Epistemic status: there are some strong anti-death / pro-immortality sentiments in EA/rationalist circles, and it's bugged me that I haven't seen a good articulation of the anti-immortality case. This is a quick attempt to make that case. I'm confused about what to think about immortality overall; I think that it may depend a lot on circumstances/details, and be eventually desirable but not currently desirable.
The basic case for immortality goes something like:
A death is a tragedy. Individuals would, in almost all cases, prefer not to die. They have friends and family who care about them and would prefer they not die. In a large majority of the cases where they would prefer to die this is because of other factors they'd prefer to fix instead (e.g. extremely poor health). In a post-scarcity future we should expect to be able to fix these factors, so we should plan on abolishing death.
This argument mostly checks out to me when evaluating whether it's good for individuals to die. But my worry is that the whole line of thinking is too individualistic. Would it be good for society as a whole if people were immortal?
Historically I think the answer is not clear-cut, but my guess leans towards "no". If I imagine I have the option of pressing a button so that people 3,000 (or 1,000, or 300, or 100) years ago were immortal — not aging, and not dying of disease — I feel like I don't want to press that button. There would certainly be a lot of good things that would happen from it — many tragic deaths averted, many good things that persisted longer, and perhaps longer time horizons for individuals. But I am scared that:
- For most of history, populations were food-limited, so this would lead to more deaths by starvation or violence, which seem probably worse
- However in the modern world this might not be an immediate problem
- We'd also have contraception available as a tool (although it's unclear whether it's good to give existing people more life rather than their children having lives)
- It's possible that technology will move us to fundamentally different positions re. personal identity (e.g. because everyone is run as emulations, and these can be slowed down) before our inability to keep scaling food production exponentially causes hard constraints on population
- However in the modern world this might not be an immediate problem
- The world would have been much more likely to get stuck locked into some bad states
- A lot of repressive dictators die of natural causes
- If they were immortal, it seems much more likely that one would have successfully conquered the world, and established a regime which stably kept them in control for eternity
- Less extremely, there is the adage that science progresses one funeral at a time
- I'm sure this is sometimes an exaggeration, but also feel sympathetic to the thought that if new ideas threaten existing social structures, and if the people instantiating those structures were permanent fixtures, there might have been much more repression of new ideas
- It's a trope that the death of elderly relatives — even highly beloved ones — can be freeing for people
- This doesn't point to any particular failure modes, but is some support for "death may play an important role in allowing society (as it is currently arranged) to move on from things"
- A lot of repressive dictators die of natural causes
These are still concerns to me today.
At a more personal level, I have some worry that the narrative of death-as-tragedy can belittle narratives of death-as-end-to-story-arc, and that sometimes the latter seem like they are capturing something true and important. For old people who have had a happy routine and watched their grandkids grow up and have kids of their own, and feel like they can let go rather than needing to do more in the world, I dislike telling them (implicitly or explicitly) that this is a failing.
Would I eventually like to move to a post-death world? Probably, but I'm not certain. For one thing I think quite likely the concept of "death" will not carve reality at its joins so cleanly in the future.
Is there too much death in the world today? Yes. If I could push a button to increase life expectancies by 10% or 50% I surely would (although my confidence is driven more by a sense of an implicit contract with all the humans alive now than consequentialist reasoning). If I could push a button to increase lifespans 100x or 10,000x I would be much more hesitant. (If there is a technological singularity this century that goes well then I would love for as many currently-alive people as possible to stay alive to see it, but I think in expectation the bigger impact of changes in lifespans would be to affect how such events might unfold.)
I felt quite frustrated by this post, because the preponderance of EA discourse is already quite sceptical of anti-ageing interventions (as you can tell by the fact that no major EA funder is putting significant resources into it). I would in fact claim that the amount of time and ink spent within EA in discussing reasons not to support anti-ageing interventions significantly exceeds that spent on the pro side.
So this post is repeating well-covered arguments, and strengthening the perception that "EAs don't do longevity", while claiming to be promoting an under-represented point of view.
Thanks, Owen! I do feel quite conflicted about my feelings here, appreciate your engagement. :)
Yeah, I agree with this -- ultimately it's on those of us more on the pro-immortality side to make the case more strongly, and having solid articulations of both sides is valuable. Also flagging that this...
...seems roughly right to me.