an end to death would mean an end to all human liberty forever. the only purpose of immortality is to create a permanent ruling class who will lord over the rest of us as cattle and functionally as gods.
an end to death would mean an end to all human liberty forever. the only purpose of immortality is to create a permanent ruling class who will lord over the rest of us as cattle and functionally as gods.
Clearly none of them watched The Good Place
If I recall my Dracula correctly, it is the moral responsibility of all Texans to use our big knives to kill vampires.
maybe if they were hot and horny like the vampires in true blood
They are all just trying to recreate what they read in some metal hurlant comic books from the 1980s But somehow nobody seems to notice or talk about that
Counter offer, we give it to rich bastards before we launch them into the sun
Either that or they’ll fuck off and go to virtual paradise instead of bothering the rest of us anymore.
holy shit
medical breakthroughs are expensive at first, but then become cheaper
Funny I had the same thought watching alien earth
Anyone who wants to be the God Emperor of Mankind unironically should be ground up into hamburger
So it's possible another healthcare CEO got himself merc'ed and it's being buried. bsky.app/profile/opsn...
Also consider that science really does advance one funeral at a time.
Death is part of life, sorry to break it to the egomaniacs
The resistance wholly informed by Warhammer
yep. the very idea of immortality in mythology is where everything went wrong. gods gotta die.
Beggars in Spain…
these tech people are stupid to think that they're going to live forever but it's also stupid to think that the end of death would be a bad thing death is bad
Yes, the TV show Altered Carbon shows at least a version of this horrifying idea. In the future, humans discovered alien technology that transferred consciousness from one body to another even after death. This creates a dystopia where ultra wealthy have unlimited access to the technology.
Any person meeting the criteria of wanting to live forever is the exact type of person who should not be living forever. Rich or poor.
But also, there just isn't immortality
they'll do anything just for 2, 5, 10, 20 more years... but the way they're going about it, it's directly reducing life expectancy for everyone else. i assume that's quite intentional
In a way they're all emulating the legend of Elizabeth Bathory but with unlimited resources to fill their bathtub as deep and often as they want How long before they go from doing this metaphorically to literally?
Some people took Jupiter Rising seriously..... somehow.
You should watch Pantheon. Its about this very subject
I’ve been saying for a while that the techbros are basically doing theurgy (god work) with AI. Trying to make the statue dance. The preoccupation with rocketry is their literal fixation with ‘soul flight’ and achieving apotheosis. The ayahuasca and DMT techbros are at least staying on the ground.
I agree but it's fun to imagine these dudes to all ending up as variations of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, just bitter old fucks slinging shitty insults.
The nice thing about your ultra wealthy overlords being uploaded to the cloud is that it has an off button.
All the billionaires in one data centre sounds like a dream come true for anyone who wants to swap their guillotine for an EMP device
Oh god no. They won't trust *each other*! They'll each own their own data centre, each little god in their own heaven. Which leads to an interesting philosophical question - after the death of the body, is there anything left to kill?
Wouldn’t it be cool if they were able to live forever, but only as we lock them in a permanent prison of their own creation?
Their underground bunkers would be fine
As a suicidally-depressed person who is therefore pretty positive on death lately, I would caution against "this thing you want so it can improve your health and life causes an abstract social degeneration, because vibes" since arguments of that form can lead down some dark roads.
To be clear, I do not disagree that tech billionaires want to attain immortal god-aristocrat status. They definitely want to keep this shit for themselves and have no interest in the infrastructure or technology to make a cure for aging widely available to everyone.
but that's the thing THEY'RE doing. Does not represent the whole concept of defeating aging in the abstract. Existence precedes essence and all that.
Sure, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to argue that any nation, organization, or person on the planet that could create immortality would be willing or able to distribute it to the whole world. Immortality would absolutely become a commodity of the wealthy immediately and would not trickle down.
If it was invented before we make a radical change to our current world government, we would have to rip immortality from the hands of the ruling class in a terribly bloody and violent fashion. That, I believe, is the point OP is making.
Hm! Y'know, fair. "yeah but these are the conditions we have right now" is a reasonable response to "this is conditional, not intrinsic."
Forgive me if I'm falling victim to the aestheticization of politics here but a global tree-of-life revolt, storming the gates of a false heaven, has some kind of fucking intense aesthetics. Maybe I will write a story about it? Feels like it could make a good cyberpunk novel.
Especially one with digital/mechanical immortality as the lynch pin to the continual inequality between the corpo overlords and the every day people.
I am of the opinion that brain uploading is extremely far away from working, and if it works, would *shorten your life* because ain't no stem cell GPUs replacing the GPUs that burned out, unlike certain other informational systems I can think of. that doesn't mean they won't try, though. lol! lmao
I want the entire ruling class to do the Steve Jobs thing of dying a preventable death because they trust scammy culty fake medicine over actual doctors, but with brain uploading instead of healing chakras or whatever. that would be so good
I felt bad when my son was asking me about technical ways to end world hunger and I had to explain that the production/logistics of ending starvation has existed for decades but politically/economically some people use starvation as a weapon so it persists. But build new stuff anyways son.
Well, I mean, solving age solves *one* kind of death. There are still others.
Okay, but what if *I* get to be the ruling class?
i've been working my way through the Red Rising series and damned if i don't see the themes everywhere i look right now
Okay, so if death is so good why are you choosing to still be alive right now?
are you this obtuse on purpose or accidentally?
To spite you in particular
death isn't good or bad just like carbon isn't good or bad. it is reality. we are finite. everything is finite. failure to accept this leads to harmful delusions. and the delusions of the wealthy and powerful harm large numbers of people at scale
Just because something is "reality" doesn't mean it isn't bad. All actual bad things are reality. Just as all actual good things are reality. Living is one of the actual good things, dying is one of the actual bad things. There's a lot of cope around this, but that's the reality.
So we should stop medical research? Death and disease are part of reality, so why fight it. It's also something that is used to keep people wealthy and powerful, like Trump wouldn't be the American president right now without it, he wouldn't have survived covid.
Wafflespancakestweet.jpg
How? It's a direct response to "life is finite, we should accept that and attempts to not are inherently bad". A large amount of medicine and medical research is an attempt to fight back at the finite, not to just accept the inevitable.
I think your read of what Robert said just isn’t what he meant. He didn’t say “accept whatever happens and do nothing.” In the context of his whole thread he’s saying “immortality in our reality would be a bad thing.”
Medicine is generally about fighting back against death from disease and injury, and life expectancy has extended as a result of that, but extension of age isn’t the explicit goal of most medicine.
but what’s your point? ai is good because medicine is good?
to be a contrarian and sow division. thats the point of all bots.
So disagreeing with one of his takes is sowing division now?
but all you’re doing is saying “nuh-uh”. what is your actual point? is there a reason why it’s important to disagree? is immortality good? is there a benefit that isn’t being considered?
It was more I disagreed with his take from that picture, that is all, or that looking into immortality is inherently bad in all cases. I wasn't trying to defend billionaires becoming immortal gods or anything. That is a case that would be bad.
That looking for ways that might stop people from dieing as fast as they do now isn't intently immoral.
that’s not what Robert said, though. he said that seeking immortality is immoral. you’ve strawmanned it into “anything that makes a person live longer is immoral” which is a patently absurd argument that no one has made.
Ok. I don't think research immortality is immoral. Happy?
you don’t think it’s immoral for someone to pour immense quantities of resources that could be used to provide food and shelter to literally millions of people into efforts to make their own consciousness immortal? I guess we have different ideas about morality then
‘One thing will only be used for bad therefor we should stop everything that isn’t that thing as well’ - You Go watch some Stargate or read Altered Carbon to fine out why amoral powerful people gaining immortality ends badly for everyone else
That wasn't my argument. One point of it was that just because something can be used for a bad thing (like immortality in Altered Carbon), does not mean it can only be used for bad things.
Except, that is what you said. Literally. There are certain technologies, especially at our current point in society, that will only be used for dark ends. These technologies should not be pursued. The likes of musk and Bezos want to become immortal gods. You are not included.
This is what I was replying to. I wasn't replying to his comments about billionaires wanting it.
Do you think our current capitalist class that is pursuing immortality would use it to good ends?
No, and I never said I did
no medical researcher working on better cancer treatments does so thinking "this is a step towards immortality". they do so with a goal of decreasing suffering and increasing quality of life. the tech billionaires obsessed with uploading their minds only care about one thing: maintaining their power
I think curing cancer is good but I think letting billionaires live forever to acquire even more wealth and power is bad.
scientists working to cure cancer are generally thinking about other people who they want to help. sam altman is obsessed with digitizing his consciousness because he thinks it will let him be rich and powerful forever.
One of the bible verses I agree with is "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." Yes it would be ideal to be able to live for as long as you wanted, but it should only be done once all other major issues have been resolved. If done before that it would hamper any progress on any other issue.
"Books that were collected together hundreds of years ago and were written in different languages than they exist today thousands of years ago is right, but only on this 1 thing." Lol.
Considering I said "one of" and that hundreds of bible verses are just descriptions of actions, I don't know why that's particularly funny to you
Because you're taking it out of context. The Bible should make you more prepared for death, not less. The reason why people in third world countries and in Indigenous communities are more mature about death than Americans is bc they have psychological acceptance baked into their culture.
Also just like the fact that the Christian faith was kind of a doomsday cult.
Well not exactly. That is the Evangelical thing interpretation though, sadly, American Protestants (and some smaller Evangelical cults abroad) have since the 19th century been obsessed with doomsday or The Rapture, rendering them harmful to literally everyone else.
Saying all Christians are obsessed with Rapture is like saying all Muslims want violent totalitarian Jihad or all Jewish religious are Zionists. It's a prominent sect of those movements but it doesn't describe everyone.
Medical research merely improves quality of life for young and middle aged people. It doesn't mean old people should not die. At a point the brain stops learning, even old people without dementia are bad at embracing progressive policies and climate science. Life requires death on every level.
are you doing some training for your shadowboxing championship
yawn
It's plainly obvious that if true immortality existed the actual moral obligation would be to share it with everyone, not destroy it out of a misguided sense of ressentiment People prefer being alive. That's why we understand murder to be wrong.
there are situations where murder is understood to be socially acceptable or necessary in the interests of society. preventing the dictatorship of a single generation over all the future of humanity would plainly be one of them, i think. imagine the poison of nostalgia lasting for eternity!
Even in this entirely hypothetical situation, forcing others to die against their will is not even the only hypothetical solution. That people think it's the only one says frankly bad things about how much people value, life, freedom, and individuality!
i invite you to look at any of history at all and ask yourself whether your self-interested faux optimism is warranted in the slightest, or if it's merely you trying to put a moral covering over your own immaturity and fear.
are you willing to kill everyone now living to address this problem?
if the technology exists to keep them alive (which it doesn't), that would be the choice. question isn't "are there downsides," it's "is mass murder an acceptable way to address those downsides"
If you are unable to see the distinction between leaving mortality intact and killing literally everyone alive, I think that you are an idiot and a sophist. Stop reading lesswrong forum threads and get a life.
you seem nice
and you seem gullible!
lol
Self-interest isn't a bad thing, it's inherent to the human condition because it's a prerequisite for having any kind of will. You're also arguing in self-interest, You're just abstracting your desire into the broad concept of "society"
Like, okay, you got me. I really dislike the notion of dying someday. I think that sucks and want to avoid it because I dislike it. I don't think the mere possibility of pursuing that desire necessitates tyranny. So what?
If you are unable to see what the consequences of that action would be and think it would lead to anything other than the ultimate stagnation of human culture then I think you are an idiot. If you pursue it out of a fear most teenagers outgrow, I think you are childish. So that.
Well, the first thing and most obvious point is, the consequences you're talking about are imaginary. You're speculating based on wildly incomplete information, and I'm telling you that if you can imagine negative consequences, you can also imagine positive ones.
I don't actually think biological immortality is likely to happen in my lifetime, if ever, but that people cannot imagine such a tool having anything but negative impacts speaks to a broader fear of change than anything else.
if you would like us to have millions of people from just five hundred years ago still furiously passionate over the nature of the trinity and the reformation, with no way for it to pass out of the stream of human relevance, you can pursue it-- but it seems straightforwardly evil to pursue.
Murder by definition is wrong. Murder definitionally is the unjustified killing of another human being.
if you're looking to the dictionary for your moral values i think you're looking in the wrong places, pal
So you just use words incorrectly and then complain when told you're fucking stupid.
any frustrating or horrible moment you've had of the old society strangling the new would be intensified a hundred fold in this society of immortals, stretching on forever, and you would rather that happen then accept you are a temporary atomic arrangement. shameful, tbh.
Would these people, if sharing immortality with everyone results in a more egalitarian society, share it? No, they're goddamn bastards.
Seems like all the more reason to take it from them then!
And if it's limited/takes a lot of resources/requires killing people a la Elizabeth Bathory? Is your desire to conquer death great enough to drive you to anything? I'm leaning toward Robert's position, I think immortality, if possible, would be really bad for people.
Death is good because new generations born think differently and all human progress is based on the principle of old people dying. Vampire myths persist even in the 21st century bc the need for death for continued human and planetary survival is so obvious to anyone but morons like you I guess.
That implies ability to contain the tech to themselves - something that literally never worked even for very clunky tech with very exotic inputs
Unless the treatment is something that's prohibitively expensive even when open-sourced.
this is why, fundamentally, all utopias are inherently fascist I believe this is something I heard first from either you, or someone in the CoolZone orbit. maaaaybe @andrewsage.bsky.social ?
I'm assuming sudden traumatic skull and brain deconstruction would still work to keep things in balance.
If we were all immortal wouldn't that get boring after a while?
My spirit will not strive with man forever. Nevertheless…
Imo, immortality would destroy something fundamental to what it means to *be* human. Our fragile, finite lives, our membership in the living world around us; persistent reflections of billions of years of the living universe in its ever-changing self. Immortality is a grotesque anti-human goal.
Immortality would be catastrophic for our mind’s ability to perceive events imo. Even within the life most people have, they notice their perception of the passage of time speeding up. Imagine how fast that perception would be after 500 years, 1000, 1 million, etc. eons would pass in the blink 1/
of an eye and your ability to stay present in anything you might be doing would be utterly shot. Immortality is only a curse. 2/2
I feel like that's because a lot of events happen very frequently as you are younger and slow down as you get older. The perceptoin of time is linked to the frequency of events. If nothing happens for a long time it will feel like that time passed very quickly. That's how I think it works atleast.
This was the plot of Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker :o
Vampires, Vandal Savage...their stories all end the same...they get bored after countless millennia and someone ends up undoing them.
Brb hiring someone to haunt every leader and billionaire in the world and whisper “you will die one day and there is nothing you can do about that” on a regular basis
That was one thing the Romans really nailed. At the height of any general's fame, with crowds literally cheering their name, there'd be a guy standing right next to them repeatedly whispering, "remember, you're going to die some day," in their ear.
duh. i watched Altered Carbon
I am guessing it didn’t sink in when these rich bastards (and their wannabes) watched it so maybe it needs to be reissued with giant flashing text reading “THESE GUYS ARE BAD” whenever the Meths are on screen? Too subtle?
theyre like...unbelievably bad. playing god. no limits. Altered Carbon was weirdly realistiv in that there are no good characters just less bad ones. and the Meths are fucking horrible. they make hitler look like a kid who slapped his babysitter.
i wouldnt wish immortality on my worst enemy.
also if theyre like Quell from altered Carbon i dont think we need to murder the inventors. quell was gonna kill everyone to make up for giving them immortality.
And that last sentence is how you know it's happening sooner rather than later.
What if Peter Theil wants me, specifically, to ride mountain bikes and drink Old Style forever?
Ending death would destroy humanity and earth. The sort of people who are trying to live forever would end the planet in a decade or two, tops.
We forget the lessons of Altered Carbon at our own peril.
I learned this from watching Freejack.
The ‘put the genie back in the bottle’ shit is idiotic, especially if you believe that immortality just creates a permanent ruling class. If a lab was successful at achieving human immortality and the inventors were murdered and the labs burned, you’d buy a decade Win the war, not the battle
I would say that another purpose of immortality would be that I don't have to watch all my pets and older loved ones die but that's just me.
To be clear I do not think for a second that these techbro assholes would be willing to share immortality with the rest of us if they gained it but I can't help but feel that the sentiment of living is awesome and I want to enjoy life forever is not inherently wrong if you intend to share that gift.
I think this is all based on an underlying truth drawn past its limits - yes, immortality developed now will be distributed along the lines of current power structures, entrenching the status quo. But immortality is not inherently a harmful goal if pursued in an egalitarian, careful, mature way.
Vampires, who would need to be treated as such.
This feels surprisingly close to Stargate without the portals
They'd be liches.
With riches and all the bitches.
Some motherfuckers never read Altered Carbon, and it shows.