Life extension is the most important thing we can invent.
Imagine a bunch of 200 year old geriatric silicon valley plastic
jesuses who refuse to die, but whose quality of life is so bad they keep
coming up with terrible ideas to fund their medical equipment.
“Well, mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had infinite
time, we would be less concerned with whether something was faster. The
reason speed has value is because time has value; the reason time has
value is because human life has value, and lifespans are finite. If you
made lifespans much longer, you’d reduce the effective cost of
everything. Thus insofar as reducing scarcity is acknowledged
to be the proximate purpose of technology, eliminating the main source
of scarcity – namely mortality – is the ultimate purpose of technology.
Life extension is the most important thing we can
invent.”
It is weird to say that you need to be totally detached from the process of people actually inventing a lot of modern tech, which is often more driven by 'I was curious and wanted to play with robots, and this stupid project was the one project out of a 100 variants I got funding for' than reducing scarcity.
It also ignores medical research, which has nothing to do with reducing scarcity (and a lot of procedures actually introduce scarcity due to expensive procedures, hard procedures (skilled docs are scarce), expensive equipment/meds etc). But as he made the link 'scarcity = mortality' this whole issue is nicely handwaved away.
Right! And military needs, long one of the most important proximate drivers of technological advancement (even in the dearly departed USSR!), tend strongly to increase both scarcity *and* mortality. It's just a bizarre thing to say.
Makes a bit of sense to me, in it's own transhumanist logic. Aka, you should pick the weird things which don't follow logically as just transhumanist assumptions (and don't forget, transhumanist are always coming from a position of unexamined privilege (worrying about how to equally spread life extension tech to the lower classes/third world seems to be either a no-no, or a good way to never get invited to speaking events again)).
It is also incorrect of course, mortality isn't the main source of scarcity, life extension (basically stopping aging) wouldn't stop hunger, exposure to elements, boredom, diseases. It looks like it that this person took the conclusion they wanted to arrive at 'we need life extension' and reasoned towards that.
There is also the weird counter argument that you can make, that humans are not a finite resource, and we can make more people whenever we want, so mortality isn't a problem, but that has a lot of other bad implications.
Also [this tweet of his](https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/1259912936602177536) im pretty sure I have seen this same 'people are taking it seriously now' argument 10 years ago.
E: Looks like this person is also [the guest speaker at the next SSC](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hudpaa/the_purpose_of_technology/fyno81i/) meetup.
> mortality isn't the main source of scarcity, life extension (basically stopping aging) wouldn't stop hunger, exposure to elements, boredom, diseases
Life extension is more glamorous than
• not killing innocent people
• eradicating poverty
This guy is completely capable of learning how the logistics of survival on a low income shorten the lifespans of others, he just doesn’t want to.
And to think that these Kurzweil fanboys unironically think they’re above the Kardashians repeatedly undergoing expensive elective surgeries in search of youth...
Same problem with the 'lets improve IQ' crowd. A big problem lowering IQ? Worrying about finances, but for some reason that hardly seems to come up. (Seems pretty solvable to me, but, that would have capitalistic implications).
I do have a soft spot for this transhumanist stuff. The extent to which that overlaps with rationalist tech-bros is disturbing - but at least in its broad strokes the ideology makes sense to me.
Curing aging is the holy grail of transhumanism for a lot of reasons. Most obviously it’s an unambiguous good and hugely desirable but in a deeper sense I think all of them feel like with immortality achieved transhumanists will have won. “Normal” people, too, will think like they do once everyone’s mental time horizon is no longer measured in tens but thousands, millions or even billions of years.
I think where they make a mistake is trying to apply this view to current day politics, etc. I would like to live forever but unfortunately that’s not an option for anybody alive right now. Nonetheless, I would be disappointed - and frightened for the future of this species tbh - were I to learn that by the end of the millennium we still hadn’t achieved immortality.
I also like the transhumanist ideas, but from what I have seen from the transhumanist themselves, the future from the Altered Carbon TV series seems to be most likely.
And well, people like Natasha Vita-More would like to live forever and reverse aging and would love to live forever, but I know a lot of people for whom it wouldn't be great. Some are already perpetually bored right now, and I don't think not aging/reversing aging would improve their lives at all, and it wouldn't instill a long term mental time horizon in them. E: and I do worry about immortal transhumanists upperclass people making very bad judgments about immortal non-transhumanist lowerclass people who don't share their long term view on things.
If I am anything politically it is that I attempt to be a champion of people at the bottom of the ladder, and a checker of the facts (the facts the rationalists tend to have on hand are wrong, either because they don’t understand what they imply or because they are actually just flat wrong).
I cannot for the life of me see how the speculative future value to such people’s lives of abstract and hypothesised technologies is supposed to motivate such people, especially given how massively contingent on historical change their availability to such people necessarily is
So no offence or anything, but why do we even need to appeal to other speculative futures as feature in sci-fi to make the point that this is all fundamentally up in the air?
I'm sorry I'm having trouble getting what you mean.
Are you saying you are having trouble to see how future speculative lives might motivate people?
Or are you saying that this is all bullshit because we don't even know if it is possible and how is this kind of speculative far future thinking supposed to motivate people at all?
(Because I can see how it can motivate people but also how people are going 'why the fuck do you care about this bs?')
What im saying is, I'm having trouble figuring who you mean with 'such people'
And while I personally would like to see what the far future has in store for all of us, I don't want any of the past atrocities of the people at the bottom to continue or repeat. The one is a fantastic fantasy after all, and the other is the real lived experience of billions of people, and my fantasies shouldn't stand in the way of all these billions living their lives without pain and suffering. Lot of Transhumanists and Rationalists are perfectly fine with 'acceptable losses' (and forget that these 'acceptable losses' didn't consent to any of this (see also Aella being fine with reddit free speech costing the lives of 10k random people), something that Warren Ellis got wrong in his transhumanist far future part of the Transmetropolitan. But turns out not getting informed consent is a bit of a personal problem with Ellis).
A) When have I ever been known to have the capacity to clarify what I mean
B) I have forgotten what I originally meant there
However, I think I was trying to make the point that most people at the bottom are not in any obvious way helped much by technology growth outside a handful of industries such as medicine: my best friend grew up mostly without amenities that were widely available in the Western world in the 60s, in spite of growing up in London in the 90s.
The second point I think I was trying to make is that sci-fi references are a useful tool for understanding where we are now, but ultimately exist only posterior to the point that dystopias are never *that* far off the horizon, which is a point that can be made without using the word “dystopia”
On the first paragraph (tech growth), that is true, I think the counterpoint is that 'eventually these technologies will reach the poor' (which is true, but imho it often just comes as a tax, you nowadays need an attention swapping smart phone to do anything, and these things are super expensive (compared to old phones) and break down quickly, the rise of more and more cars comes with a breakdown of public transport, etc etc) and a lot of technologies don't reach poor people at all, it is a false idea richer people have because they simply can't empathize with poor people.
And yeah, a lot of science fiction is interesting as either just a fantasy (which is what most science fiction tech is, just magic), or as a reflection on current things. An example is star trek, people love the replicators, which mean that people can eat as much food as they want without worry, without realizing that atm right now there is enough food to feed everybody (not to give everybody what they want, but for what they need there is at least enough). We waste so much food on capitalist bullshit it is insane, the replicator is a good reflection of that idea. 'What if people didn't have to worry about food'.
And to paradoxically answer the first points here last.
A) This seems a fine attempt.
B) That happens, now imagine you had super AGI robot brain, you could state restore yourself to that moment and then
Somebody other than me downvoted you, so don’t take that from me if you notice: I barely use either the upvote or downvote buttons anyway
Basically I agree, and particularly on the subject of things such as smart phones: I don’t have a phone contract at the moment, although I am being pursued on false pretences by a collections agency over my thankfully expired contract for a smartphone with Vodafone, a major provider in the UK infamous for avoiding corporations tax. As the son of a wealthy businessman I’m free to consider my options against Vodafone and their grubby collections agency, and to at least attempt to pursue a career that doesn’t require me to be in constant contact by mobile app - such as, say, Uber - and therefore to choose a life away from phones. Obviously I’m extremely online, but that’s not a tax: I got the iPad I’m writing on now free as a hand-me-down, and my only personal outlay was for the Bluetooth keyboard to type on.
I mentioned my friend, indeed my best and closest friend, so close in fact that when we broke up as a couple several years ago that my own mother took her in and gave her a bedroom free of charge (she lives in, of all places, my own childhood bedroom).
In order to get to the stage where she could go to university she had to make some pretty heavy applications for funding from various charitable organisations who helped her to get basic technology such as a laptop or a smartphone, and still I recently felt obliged to lend her a semi-fucked laptop I had lying around so that she could study the music she needs to study in order to pursue her career as a jazz musician.
The upshot is that people without access to people like *me* experience technology growth not, as you point out, as an unmediated benefit but often as a “tax” - however, I wouldn’t personally use the word “tax”, I would refer to it as a barrier to entry, and only thenceforth as a “tax” in the sense that a barrier to entry (which in a liberal economy is a much worse thing than a tax) can be characterised as a tax once the barrier *has been overcome*.
The point about replicators in Star Trek is therefore made even more apposite: replicators in Star Trek are a metaphor for the post-scarcity society (and this is explored in its complications in that episode where Scotty ends up on Picard’s enterprise, incidentally, with respect to synthahol). So, if sci-fi is a reflection of a contemporary society, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that in a pre-post-scarcity society, it makes sense that they exist as reflections of the (totally unfair and unnecessary) charity of people like me and my family, but written as a fundament of what that society looks like, rather than a contingent matter of luck assigned to this or that individual by the universe at the expense of somebody else who deserved exactly the same treatment. This has been a fundamentally motivating feature of what I guess I sometimes maybe work on academically and it boggles the mind that people think so shortly of it as a motivation.
Why?
Isn’t it monstrous that all the time new humans gain conscious awareness and the moment they do reality tells them: “By the way, you’re aging - you know the process that lets you be taller, stronger and more intelligent every day. Well, in a few short decades that will start to make you weaker, dumber, sicker and generally miserable. It will cause you unending pain and one day you’ll die because of it. Enjoy your life.”
In my view this sort of psychological torture is fundamentally incompatible with even the most basic understanding of human dignity. I’m utterly convinced that the fact that many people have learned to live with this trauma and abuse - perpetrated by nature basically - to the extent that when asked they actually welcome their own mortality is a desperate coping mechanism selected for by evolution. Anybody without this ability of self deception went mad or killed themselves or both.
Old age and death is bad. How can a cure to that not be unambiguously good?
Yeah, I was linked Yud's stupid dragon story as well but it still doesn't address any of the actual problems with letting Rupert Murdoch live forever and never can.
> Curing aging is the holy grail of transhumanism for a lot of reasons. Most obviously it’s an unambiguous good and hugely desirable but in a deeper sense I think all of them feel like with immortality achieved transhumanists will have won.
Have you watched Altered Carbon?
Cause the societal structure - ultrarich live-forevers and have-nots trying to live forever is what you get without affordable transhumanism. A literal dystopia.
ofc, this is all highly ironic coming from a movement that these days is personally tied to the "oh, let's invest so much into ethical AI because that would be bad if it was unethical AI"
I’ve read the books.
I don’t buy that argument. Few people think we should have resisted the invention and universal entrenchment of the Internet because it gives bad, unethical actors like the CCP or NSA more power over us.
Political questions require political solutions - not Neo-Luddism.
How often do you describe skepticism of the "unambiguous good" of new technologies as "Neo-Luddism"? Is this your go-to frame toward critiques of transhumanism?
No. But to a very specific kind of argument it is. Namely that unequal access to something might lead to overall bad outcomes. The fact that that’s the case is not a problem with the thing itself but with its surrounding political, economic environment.
Obviously capitalism is disastrous and if left unopposed will use tranhumanist-style advances to perpetuate itself like it has done with prior technologies. The fact that we live in a fucking dystopia doesn’t change the fact that a cure to aging would be an unambiguously good thing.
I’m struggling to work out why you would think that the benefit of a technology is distinguishable from its social consequences, when you have already *described* a technology as beneficial specifically in terms of its social consequences
The social problem of technology - to accidentally paraphrase Martin Heidegger - is specifically the question whether and how technological change leaves people behind, and whether such technologies will, eventually, lead to a poorer life for people if things don’t happen differently
This is why there exist historians who have an at least *ambiguously* approving view of the very Luddites themselves: a fundamental sympathy with the social consequences of technological change that outstripped their capacity to adapt
This doesn’t mean that in our present example the abolition of ageing through technology isn’t an *ambiguous* good, but it does imply that the technology itself is - as in your own presentation - only *ambiguously* good, because historical contingency plays a crucial role in *how and whether it is good*
Technology, just like the system which creates it, is inseparable - as you acknowledge - from the social conditions which, at least in my view, create the very word “good”
That’s a great reply. I’ve tried to think about it for a while.
Perhaps *unambiguous* is too strong a term and ultimately indefensible. The reason I used it was because I view a cure to aging as just that - a cure to a disease. Like smallpox or leukemia. Given the nature of your society access to a cure might not be universal.
But a cure to a disease is different from other technological innovations. The Luddites, who I do have sympathies for - were it not for my views on aging and immortality I might very well be some sort of primitivist romanticizing humanity before the agricultural revolution -, or the [Silesian Weavers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weavers'_Uprising) - to pick an example from my country - were worse off because of the combination of social inequality and technological innovation. With a cure to a disease, the worst that can happen is that some people won’t be able to enjoy it. I.e. it simply won’t affect their life. Everyone else will only enjoy a benefit.
In that sense it’s unambiguous.
So much for my thought process (better: intuition). I’m sure it can be challenged ;-)
In replying I think it’s a good idea to cover both of your replies at once, so I’ll quote [what you and I said here](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/hwd4kf/bss_concludes_that_the_ultimate_purpose_of/fz0yg6p/?context=3) as well
>>I am thoroughly unconvinced that life extension or eliminating ageing and/or death are unambiguous goods
>Isn’t it monstrous that all the time new humans gain conscious awareness and the moment they do reality tells them: “By the way, you’re aging - you know the process that lets you be taller, stronger and more intelligent every day. Well, in a few short decades that will start to make you weaker, dumber, sicker and generally miserable. It will cause you unending pain and one day you’ll die because of it. Enjoy your life.”
>In my view this sort of psychological torture is fundamentally incompatible with even the most basic understanding of human dignity. I’m utterly convinced that the fact that many people have learned to live with this trauma and abuse - perpetrated by nature basically - to the extent that when asked they actually welcome their own mortality is a desperate coping mechanism selected for by evolution. Anybody without this ability of self deception went mad or killed themselves or both.
>Old age and death is bad. How can a cure to that not be unambiguously good?
To lay my cards on the table: I am not a transhumanist, although I get the point they’re making. For the most part my limited interests in transhumanism stem first from my being troubled by the accelerationist political economy that many people who label themselves transhumanists espouse, and second from my sympathy with the ethics that are often espoused in the transhumanist world as it pertains to trans*gender* life. I am not transgender, but insofar as I can I support my LGBTQ+ siblings.
However, for me, what you have described above is not a monstrosity. Suffering issues with what would later be termed “depression” and “anxiety” in the psychiatric sense from a very young age has not made me unambiguously amenable to the project of extending one’s health as an ultimate end, i.e. longevity or immortality. Death and ageing serve a social and psychological role in many people’s often fractured hearts which should not be merely dismissed as sufferings to be cast aside.
The possibility of growing old, and eventually dying - or indeed dying suddenly, loom so large over the lives of so many people that removing that possibility and recasting it is a choice you don’t have to make if you don’t want to is an enormously disruptive enterprise that shouldn’t be taken lightly. My politics are not conservative btw, I’m a queer liberationist on the far-left end of the spectrum, so I’m not making this point from a “don’t change things” perspective. I have known people who died both young and old, and I wake up in the morning feeling sad about some and sanguine about others, because each of those deaths reflected their lives in different ways that - in my opinion - is not captured by the “yes or no” ethic of choosing to die in a post-death society.
Such an ethic is one I infer that you are endorsing when you say that you view death and ageing as a disease. A death, in this view, is something you would prefer not to face, just as you would prefer not to face cholera. The problem is that I don’t see things that way: a death can be both something deeply regrettably painful (like cholera, whether you survive it or not), or it can be merely a sad parting of ways, and even an opportunity for the celebration of a now parted life.
I’m no more religious than I am transhumanist by the way, I’m not talking about a soul going on to the next world or some shit like that. Nor am I a primitivist, but I care a lot about things like ecology and the balanced functioning of society with the rest of the natural world. It seems to me, as a consequence at least partly of what I’ve said above, inhumane not to acknowledge that the abolition of death and ageing, and that failing to distinguish between disease and ageing and death is a risky thing to do, especially in the anthropocene.
There isn’t a huge amount of logical argument in there, because I am being deliberately - and a bit sadly, given the subject matter - impressionistic. But I think you can locate the points attempting to find themselves if you read sympathetically. Just as the anti-death movement often make emotional appeals in the service of the argument, I’m making emotional appeals in defence of death.
> The fact that that’s the case is not a problem with the thing itself but with its surrounding political, economic environment.
Yeah, that's a curious distinction. Since we don't and can't live sans any surrounding political, economic environment - nor can any technology we use exist in such a way - I don't see any sense in why "problem with the thing itself" matters. It's unambiguously good from the vantage of a view from nowhere that doesn't matter.
As somewhat of a transhumanist myself, i can't help but disagree with a lot of that - I certaintly don't see how 'curing' aging would be *unambiguously* good or desirable, and in fact i think it would make for an immensely dystopian turn in society if it were accomplished today.
That being said, there's plenty of better and more important transhumanist things one could develop - obviously an immense amount of ailments could be cured if we could just replace the part in question. In fact, i think this would be an important thing to strive for even if it reduced our lifespans (technology breaks down too after all, not to speak of the body rejecting it) as long as it wasnt too drastic - I for one would undoubtedly choose to live to 40 with a body that generally does what i want it to, than to live to 70 (or forever!) with one that doesn't and requires constant medical upkeep to even stay alive (as is current reality for me and many others)
tl;dr immortality isnt everything, or much at all
> to equally spread life extension tech to the lower classes/third world seems to be either a no-no, or a good way to never get invited to speaking events again
Wait, really? I mean, I know the Dork Enlightenment types are like that, where are the transhumanists talking like that?
Try finding an article in humanityplus magazine talking about how making sure the lower classes get equal acces is important.
There is this really big void about this subject in a lot of transhumanist places. (H+ is my goto example because somebody once posted a 'we must beware the rightwing takeover of transhumanism' article there, which was instantly scrubbed (i read it on my rss feed) and the author of that stopped posten (and reposting content from other places in h+) after that it was basically the end of h+ mag.
So my N is low on this, but this left a really sour taste and made me notice just how weirdly class struggle is absent from most transhumanist ideas. (And noticing something not being talked about is hard anyway).
E: of course i could also just be wrong and there could be a different explanation for all of this.
okay I memed it
Imagine a bunch of 200 year old geriatric silicon valley plastic jesuses who refuse to die, but whose quality of life is so bad they keep coming up with terrible ideas to fund their medical equipment.
“Well, mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had infinite time, we would be less concerned with whether something was faster. The reason speed has value is because time has value; the reason time has value is because human life has value, and lifespans are finite. If you made lifespans much longer, you’d reduce the effective cost of everything. Thus insofar as reducing scarcity is acknowledged to be the proximate purpose of technology, eliminating the main source of scarcity – namely mortality – is the ultimate purpose of technology. Life extension is the most important thing we can invent.”
Is it just me or does this make no sense?
I wonder what fraction of these people have read the entire Twilight series.