Epistemic status: there are some strong anti-death / pro-immortality sentiments in EA/rationalist circles, and it's bugged me that I haven't seen a good articulation of the anti-immortality case. This is a quick attempt to make that case. I'm confused about what to think about immortality overall; I think that it may depend a lot on circumstances/details, and be eventually desirable but not currently desirable.
The basic case for immortality goes something like:
A death is a tragedy. Individuals would, in almost all cases, prefer not to die. They have friends and family who care about them and would prefer they not die. In a large majority of the cases where they would prefer to die this is because of other factors they'd prefer to fix instead (e.g. extremely poor health). In a post-scarcity future we should expect to be able to fix these factors, so we should plan on abolishing death.
This argument mostly checks out to me when evaluating whether it's good for individuals to die. But my worry is that the whole line of thinking is too individualistic. Would it be good for society as a whole if people were immortal?
Historically I think the answer is not clear-cut, but my guess leans towards "no". If I imagine I have the option of pressing a button so that people 3,000 (or 1,000, or 300, or 100) years ago were immortal — not aging, and not dying of disease — I feel like I don't want to press that button. There would certainly be a lot of good things that would happen from it — many tragic deaths averted, many good things that persisted longer, and perhaps longer time horizons for individuals. But I am scared that:
- For most of history, populations were food-limited, so this would lead to more deaths by starvation or violence, which seem probably worse
- However in the modern world this might not be an immediate problem
- We'd also have contraception available as a tool (although it's unclear whether it's good to give existing people more life rather than their children having lives)
- It's possible that technology will move us to fundamentally different positions re. personal identity (e.g. because everyone is run as emulations, and these can be slowed down) before our inability to keep scaling food production exponentially causes hard constraints on population
- However in the modern world this might not be an immediate problem
- The world would have been much more likely to get stuck locked into some bad states
- A lot of repressive dictators die of natural causes
- If they were immortal, it seems much more likely that one would have successfully conquered the world, and established a regime which stably kept them in control for eternity
- Less extremely, there is the adage that science progresses one funeral at a time
- I'm sure this is sometimes an exaggeration, but also feel sympathetic to the thought that if new ideas threaten existing social structures, and if the people instantiating those structures were permanent fixtures, there might have been much more repression of new ideas
- It's a trope that the death of elderly relatives — even highly beloved ones — can be freeing for people
- This doesn't point to any particular failure modes, but is some support for "death may play an important role in allowing society (as it is currently arranged) to move on from things"
- A lot of repressive dictators die of natural causes
These are still concerns to me today.
At a more personal level, I have some worry that the narrative of death-as-tragedy can belittle narratives of death-as-end-to-story-arc, and that sometimes the latter seem like they are capturing something true and important. For old people who have had a happy routine and watched their grandkids grow up and have kids of their own, and feel like they can let go rather than needing to do more in the world, I dislike telling them (implicitly or explicitly) that this is a failing.
Would I eventually like to move to a post-death world? Probably, but I'm not certain. For one thing I think quite likely the concept of "death" will not carve reality at its joins so cleanly in the future.
Is there too much death in the world today? Yes. If I could push a button to increase life expectancies by 10% or 50% I surely would (although my confidence is driven more by a sense of an implicit contract with all the humans alive now than consequentialist reasoning). If I could push a button to increase lifespans 100x or 10,000x I would be much more hesitant. (If there is a technological singularity this century that goes well then I would love for as many currently-alive people as possible to stay alive to see it, but I think in expectation the bigger impact of changes in lifespans would be to affect how such events might unfold.)
Humanity and society are weird. By some cosmic fluke involving brains and thumbs we figured out how to mold the landscape to grow our food and later on figured out how to access million-year old energy deposits in the lithosphere.
We are less than two centuries out from the beginning of industrialized society and we have no clue how to balance energy and resource flows to sustain civilization beyond a few more centuries. And now some of us apes are thinking, "hey, how about we don't die?" as if the current weird state of things somehow represents some new normal of human existence.
There has been ample debate around "strong sustainability" vs. "weak sustainability", which centers on how much technological substitution can overcome increasing environmental pressures. People have been using specific, limited examples of weak sustainability being true (see debates around Limits to Growth) to argue against strong sustainability. Its one thing to argue that we can change planetary limits / carrying capacity, and another to say that those limits don't exist. Limits exist; that falls out of some basic thermodynamics.
Pursuing life extension beyond a few centuries seems reckless without figuring out how to do strong sustainability first. With limits, resources are zero-sum beyond some geologic replenishment rate; people living longer trade off against other people, non-human animal, and plant life, or it buys down the resources available to people in the future. I would expect longtermists to be especially cautious about how reckless life-extension could be given limits.