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I still haven't been sold on a need for immortality. We have people live longer than they like now. Why extend any further past this?
by DoctorOW 3y ago
I still haven't been sold on a need for immortality. We have people live longer than they like now. Why extend any further past this?
- the__alchemist 3y agoCome back to this when you're old, or another circumstance where your life is failing. You might not have the same mindset as when death seems like something in the distance that is happening to other people, or you far in the future.
- DoctorOW 3y agoI've talked to multiple people who feel more or less ready to die. This reinforces my point.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoI've talked to multiple people who want to live forever, at various stages of their lives. Our comments therefore cancel out. (Our of curiosity, the people you talked to - were they elderly, in failing bodies, with failing minds, seeing nothing in their personal future but slow and steady degradation? Might they think differently if their quality of life could be improved?)
- throwanem 3y agoI saw you palm that card. Not being able to die is just not being able to die. Rejuvenation is a different, and I suspect a considerably harder, problem.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoRE (): one also needs to filter out the religious folks who believe in some kind of an afterlife, as they likely expect that to be a better deal than anything humans can come up with on their own.
- DoctorOW 3y agoYes these people were particularly elderly, but immortality is not a cure for being elderly. It effectively exasperates the condition.
- lab14 3y agoWhy not?
- DoctorOW 3y agoThere's a finite amount of resources, experiences, and overall joy that life offers. Infinite life loses its appeal after those returns diminish.
- rnk 3y agoI think we have enough resources to go around now. We just don't allocate them fairly. People and companies like making money and resist change, resist other technologies and sabotage them politically, as an example.
- NL807 3y agoWhat if you can reset some of your experiences?
- ux-app 3y agopeople generally get tired of life because their body is failing. I'm sure you could find exceptions where people were just ... bored ... and ready to die, but this would be the extreme minority. >There's a finite amount of ... experiences I very much doubt that is the case in anything but the most pedantic, philosophical sense.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoPersonally I don't want to live forever. Though one might argue people only live longer than they wish to because their body falls apart around their consciousness, or they are faced with losing their consciousness slowly (such as Robin Williams)
- com2kid 3y agoI can easily plan out a few hundred years of activities. Let's say I have a 500 year lifespan, all except the last 10 or so with health and vigor. Well at that point, the opportunity cost of skill mastery becomes tiny. Spend 20 years learning to become a really great piano player, and another 15 learning parkour. Master 3 or 4 martial arts, that is a good 20-30 years each. Homestead for a decade or two, doing everything from scratch by hand. Spend a couple decades doing volunteer work. 1 minute of ideas and I'm up to 150 years so far. I agree that need to achieve a post-scarcity society, which would involve a lot of uncomfortable trade-offs. E.g. if we just have food that we can 100% automate the production of and that doesn't cause any ecological harm, we'd dramatically limit what food exists for human consumption. Same goes for transit, consumer goods, and so forth. I honestly think that if humanity wanted to, we could transition to post scarcity in a few decades using today's technology, but it would be a drop in quality of life for the first world (no more steaks!) so there is no real motive by those with power and money.
- quesera 3y agoI can easily think of 150 years of things to do simply as a brain in a vat. Sure there are sensory inputs I'd miss. But as long as IO in the form of text and/or audio is working, with or without augmentation, I'm confident it would be worth a try. Vision would be a nice to have.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI would not give up my agency in such a way. "No please don't!" Said the brain nobody was listening to anymore...
- happytoexplain 3y agoYou, personally, probably won't be sold on it - the concept is straightforward, so it's not like there's much you could be missing. If we manage it in your lifetime, you can simply die and let live.