As a counterpoint to this post on i09, here are four arguments for immortality:
1. Health care problems, solved. As a society, we can’t stop talking about healthcare, the costs thereof (trillions of dollars in the US alone), and all the behavioral and social implications. Personally, we mourn loved ones who have passed away, or, worse, been debilitated by terrible diseases like stroke or dementia. Every one of us watches as we, and our friends, become less physically capable with every passing year. How can anyone argue that eliminating all of this wouldn’t be a good thing?
2. A new balance. Today, we race through life, dreaming of squeezing some well-deserved leisure time out of our sunset years. How fast can we get ahead? How much time can we spend at the office, advancing our careers? What’s the fastest path to that fast pension? Well, even assuming we can rely on social structures like these in the future, is this really any way to live? Probably not. With the long-term perspective that immortality brings, we would seriously have to look at a new balance that seamlessly integrates work into our lives. Less work. Meaningful work. More time to sit back and consider the serious questions. And if we are to believe Samuel Johnson, “All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.” But, more subtly, a shift from grab what you can as fast as you can, to what will I love doing, and have meaning—forever?
3. Doing grand things. With immortality, long-term projects suddenly aren’t a problem. Want to study the life-cycle of elephants? For centuries? Without losing the intelligence or perspective you’ve gained? Sure. Want to travel the solar system, or beyond? Or would you like to explore what kind of art you can create, given near-infinite time to perfect it? Again, suddenly it isn’t about, “Can I get this done in my 20s/30s?” but “What’s a grand thing that I truly want to do?”
4. Thinking long-term. When our average lifespan is only 70 or 80 years, it’s easy to dismiss anything happening a hundred years hence as irrelevant. If we can look forward to 700 or 800 years (or more), suddenly the far future is visceral, meaningful, and real. How does it affect us? What should we be doing to plan for it? It’s a complete and utter perspective shift, forcing us to think long term. And that’s arguably the most important thing immortality can do.
And now, before everyone eviscerates me as an incurable pollyanna or lapdog of the radical transhumanists, let me point at this story, published recently in Futurismic. Yep, there are plenty of scary scenarios involving immortality—but, to be fair, we need to look at the positive side as well.
April 24th, 2010 / 8 Comments »
May 3rd, 2010 at 11:13 pm
I find all of these arguments worth (and better comparing to the those that speak against immortality). But the last argument is the one that sounds most appealing. If hundreds of years matter than we would protect the environment and would care for nature, animals and people more. That’s how I see it.
May 4th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
I could wish that this was a lot more detailed and less fluffy, but I’m happy to see people who defend against the kind of misinformation, half truths, and downright fear mongering that leads to such neo-luddism as the Io9 article.
I invite you to come check out the Immortality Institute. http://www.imminst.org/forum/
May 6th, 2010 at 8:23 am
There are some odd leaps in logic here, of the cart-before-horse variety. All your reasons in favor of immortality presuppose semi-infinite resources as well as equal access to them, capability to expand into space, and a totally flat social organization with direct representation. A few more points pegged to specific reasons:
1. Realistically, immortality will be biology-based. If so, health care may well consume all financial and most social resources because of the need to sustain the mechanisms that keep people immortal. As for uploading to other frames, this is a way of leaving a descendant or a memento, not a path to immortality (more in Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Won’t Live in the Matrix, http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/ghost-shell-why-our-brains-will-never-live-matrix)
2. Unless we change our brain wiring significantly, our capacity to learn will slow down. Later in life, we are better at synthesizing information than at acquiring it.
3. Immortals made so by technology are likely to be extremely conservative not timid, since anything truly adventurous could kill them.
4. It’s the other way around, actually: if we attain physiological immortality before we have the resources and brain capacity for long-term implementations, today’s problems will appear as balmy breezes in comparison.
Incidentally, my review of Shine is on SF Signal: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/04/guest-review-athena-andreadis-reviews-shine-an-anthology-of-near-future-optimistic-science-fiction-edited-by-jetse-de-vries/
May 6th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
I was wondering if I could use this information in my website. I will provide a link to your blog, may I?
May 7th, 2010 at 10:42 am
I left a response that got held up somewhere in limbo. I will be discussing this issue soon on my blog — it would have happened already, but the far more exciting news of the Neanderthal genes took precedence.
May 8th, 2010 at 12:07 am
Hi,
Interesting arguments. But I don’t think any of them are compelling. If good technology guarantee everyone’s graceful aging to 100, that might solve the health care crisis to. Similar objections could be made to the others. Native Americans thought long-term without long lives and nothing guarantees the theoretically long-lived would actually think long term.
I’m not necessarily against immortality.
It’s just hard to develop any compelling argument that immortality would be great for society. Especially, the long-lived might make a society that was extremely conservative.
The most compelling argument is that we don’t personally want to die. Immortality is a luxury, a possibly dangerous luxury but that doesn’t mean we won’t be eager to get it.
Immortality is unlikely to happen in isolation – it will likely to be part of other massive changes in human’s further increased ability to control our environment. All these changes will present the paradox that human might control the world but what does it mean to control ourselves? The answer easily be extremely ugly consider we aren’t thinking about the present much now – and human society is falling apart to the point that we not would enjoy all this increased power but feel a need for it.
May 14th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
[...] AIs are the aliens of the 21st Century. As both the economics of getting mass out of a gravity well (about $11,000 per kilogram) and the hostile space environment (to which humans simply haven’t evolved…yet) returned space exploration down to near Earth (commercial satellites) after the prestigious — and very expensive — Moon landings, both the interest and the likelihood of aliens dwindled. The fact that the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) hasn’t turned up anything in 50 years hasn’t helped matters, either. Humans are, in general, not very patient (maybe a dose of extreme longevity would come in handy). [...]
May 15th, 2010 at 8:48 am
[...] AIs are the aliens of the 21st Century. As both the economics of getting mass out of a gravity well (about $11,000 per kilogram) and the hostile space environment (to which humans simply haven’t evolved…yet) returned space exploration down to near Earth (commercial satellites) after the prestigious — and very expensive — Moon landings, both the interest and the likelihood of aliens dwindled. The fact that the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) hasn’t turned up anything in 50 years hasn’t helped matters, either. Humans are, in general, not very patient (maybe a dose of extreme longevity would come in handy). [...]