> either it helps us conquer death, or it poses a massive —say, existential- risk to us all
Lesson of 2026: there is no "we". Hobbes is dead but still looming over us.
The risk is that it helps some people conquer death, while posing an existential risk to some people. The US has enough problems with its gerontocracy. There has only ever been one president born after 1946. What if you were right and there never was another one born after 1946? Propped up by an immortal Supreme Court on "life" terms, of course.
Life extension is also further fatal to birth rates, of course. I suppose the worst possible outcome is technology that extends life but not working life, so you get a larger and larger population of people too old to look after themselves.
I don’t question your portrayal of the worst possible outcomes — certainly victory over senescence could send us down all sorts of dysfunctional local minima. But I encourage you to try to intentionally invest in thinking through some nice ones, too!
That’s my main and primary point, to be clear: hope is essential to human flourishing, and it admits no justification by design, unlike all other beliefs. But to comment on a few particulars, on the off chance you/lurkers ever scroll back over this convo:
1. Surely you’d agree there’s a “we” in the sense of communal risk, yes? Obviously I’m thinking about xrisk again, but this applies equally as well to threats we all agree are grave, like climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, and hell, even economic adversity.
2. I will admit that I’m missing the particular Hobbes reference, so hopefully that’s not key lol. I know him for the social contract, primarily — are you emphasizing his deadness in order to imply that we no longer abide by said contract? Cause if so… we have problems, but the day to day seems pretty darn regulated still, IMHO.
3. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with birthrates we would consider low, but u also don’t agree that longevity would necessarily lead us there — a lot of people would probably still have kids in their youth, reveling all along in the fact that they’ll have decades to centuries to share with their adult children (if they want) instead of somewhere around, what… ~25y, on average? I certainly am not having kids now because I want to prioritize my youthful energy on my work, friends, and learning — knowing that I had time on the other side would reverse my personal decision 100%.
4. I think the concerns about technologically-enabled hyper chronic bigotry that you mention are overblown, no matter how many times the honourable Prof. Weinersmith argues the opposite in his comics. I’ve found cogsci, neuropsych, and philmind have all come to share a deep suspicion of the parts of us we consider continuous, persistent, and unified — an existentially confounding idea ofc, but also one that backs up ~~an old adage~~ a line from a recent sketch comedy show: ’People can change.’
Apologies for the rants. And I do feel like your latter description of a possible world would be an incredible setting for a biting scifi satire lol.
But in the end: I hope you can find a way to join me in the wilfully-hopeful camp, even if it’s not today or even this year. We have just as much science!
Lesson of 2026: there is no "we". Hobbes is dead but still looming over us.
The risk is that it helps some people conquer death, while posing an existential risk to some people. The US has enough problems with its gerontocracy. There has only ever been one president born after 1946. What if you were right and there never was another one born after 1946? Propped up by an immortal Supreme Court on "life" terms, of course.
Life extension is also further fatal to birth rates, of course. I suppose the worst possible outcome is technology that extends life but not working life, so you get a larger and larger population of people too old to look after themselves.