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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

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 distributed." -William Gibson

chr1 9y ago
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).
- vkou 9y ago
  You're assuming that: 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.
  - chr1 9y ago
    I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely. 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.
    - vkou 9y ago
      > I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely. 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...)
      - chr1 9y ago
        > "Science advances one funeral at a time" 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?
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  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.
ansible 9y ago
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 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.
- CapitalistCartr 9y ago
  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.
  - eunoia 9y ago
    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...
    - matte_black 9y ago
      Perhaps the poor have outlived their utility. What’s next then? A culling?
      - eunoia 9y ago
        I have no idea, and to be completely clear I think this is an incredibly dark and dystopian line of thought. I'm just very curious what the world looks like when the rich no longer have any need for the poor. It feels like this is a novel situation in human history. Interested in being proved wrong...

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 distributed." -William Gibson

chr1 9y ago

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).

vkou 9y ago
You're assuming that: 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.
- chr1 9y ago
  I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely. 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.
  - vkou 9y ago
    > I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely. 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...)
    - chr1 9y ago
      > "Science advances one funeral at a time" 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?
logfromblammo 9y ago
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.

ansible 9y ago

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 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.

CapitalistCartr 9y ago
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.
- eunoia 9y ago
  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...
  - matte_black 9y ago
    Perhaps the poor have outlived their utility. What’s next then? A culling?
    - eunoia 9y ago
      I have no idea, and to be completely clear I think this is an incredibly dark and dystopian line of thought. I'm just very curious what the world looks like when the rich no longer have any need for the poor. It feels like this is a novel situation in human history. Interested in being proved wrong...