The Expensive Art of Living Forever • Hacker News Board

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#21

Post by nshepperd » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

What a colossal asshole. Transhumanists are people who are desperately wishing for longevity-related medical advances to come down in price and be universally available, and are often spending significant amounts of their own money to that end. Because, on the whole, they don't want anyone to die.

Well, life extension will only be for rich people if people like the OP successfully lobby against public support for it and prevent any progress from being made.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#22

Post by nwah1 » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

theothermkn wrote: post #15

vkou wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I make a perfectly identical clone of you, and then shoot you dead, will you resume your consciousness in that clone? Why? Alternatively, if I shoot the clone, will the clone resume its consciousness in you? By what process?

The strange places this leads arrive almost immediately. Are you the same person after you take a nap? Doesn't your consciousness basically dissolve and then reconstitute itself when "you" wake? What about from second to second, between moments of inattention? Are we relying on the "stability" of your constituent atoms? On some "arrangement" of them? On a particular locus of sensation (the goo in your brain pan)? Wha…

Look into open individualism as one possible resolution.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#23

Post by eunoia » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

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.

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 consumption fill that need now...

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#24

Post by MayeulC » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

That may just be the way the article is written, but I find all these people to be a bit too much self-centered and maybe too much on their bodies, in my opinion. There is more to old age than just the body. I personally think that if everyone could live forever (in flesh or not, maybe just in a sort of library/archive), the biggest advantage would be that experiences are retained.

It is just a shame to think about the amount of knowledge that is lost every time someone dies. And the effort needed to train the next generation. On one hand, that means we get to imagine better ways of teaching, on the other hand, we have to spend more time studying, or just accept that we won't know everything perfectly (and be more specialized than our ancestors were).

This specialization is only compatible with technological improvement if we can delegate more of the low-level task/knowledge to computers/AI, or if population keeps increasing (which isn't really sustainable, long-term). The alternative is stagnation, or regression in some fields to progress in others.

Edit: I can get some people not agreeing to this view, but this was meant at the starting point of a discussion, not a general truth. Could the downvoters at least share their view of the topic?

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#25

Post by RealityVoid » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

monktastic1 wrote: post #6

"Advanced artificial intelligence, they hope, will allow us to make exact copies of our minds that will live indefinitely in networked computer systems." I've never understood this mindset. If I asked you: "hey, here's proof that all the data that comprise your personality, memories, etc. have been copied to a computer, may I now give you a lethal injection?", why on earth would you say "yes"? It's not the particular…

I just thought of a little thought experiment.

Let's say you have the option to be revived after you die. Same body, just... you die and you come back. Pretty convenient, right?

What if you have the same opton to be revived but you loose... one day, one month, one year of your memories. Still, pretty cool, right? You get to yet live.

But what if your body gets completly destroyed and your consciousness gets placed in a completely different body? The end result is the same as the same other 2 cases. Why would you be bothered by the difference in process if the reseult is the same? I see two options - we either place too much emphasis on the continuuity of our body or the continuiti is actually an important aspect of living - maybe because of the power of natural habbit, nature doesn't usually reconstruct what it destroys.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#26

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

chr1 wrote: post #5

dgllghr wrote: post #3

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. I don't think the author is saying that what they want is wrong, just that we should think through the implications of such a future when we already have such high inequality. "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distri…

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).

I have occasionally pondered as a sci-fi concept a religious cult that dedicates itself to identifying and murdering immortals. In a world where humans have eliminated the natural causes of death, the stability of social systems may demand that unnatural causes of death replace them.

There are other possible structures designed to handle immortals.

These include prohibitions on persons older than N years voting, holding elected office, working in management positions, or controlling property. Which is to say that immortals would be prohibited from directly enforcing their will on younger people, once they get past a certain age. They would then be forced to be sneaky about it, by doing it through art. This substitutes political death for biological death, but also creates an entirely new category of crimes, based on youth fraud.

Then there's the idea that immortals all eventually join the diaspora, and never impact the baseline human culture, because everyone past a statistical age threshold boards a ship bound for distant stars, and is never seen or heard from again, except by those in their ship. Each ship is then expected to evolve its own unique culture, which will likely include some with features that are not destabilized by immortal-versus-mortal tensions. This works out fine until ships start returning, perhaps without reliable knowledge of Earth.

We already have plenty of speculation on this, in the form of vampire novels. In general, the older a vampire character gets, the richer and more callous it becomes. Its life in fiction usually becomes a routine depredation upon mortals, combined with a vicious power struggle among the other immortals. I would imagine a 400-year-old trillionaire to be similar in character.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#27

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

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.

Because elites basically don't care much about unwashed masses, until some enterprising members of hoi polloi decide they want to be elites too, at which point they become a threat in need of active management.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#28

Post by matte_black » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

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…

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

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#29

Post by philipkglass » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

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.

I agree with highly technical and ongoing. I'm agnostic about "very expensive." Initially very expensive, sure. But how much of the expensive stuff can be eventually automated and routinized? I'd guess "a lot," since that's my general guess about the future, and in that case the cost would fall a lot as well. If I'm wrong -- and I could be wrong; many predictions of widespread automation have been premature -- then I agree that the costs could remain very high.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#30

Post by spditner » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

monktastic1 wrote: post #16

philipkglass wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of what I fear about death isn't the end of my experiences but the fact that the things I was doing while alive will cease. I won't be able to earn a living to support my loved ones any more. I won't know if anyone will continue the lines of research that I consider interesting. I can't be sure that the investments I have will still be managed well. A "backup" of myself that retained my memories and abilities w…

Thanks, that's an angle I hadn't considered before. (I still don't follow the argument about continuity of experience by gradual mind upload, but we can probably chalk that up to different intuitions about consciousness).

Maybe think of it less as a one-time transfer from one singular place to another, and more a redistribution of a workload whose larger outcome is consciousness. After a migration period, that consciousness would find it's not using the meat-resources anymore.