still alive today.... 2. Would be no worse from the world we have, except a few powerful people would have not had to die. The interests of the wealthy and powerful are not aligned with those of the rest of us. Death is one way in which dynasties and despots lose power - moreso if they have multiple successors.

I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely.

First of all that would assume rejuvenation is very costly, more costly than raising a child, which is unlikely.

Second, the despot doesn't work alone, he needs to have other people who do all the killing, and these people are going to want to not die as well. All of the despots you mention had a large base of supporters, and it is difficult to remain a supporter on you are going to die for no good reason.

Third, since the technology is not a magic ring to just hide, people who fight against the despot would be able to use the it as well, and next to despots gaining more experience, you'll have people fighting agains them living longer and having more chances to fight.

What i think is more likely, is a softer concentration of power, where rich people keep money and power for much longer, but poor people are still kept content with a small chance to get rich themselves.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#36

Post by QAPereo »

theothermkn wrote: post #4

I think what dismays me about this article is that it contains exactly the kind of profound vacuity that passes, inexplicably, for wisdom about the possibility and impact of life extension and the character of those who are interested in it. It's difficult to know where to begin. First, and most glaringly, death is not a solution to overpopulation, in any sense. It hasn't worked so far, for example. Additionally, the…

https://undark.org/article/peak-pharma-drug-discovery/

Offers a fair amount of substance to back the notion that in general, medicine is going to be breathtakingly expensive in the near future. The state of biological and novel treatments now seem to support that notion. If you want to say that may change, even reverse, you need to offer more than personal incredulity to be convincing.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#37

Post by henrikschroder »

monktastic1 wrote: post #13
arebop wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sensations you call your body change over time, until there's nothing but fatigue and pain left. If someone offered to let you resume consciousness on artificial hardware after your body had ceased to function, you might take them up on it. In fact, some of my eldest relatives are in high spirits but also looking forward to death, because they have religious convictions about a wonderful, energetic, pain-free aft…

"Resume your consciousness" does not apparently mean to me what it does to others -- hence the thought experiment I gave. Just because there's a computer out there churning out bits that match mine (for some acceptable definition), in what sense would my consciousness "resume" if you killed me? Whatever sense that is, it doesn't interest me in the slightest. If I proved to you that such a machine already exists for y…

I like the Star Trek teleporter angle, because it shows us how we're susceptible to narrative explanations over actual explanations.

The way the Star Trek teleporter works is that you step into it, and then you are dismantled, picked apart atom-by-atom. You cease to exist. You die. You are gone.

But immediately afterwards, elsewhere, atoms-by-atoms are put together again, to form a thing that looks like you and talks like you and has your memories. To outside observers, there's no difference between the you that stepped into the teleporter, and the thing that stepped out of it on the other side. The narrative tricks us, first you're here, and then you're over there. Of course it's still you!

But the reality of the thing doesn't in any way guarantee the transfer of an unbroken consciousness. And I'm quite attached to mine, thank you very much.

I see the arguments downthread about how sleeping or going unconscious aren't guarantees of your unbroken consciousness, and the rabbit-hole of existential dread that entails. But come on. The fact that the matter that makes up me is pretty static, makes it pretty reasonable that my consciousness is unbroken after a nap.

But anything that involves movement of my consciousness without also moving the matter that my consciousness emerges in, has to have some serious fucking rationale for me to believe that it will lead to an unbroken consciousness.

And, of course, asking the philosophical zombie if it really is me in there, doesn't count.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#38

Post by philipkglass »

eunoia wrote: post #23
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attempts thus far in history by the wealthy to "manage" the poor have worked reliably only insofar as the poor believed they were OK. Beyond that, violent revolution with massive bloodshed is common.

So the elite have always had a use for the "unwashed masses" so to speak. Maybe you need a large standing army to fight for your country's interests. Or maybe you need a large untrained labor force to fuel the industrial machine. Robots remove both of these "uses" for a large impoverished class of people. Are we entering the first era of human history where elites have no actual use for an underclass? Or does consump…

No, consumption doesn't fill that need. "The rich will still need the masses to consume the products the rich sell" is a tune that some economists whistle through the graveyard when they're brave enough to contemplate the end of human labor but not brave enough to contemplate that automation might render most of their discipline obsolete.

That said, I don't think that the rich can wage a successful war of extermination against the poor. If we reach the point where human labor is completely obsolete, and any old plutocrat can fab up a robot army, then it's not just exterminationist billionaires who get access to robot armies. It's also philanthropic billionaires, and national or even regional elected leaders, and perhaps even robot "pirates" who are just duplicating robots without permission. That's an existential risk to civilization in that it takes a much smaller group to threaten global violence than it did circa 1940. But it also means that the most a rational Evil Billionaire can hope for is mutually assured destruction; any overtly violent attempt at eliminating the poor can trigger a cataclysmic war, but the EB can't rationally expect to kill off the masses and get away with it unopposed. EB better have already uploaded his backup consciousness to offsite Martian storage before trying that one. (But if he's an immortal being who can live in space, why would EB even want to kill his way to more control of property on Earth? This is like the implausible plot of a bunch of alien invasion stories where societies capable of interstellar travel still want to come here to violently seize our dirt and water, for some reason.)

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#39

Post by Avshalom »

wonderwonder wrote: post #2

"In a world where a growing class of retired Americans are living in poverty and perpetual, insecure, backbreaking labor during what should be their retirement years, transhumanist visions of a future of “infinite abundance” (We’ll just 3-D-print food! Everyone will move to space!) aren’t inspiring, but perverse. Transhumanists are also almost exclusively white, as is borne out by the older, moneyed demographic at RA…

Well they aren't all just dreaming are they. Some are pouring resources into bring about their future.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#40

Post by ansible »

philipkglass wrote: post #38
eunoia wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the elite have always had a use for the "unwashed masses" so to speak. Maybe you need a large standing army to fight for your country's interests. Or maybe you need a large untrained labor force to fuel the industrial machine. Robots remove both of these "uses" for a large impoverished class of people. Are we entering the first era of human history where elites have no actual use for an underclass? Or does consump…

No, consumption doesn't fill that need. "The rich will still need the masses to consume the products the rich sell" is a tune that some economists whistle through the graveyard when they're brave enough to contemplate the end of human labor but not brave enough to contemplate that automation might render most of their discipline obsolete. That said, I don't think that the rich can wage a successful war of exterminati…

(But if he's an immortal being who can live in space, why would EB even want to kill his way to more control of property on Earth? This is like the implausible plot of a bunch of alien invasion stories where societies capable of interstellar travel still want to come here to violently seize our dirt and water, for some reason.)

Indeed. That's the consistently ridiculous theme that has pervaded SF for decades, Oblivion being a recently example that I've seen.

If you've already uploaded, then you might want to just ship yourself off to another solar system, so that you can have unimpeded access to all that matter and energy, instead of competing for stuff here.

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