The Expensive Art of Living Forever
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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 particulars of what I'm experiencing (my memories, my personality, the sensations I call "my body" etc.) that are interesting to me; it's the sheer fact that I experience.
I fear this will degenerate into an unproductive debate about what consciousness is or is not, so maybe it's better to just nod politely.
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 afterlife.
Why?
Alternatively, if I shoot the clone, will the clone resume its consciousness in you? By what process?
> unproductive debate about what consciousness is or is not
I'm just addressing the question of why you'd say yes: you might be ready to be put of your misery, and at that point, why would you say "no"? The resumption of "you" gets an afterlife, and nothing gets worse for the you that's about to die either way.
What if we "clone" you by copying every other atom into a "left" clone, leaving the original in the right, and doing the reverse on the alternating atoms? Which resulting "clone" is you?
This way lies madness. Possibly twice.
Yes.
> Doesn't your consciousness basically dissolve and then reconstitute itself when "you" wake?
Yes.
> What about from second to second, between moments of inattention?
Yes.
> Are we relying on the "stability" of your constituent atoms?
Yes.
> On some "arrangement" of them?
Yes.
> On a particular locus of sensation (the goo in your brain pan)?
Yes.
> What if we "clone" you by copying every other atom into a "left" clone, leaving the original in the right, and doing the reverse on the alternating atoms? Which resulting "clone" is you?
My father replaced the handle, and I replaced the blade, but it's still my grandfather's axe?
Neither. You ripped my brain in half, I am dead.
What makes it the same consciousness as the yesterday one, if not all your memories, and past experiences? If my pure consciousness wakes up tomorrow in your body, with all your memories, will it be your consciousness then?
If the thing works like a computer, that is clone is truly identical, and time is just a counter, then there is nothing to resume the clone won't know that it was cloned, and the whole thing won't be much different from the normal passage of time, (except for seeing yourself killed won't be pleasant).
But if there is something else that you can't clone, like quantum state being impossible to clone perfectly, or a soul, then the clone is not you but that's because the assumption of a `perfectly identical clone` is wrong
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.
It's not a matter of guarantees; “unbroken consciousness” is, itself, only a “narrative” for the experience of memory; insofar as it denotes anything that exists at all it is nothing but present consciousness plus memory, and any other explanation veers into the realm of magical metaphysics.
That is crazy talk.
I understand the reasoning that leads you there. It's still crazy talk.
A "backup" of myself that retained my memories and abilities would solve these problems and others even though it wouldn't solve my personal existential dread over cessation-of-experience. (Though if someone did develop gradual replacement mind uploading I'd get to maintain continuity of experience too.)
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.
First, and most glaringly, death is not a solution to overpopulation, in any sense. It hasn't worked so far, for example. Additionally, there was a great video by Numberphile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpj0E0a0mlU, where he shows that the current 1.1% global growth rate results in us overpopulating the Universe in something like 9000 years. Sooner, rather than later, we will face a real population crisis, even in the face of 80-year lifespans. Growth rates absolutely will come down, one way or the other, in a way that will be functionally indistinguishable from outlawing procreation.
Second, transhumanists, and the subset of truly whacko pseudoscientific transhumanists (however large a fraction you think that is), represents not nearly everybody who is interested in longevity, nor do they characterize, at all, the entirety of those populations. I wouldn't characterize Aubrey de Grey as a transhumanist, for example. The smear doesn't stick, even if we were to allow smear tactics as legitimate.
Third, and finally, there is absolutely no guarantee that life extension technology will be expensive. None. Further, there is no reason to think that its cost would not decline over time, indefinitely. How much could an Alzheimer's vaccine actually cost, once every 50 years, lets say? How expensive could a CRISPR therapy be? If it were routine and assembly-lined? What about the decline in lifestyle cost after one has paid off one's mortgage and taken care of all the other mostly one-time expenses?
As thinkers, we truly need to do much, much better than this article.
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.
It doesn't say that small-molecule drugs developed today will remain expensive after the patents expire. Small molecule drugs discovered now should have approximately the same manufacturing cost as those discovered 10 years ago, even though the discovery cost has gone up a lot. So this is not going to make medicine in general breathtakingly expensive; in our lifetimes most people will never have the rare disorders that orphan drugs target, and in a couple of decades the exclusivity will be gone anyway.
I don't even think anyone expects a simple "take one pill per day" small molecule drug to prevent deleterious effects of aging. It would be great if that happened, of course. It couldn't be monopolized after the patent expires and it would be the complete opposite of an orphan drug; nearly everyone is going to suffer from aging eventually. More likely IMO it'll take genetic interventions, biologics, and a bunch of analytical techniques and frequently adjusted treatments to suppress deleterious aging effects, if it's possible at all.
Get used to this. Moderately-priced mass-market drugs will disappear. Or rather, they will go off-patent and become generics. With no R&D expenses to recoup, they will become cheap commodities, costing a few dozen or hundred dollars per treatment. New drugs, especially those protected from competition by the Orphan Drug Act, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Don’t be surprised when the first million-dollar treatment hits the market.
Which dovetails with:
These developments are no kind of tragedy — drugs cannot do much more to lengthen human lifespan. Nor are these developments the result of a conspiracy or of unusual levels of greed. They are just the end-stage of the depletion of a resource.
We are specifically talking about life extension, and the claim is that the modern pharmacopoeia is moving away from traditional drugs, to far more expensive alternatives with more therapeutic potential.
Look at first generation senolytic drug candidates that clear ~25% of senescent cells in mice, varying by tissue type. These vary from $100 per dose, for things like dasatinib plus quercetin, to a few thousand dollars per dose where you need a biotech company to one-off synthesize it for you, such as foxo4-dri. One dose is needed every few years - more than that won't help further.
The story will be the same for glucosepane cross-link breakers.
The trend in this type of technology is towards engineered small molecule / enzyme / peptide / etc that will cost next to nothing a decade after it is introduced, and can in any case be manufactured to order in China and shipped in if the patent holder decides to try charging monopoly rates. Alternatively, gene and cell therapies that can be mass produced, all the complexity baked into that manufacture, and then administered by a bored clinician. The cost will be similar to present day biologics, which are largely in the $1-10k/dose range. Again all of these treatments will be once-every-few-years, not any more frequently. That is the point of damage repair as a strategy - you only need to do it as often as the damage builds up. There is no point in doing it any more often.
If transhumanists were almost exclusively ANY OTHER ETHNICITY would the writer still have pointed it out?
Not trying to derail the thread into a race war, I'm just fatigued by the double-standard that keeps showing up in modern journalism.
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?
I find this attitude tiresome. The author is attempting to shame his subjects for daring to look beyond today's problems and for their demographic makeup. Everything does not have to be looked at via the lens of societal privilege. Can't we just let people dream of the future without saddling them with current day baggage.
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.” ― John Locke
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." -William Gibson
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.
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.
That's not an assumption I'm making. Death resets ossification and concentration of power every couple of decades, regardless of whether rejuvenation therapy would be available to the top 10%, 1%, or 0.001%, or whatever. The problem is not the therapy, or even who gets it, the problem is what happens when it is available.
The problems that immortality causes are social, not technological. People with wealth and power tend to accumulate more wealth and power, at the expense of everyone else. When they die, it is distributed among their successors. A slow, and inefficient form of trickle-down, if you will.
Ever hear the expression "Science advances one funeral at a time"?
Well, so do politics, except that they have a far more dangerous (to us) positive-feedback cycle.
> 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.
Life isn't an RPG where you punch wolves to get experience points, having a therapy that lets you live longer doesn't help after you starve to death in a GULAG, and most revolutionaries are young men with little to lose. You couldn't have picked a better example of asymmetrical technology if you tried. (Well, I suppose there's also the surveillance state, and drone armies...)
This is mostly due to age related brain function degradation, most scientists now have to relearn and try new things several times in their middle age. Unfortunately many lose that ability with the age, but retain the power they have gained before that.
If scientists could retain the abilities of their young brain for longer, science would benefit greatly from improving the ratio of learning/working time.
In general i agree that without death resetting ossification and concentration power would take longer, but is the death of billions of people worth that? Is the current interval the perfect one, or maybe we should intentionally create antibiotic resistant bacteria to make it faster again.
If no why is intentionally hindering the development of life extension any different than trying to destroy the effects of life extension we achieved so far?
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.
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 be killed off, because there won't be a benefit to the wealthy to keep them around.
I'm hoping we will (as a society) address issues of infinite expansion (which doesn't work in the long run), but are able to extend practical immortality and high quality of life to everyone currently alive at the time. But there are a number of obstacles in our path.
It feels like this is a novel situation in human history. Interested in being proved wrong...
Feedback loops are powerful and dangerous. A positive one can carry you to ever increasing wealth, wisdom and power, but a negative one could destroy not just yourself, but your entire family and the generations to come.
The poor have fallen into a highly negative one, and they are increasingly going too far in to have any escape velocity to get out. If we try to help them, we only prolong the inevitable and create an even greater population of poor that we simply can't support. If we let them die, then the blood is on our hands, but we may be left with a world that is more balanced.
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.)
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.
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?
Whatever the failings of feudalism and royalty from centuries past, there at least was a system in place for the elites to train the next generation of elites. The goal was to teach them how to rule, how to maintain their power base, and so on. A tradition to carry on, because they all knew they wouldn't be around forever.
We live in such chaotic times now. There is no tradition, no body of knowledge and custom to guide the elites of our society now. Now they do whatever the heck they want, with seemingly little regard for their own family's future, much less the fate of society in general.
I don't mind looking at nearly everything through that lens, even if not exclusively. We probably should think, in general, about differential healthcare outcomes even, and especially, now, for example. What I object to in this case is the smear tactic. "It's just crazy rich white people who are afraid to die." As you say, it's shaming. And, it leads to that other assumption, that this will always only be for rich people. I'm no fan of abject capitalism, but there are rich people who make things cheaper for everybody. Ford didn't own the only automobile, nor Boeing the only airplane. They, and other manufacturers, are interested in bringing costs down in order to get more buyers.
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.