On "Friendly" Immortality

Strongly agree.

Sure, but it has spurred more comment than otherwise would be made, and more directed comment at that. Net benefit.

WBE's?

Yes but velocity is higher than many people are comfortable with. Two kids in diapers and three more in grade school at the same time is a lot more work than many people who like children are really up for.

One reason Amish have so many children is that they are needed for farm work - you actually get a return on investment with children in a low-tech farm.

Contrary to lavalamp, in a society without age I expect more murder, not less.

Inequality and ambition will become more and more socially problematic as lifespans extend. Imagine not just competing against Rockefeller's descendants, but a 172-year old John D. Rockefeller (still sharp as a tack), patriarch of a clan of 150. And 150 assumes that they just extend lifespans, not reproductive windows! Compound interest will become a serious issue, in wealth, intelligence, and time.

Generational warfare is limited, now, because most people are patient enough to wait for their parents and bosses to die or retire. When that is no longer an option, things will get bloody- and maybe it will sometimes be a polite sort of "forced retirement," but I suspect that'll be more difficult to pull off than murder. You don't have the frailty that comes with age to force an accident, and it'll be difficult to accumulate enough allies to unseat them- they've been around longer. Would Nelson be content being forever just a grandson (especially if more second generation Rockefellers were being created)? Would John be content giving up the empire he created to watch his children or grandchildren mismanage it, when he feels just as hale and hearty as when he built it from scratch, and has the benefit of decades of experience?

As well, demographic trends that are vaguely worrying in the long run become short-run concerns. Suppose you had some violent, high birth-rate group that could become large enough to go around murdering other groups because they don't share their bloodline in two centuries. Normally, that would be your great grandchildren's problem, not yours, and it's easy to imagine their two-hundred year plan falling apart. But with the originators around to see the thing to completion, and your head on the chopping block, you might be interested in nipping this in the bud (as once they get large enough, it will be difficult to kill enough of them to change their minds).

Arguments for disposing of "defectives" are also stronger, because once you have a high-quality person, they stick around. Why not populate the world with just high-quality people?

Overall, I think a world of thousand-year vampire clans will be a better one to live in (especially if I'm a first-generation vampire!), but I think society's fractures will be deep and bloody.

This is Whig history. I am not confidant that we are morally superior to prior generations and that future generations will be morally superior to us. Making this argument would require a non-trivial amount of intellectual labor.

If there were 180 year-olds alive today, chances are pretty strong that a good amount of them would think that being anti-slavery is pretty progressive.

Actually there is data on this. Why not crunch the numbers? Those born in 1941 are 70 today, but where 20 in 1961. Controlling for how getting older tends to make people more conservative, how do their opinions differ? Do you think people who don't update on social norms, signalling and values are likley to die significantly more than others? If not I think you will find a surprising shift in individual opinions over the decades from what I recall of when I was last doing research on something related.

If I accept that "social progress" is going to slow down, but not stop, by some factor, this does not seem a grave tragedy, compared to the dis-utility of billions of deaths. Isn't the whole reason we care about the speed "social progress" because we dislike the dis-utility incurred by those who wouldn't be incurring it in a different (better?) system?

A sufficiently long life in the improved system should outweigh any difference in the amount of time spent in suboptimal conditions. To pick one of your charged examples and put a face to it, wouldn't you say Alan Turing might have decided to stick around if he knew he would still be young and healthy in 2010 and society would be accepting of homosexuality?

Turn things around: in a world where people lived forever, we would not solve the problem of social stagnation by killing people.

EDIT: Hm, I guess this is extremely similar to the provided counter-argument.

I don't think it would be considered "stagnation" from the perspective of the old folks. They might see it as society retaining its sanity. From that point of view, this is not a cost, but a benefit.

In order to count it as a cost, you'd first have to assume that the values that future folks would hold, given no life extension, would be better than the values people would hold given life extension. What are the reasons to think this?

We don't so much change our minds, and we grow new people and the old ones die.

Yes, because our neuroplasticity tends to decrease as we age. This is why it's important to realize that anti-aging treatments must deal with the brain as well as with general bodily cell degradation. I think that many people in the field do realize this, though. (See also my previous comment on this subject.)

Cross-reference: this issue was discussed in Three Worlds Collide — the born-in-our-era Confessor says that he is too old to lead — that his generation was appalled by the decisions of the younger generation, but the by-then established social structures did not give them a say and rightly so.

Have you ever tried having a long conversation with an elderly person, only to realize that they are bigots/homophobes/racists, etc? We all love Grandpa John and Grammy Sue, but they have to die for society to move forward. If there were 180 year-olds alive today, chances are pretty strong that a good amount of them would think that being anti-slavery is pretty progressive. They would have been about 90 years old when women got the right to vote.

We don't so much change our minds, and we grow new people and the old ones die.

Which hinges on "moral progress" currently happening or it being always desirable from our perspective.

A unexplored variant of the argument that I think works better would be one of the many examples of scientific revolutions marching on, one grave at a time. But obviously one could make a similar counter-argument that not all knowledge is good. Sometimes a better map gets you killed. But I would generally ignore that for now, since posters who question the high prior on the high instrumental value of a better map have a revealed preference of wanting a better map, considering the community they are a part of.

Edit: Missed this comment

We don't so much change our minds, and we grow new people and the old ones die.

Introspection works poorly here, as it often does. People are adept at changing their minds and forgetting they had ever thought differently.

A person with a good grasp of the outside view but who overly respected introspection might think: "I think I am right about things, but so does everybody. Furthermore, I haven't significantly changed my mind from being wrong often, nor has anyone else. Society has been improving over time.

So long as I humbly and accurately recognize my not often changing my mind parallels others' not often changing their minds, and it is unlikely I represent the pinnacle of moral progress throughout the ages (even assuming I'm better than my contemporaries) death is needed to replace people and maintain moral progress."

The problem with that reasoning is that it is not true that people don't change their minds - they mostly just think they don't. They can honestly say they have always supported chief Grok, even when chief Urk was in charge.

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This seems like a real problem, but, well, I don't know of any good way to deal with it. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling didn't happen until after the Confederate war veterans were all dead.

As I once said some time ago: What kinds of things which are currently considered signs of social progress are also things that an average educated person from the U.S. of the 1800s would find horrifying?

Yet it seems like most people are not applying the same thought processes to life-extending technology.

Many people have applied the same thought process. The transhumanists have just finished already.

The main reason why making the decision is easier for life extension than for AI is because the goodness of AI depends on exactly what its goal system does and how people value what the AI does, while living longer is valuable because people value it. AI is also a fairly technical subject with lots of opportunities for mistakes like anthropomorphism, while living longer is just living longer.

Sure there are some extra considerations. But imagine going to a society where people lived about 800 years and saying "hey, I have a great idea, why don't we kill everyone off on their 100th birthday! Think of all these great effects it would have!" Those great effects are simply so much smaller than the value of life that the 800-year society might even lock you up someplace with soft walls.

However scientists are working on these technologies right now, discovering genes that cause proteins that can be blocked to greatly increase life-spans of worms, mice and flies. Should a breakthrough discovery be made, who knows what will happen? Once it's developed there's no going back. If the technology exists, people will stop at nothing to use it. You won't be able to control it.

Just like AI, life-extending technologies are not inherently "bad". But supporting the development of life-extending technnologies without already answering the above questions is like supporting the development of AI without knowing how to make it friendly. Once it's out of the box, it's too late.

I was thinking about your post and these parts don't sound convincing enough to me. You can make a Police State Society that stops every person and checks their Birth Date on a government mandated ID, and just arrest/shoot anyone over 125 (or whatever the age is) Police states are not a GOOD thing by any means and I am not recommending one. But the idea of "You won't be able to control it." just seems like a very odd thing to announce for any kind of Biological life extension technology. How are we talking about an unstoppable opponent in the same manner people think of an AI?

And on the breakthrough side, even if we literally developed a pill to "Cure all cancers for a dollar, side effect free." That would be a STUNNING breakthrough in today's research. But we would need an even bigger breakthrough to get to life extension effects to what you're saying, or more likely, several breakthroughs in separate fields. Are we really anywhere near that?

I suppose to summarize my current beliefs, it is possible that lifespan will go up exponentially at some point, through a biological method, but I don't see that happening yet, and I definitely don't see it being unstoppable, and there are other technological events that I would expect to hit a crisis point far sooner.

Is there evidence that I'm not aware of that would make me change my thoughts on this?

The analogy of Life Extension to AGI seems weak to me. The problems of LE (if any should surface, which we don't really know will happen) would be very slow to take place, and we would be able to watch them unfold and fix them as they happen. AGI is more like splitting the atom, in that it could easily reach critical mass and go beyond our capability to control in a matter of split seconds.

So no, the same level of urgent caution is not merited. I'm not saying there's no way being careful can help us, but the mere act of conferring biological immortality through incremental advances in genetics is not something that should rationally make you worry in the same way that AGI should.

It's really just a minor infrastructure change as far as humanity is concerned, one which makes reproduction less necessary, reduces the demand for (new) basic skills education, etc. -- it doesn't reorganize the cosmos, muck around with our basic psychological make-up, or anything like that.

Heck I'd almost say being able to synthesize fresh meat and veggies from single cells rather than farming it is a comparatively bigger change for us to get used to... Eating is something we do every day, whereas aging is something we do once in our whole lifetime, at a slow and unnoticeable rate.

I'm rather glad you made this article, old sport, as it made me realize that I was treating this particular debate as an "arguments as soldiers" issue, wherein I must crush all opposing arguments and may never betray an ally. This was, of course, incorrect thinking, and so I'm glad I don't think that way anymore.

But looking at all the comments so far, it doesn't appear that there are any strong objections to life extension technology. There are the expected problems and the unexpected problems, but the same could easily be said of all sorts of tragedy removals that technological progress has brought us over this time. None of the ideas brought up in this post even attempt (so far as I can tell) to argue against at least doing research on life-extension, and, as others have brought up, this near-impossibility of existential risk from such technologies make the AGI analogy extremely weak.

So, good thing to bring up. But for the most part, we're done here.

Space colonization is another way of coping with more people (again on a longer timescale than 40 years.)

Space colonization isn't really all that necessary, if we're talking about human habitation. On the other hand, if we're talking about space industrialization -- constructing industrial/economic materials/objects in space -- then that definitely opens the floor to sustaining significantly larger populations here on earth, with just a touch of additional materials-science "shenanigans".

1. Orbital solar-thermal power plants (if constructed offworld with bootstrapped lunar industry) could push humanity to post-Kardashev-Type-I energy consumption. This reduces energy costs as a primary economic concern.

2. The adoption of skyscraper farming techniques would reduce vast swathes of human ecological impact (in addition to the offset of energy production offered by point #1.) It would also significantly reduce current human land-use by area. These two things in turn would allow for greater human population without apparent depreciation in available square-footage per person.

3. The adoption of higher-strength materials for construction (CNTs for example) could permit the development of 'megastructures' terrestrially. This, in turn, would allow for multi-level urban environments. Imagine a single building the size of the NYC metropolitan area that was half a mile high. Even if it was primarily open-air, and dedicated 25% of its area to "parkland", that would still represent as much as a ten-fold increase in "habitatation area" using generous amounts of square-footage per person. (I'm heavily 'ballparking' numbers here.)

-- In case it isn't entirely obvious; the scenario I just described would allow for the increase of human populations by approximately 20x our current numbers, all while reducing the total landmass utilized and our ecological footprint. (Industry, energy consumption, and agriculture would all cease having observable ecological footprints.)

While clinical immortality might decrease the TFR necessary for population replacement, it certainly wouldn't reduce it to zero. (Accidents, plain and simply speaking, happen. As do intentional deaths.) The question then follows -- what rate of TFR would such a culture described operate at?

John McCarthy argued that overpopulation won't be much of a problem as part of his larger analysis on the sustainability of progress.

I've never understood how severe food yield issues from overpopulation are supposed to come about. If the population is increasing far faster than we can increase the food yields, wouldn't the price of food massively increase and stop people from being able to afford to have children? Is the idea that the worldwide agricultural system would be gradually overtaxed and then collapse within a short period? If not, what were all the people eating the day before catastrophic overpopulation is declared?

One thing that should probably be noted is that doubling life span wouldn't necessarily double the number of years a woman is fertile.

As utterly basic as this response is, it must be made:

as much as life sucks now, I cannot expect it to suck for the entirety of the next thousand years. Therefore, I will attempt to live those thousand years. If life still sucks, then I cannot expect that it will definitely suck for the next ten thousand years. Therefore, I will attempt to live those ten thousand years.

In other words: I'd like to be around when life stops sucking, thank you very much.

I'm not sure I understand the practical impact of this objection. Right now, massive life extension (routine 100+ yr lifespans) and solving serious permanent medical conditions (regrowing lost limbs, curing Down syndrome) are both significantly beyond our capacity. Any research into either topic easily qualifies as basic research and I would predict that increasing our knowledge towards curing permanent medical conditions would be useful in life extension, and vice versa. Put slightly differently, how would you expect our basic research funding to change if we abandoned research into massive life extension?

And even if Down Syndrome occurs in the same frequency after 1000 yr lifespans are common, isn't that an improvement for most people?

Can't see why you should mercy-kill people in a hundred years but shouldn't mercy-kill them tomorrow.

A similar idea was discussed several months ago, in the post: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die.

Rebuttal of the rebuttal:

Also, nobody who doesn’t want to live longer would have to, so life extension technology wouldn’t result in immortal depressed people.

Suicide is already effectively illegal. Many easy, painless methods are outlawed or not given to the mentally ill (drugs, guns, assisted suicide). Suicide-attempters are force-treated. There is tremendous social pressure to not commit suicide, including inflicted guilt. (For detailed arguments, just read Sister Y's linked blog.)

Personally, I'm not interested in life-extension until life is actually worth living. Several problems (like the harsh, maybe-even-negative-sum social hierarchy) seem unfixable without a major re-engineering of humanity, so I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, if ever.

Having said that, I don't know how bad life in general is. Maybe some people actually have lives worth living. They can extend their lives if they want. I'm not interested in arguing other people into pessimism, and I have no reference point to understand their preference anyway.

However, I think it's credible that 30% or more don't have worthwhile lives. Having more people alive for longer seems like it will only bring back the Malthusian era much faster.

Assuming away any externalities, why would "life sucks" (i.e., life is worse than average/ideal) be a reason to think life is worse than death?

Edit: I see now that my objection is the same as Normal Anomaly's, at the end of the OP.

I'm going to bring up the classic Aubrey de Grey response, which actually works for all of these issues, but I think this one in particular. Yes, there will be problems if we live a much longer time. Yes, they will be very big problems. No, we don't even know what those problems will even be. But those problems will pale in comparison to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every day.

If the consequences of life extension really are unknown, then they might be really good just as easily as they could be bad. Giving those up has a high opportunity cost. Without more information about the nature of these "unknown" consequences, they are not relevant (for non-risk-averse utility maximizers).

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