A world without natural death would have a very different attitude towards children. There simply wouldn't be room for very many new people on a planet populated by immortal 300-year-olds.
Most people wouldn't be able to start a family. The few who get the opportunity would probably be carefully vetted by governments.
The dragon fable is emotional, but it doesn't address any of the questions of what a "post-dragon" world of inevitable gerontocracy would look like. If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay. Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
> Most people wouldn't be able to start a family. The few who get the opportunity would probably be carefully vetted by governments.
Maybe. Or maybe there would be a push to engineer deserts to be habitable. To create undersea habitats. To colonize Mars and expand further. This might not happen, but it is a solution.
Also, with more and more interesting things to do and without the societal pressure to have children (as we have today), less people would even want to start a family. I believe the problem is manageable, and I don't buy the "we have to die, so that new people can live (and die)" line of reasoning.
> If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay.
It would probably happen. But that would be a nice problem to have.
> Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
We seem to be managing this problem with wealthy families, so we could probably manage it with individuals as well.
The most common rebuttal to this is that a low birth rate is better than a high death rate.
Even if everyone was immortal (not just unaging, as that would only reduce death rates by ≈90%), couples could still have one child each. That would leave the final population at twice the original population. 8 billion people have 4 billion kids, who have 2 billion kids, who have 1 billion kids... etc.
> Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
Nobody knows. Fixing aging will cause new problems, but those problems will not be as bad as 100,000 people dying every day.
Lastly, who thinks aging will never be fixed? Maybe we fix it in 30 years. Maybe it takes 100 years. But unless we destroy our civilization, humanity will invent anti-aging technology. So we have all the problems you worry about, though perhaps not in your lifetime.
>The dragon fable is emotional, but it doesn't address any of the questions of what a "post-dragon" world of inevitable gerontocracy would look like. If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay. Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
We already have a gerontocracy, and Bezos and Zuckerberg already have empires. Blaming a fantasy of immortality for the problems of real-life capitalism or democratic decay makes no sense.
If your house is falling down from mold and termites, you don't blame the future house, you blame the damn mold.
I absolutely despise this fable, and I'm annoyed at Bostrom for all the time I've wasted trying to defend my position whenever it comes up.
The story is too simplistic for the point Bostrom is trying to make, even as a fable. It treats the concept of death as a singular thing that ends up being defeated by a literal magic bullet. I don't think a Manhattan Project style effort will ever be capable of eradicating death like this, and I don't think this is an unreasonable position to hold. We've already made incredible progress in improving overall health, reducing mortality, and treating and eradicating really horrible diseases. We already get to live 2-3 times as long as our ancestors. I'm definitely not a Luddite trying to claim that this is enough progress, or that this is how it's meant to be, but you'd have to be willfully ignorant to miss the obvious fact that we're now at a point where the return on effort for cutting edge health research is rapidly diminishing. Perhaps we'll have a bio-renaissance, perhaps not, but even a renaissance isn't likely going to take you to infinity.
Bostrom obviously expects pushback, as he spends a considerable fraction of the fable "defending" his effort from "critics." But he doesn't understand his critics or their criticism. In the story they take the form of caricatures of luddites, penny-pinchers, and ignorant religious fools.
I absolutely support continuing research in health and longevity, but we should be realistic about the effort required, the real possibility that seemingly promising efforts will fail, and what we hope to achieve. Eradicating cancer is a fantastic goal, but it's really fucking hard, might not work in the general case, and isn't likely to increase best-case longevity by a huge amount. After cancer no longer kills you, something else will.
Also, it would be nice to not be accused of being some sort of monsterous death-worshiper whenever I express this view.
The story doesn't exist to discuss the right approach to curing death, or the most efficient and expedient way to get there, or the current techniques in the field.
The story exists to help get people to the baseline point of acknowledging that death is bad, because even that much can be shockingly non-universal. If we could get to a point where a large fraction of people genuinely believed that, then the rest of the problem becomes far easier.
If the primary problem was simply "how do we solve this", that'd be hard enough.
It only took 66 years from the Wright Brothers flying at Kitty Hawk to Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Healthy skepticism is warranted, but outright pessimism is not.
We have many great challenges ahead of us as a species. It’s important to keep in mind our priorities and how we’re allocating our resources, even as it relates to curing aging/death.
Sidenote: I enjoyed that the CGP Grey animation of this fable cribbed off of Kennedy’s speech kicking off the space race to the Moon.
>> After cancer no longer kills you, something else will.
Well, currently, unless something else kills you, cancer certainly will. Cancer is a biological inevitability, that can only be kept at bay for so long by the efforts of the human immune system. And as we all know, the longer we all live, the more of us will get cancer, because the transcription errors that eventually cause it become all the more likely as time goes by.
Bostrom seems to think -it's not expressed in so many words- that if we halt ageing, we'd also defeat cancer, somehow, perhaps by having an immune system that is forever as powerful as a young person's. The problem with this idea is that young people do get cancer, despite their healthy immune systems.
It looks like everyone alive has a probability to get cancer at some point in their life. For younger people this probability is relatively low, but currently, we only spend a few years of our lives (let's say 20) being young. If our "young" period is suddendly extended to 50 or 60 years, or more, the probabilty to get cancer while "young" in this sense, will increase. Imagine rolling a 100-sided die every year for 20 years, hoping not to roll a 01. Now imagine doing the same for 100 years. It's obvious that you're much more likely to roll at least one 01 in 100 years, than in 20.
So maybe Bostrom's magical health-extension pills won't work exactly like he thinks. Maybe we can all extend our life spans (well, those of us who can afford that mythical panacea) but not for as long as we'd like, and maybe we will find that if we extend our life for long enough, we will increase our likelihood to die of the most dreaded of diseases to an absolute certainty.
You don't seem a death-worshipper. This is only skepticism about the practicality of eliminating death, not a rejection of the central thesis that "The dragon is bad!".
I think it's more about preventing aging than diseases. There are a lot of people who are "monstrous death worshipers" because they want to cure cancer but not aging. They see cancer as a problem that's worth solving but old-age-death is part of being human so they just don't care about it at all. Even criticizing rich people for trying to prolong their own lives.
I agree though that it completely ignores all other causes of death and the incremental improvements we're making. We'll still get hit by cars even if we don't age. I see that more as a lack of detail than an important problem with the story.
I think the difference between your perspective and Bostrom's is his thinking is, in as non-pejorative sense as I can spin it, childish. Most people, when they are children, tend to imagine that problems have simple solutions, and can be solved by commitment, faith, and good intentions.
When people grow up, through a process of disappointment, failure, and gradual acclimatization to the muddy vagaries of reality, they tend to get increasingly suspicious of grand goals and simple solutions. And that's because, like you point out, doing stuff is really fucking hard.
The problem is, of course, that sometimes really amazing, or really terrible things can be done. The Marshall plan, or the Manhattan project, the end of Smallpox. World hunger is manifestly solveable - the only thing we lack is the will - i.e., as a society, we consider malnutrition and starvation acceptable.
So people who are suspicious of grand goals tend to get lumped in with the people that opposed all the grand goals that have gone before us, universal literacy, political freedom, and so on. Bostrom is just taking this pattern to an absurd conclusion, by making the grandest of all possible goals, then casting himself as being in the tradition of the people who ended smallpox, and anybody who disagrees as being in the tradition of those who opposed the vaccination program.
Which is where the whole thing gets incredibly obnoxious. The thing about the Manhattan project is, it was a technical challenge, but not a political one. There were no political interests arrayed against it. Anything that affects who dies and who lives is a political challenge - like smallpox, or nuclear disarmament, for example. And that takes a vast amount more work, even if the technical challenge is very simple. And that shows - the only vast political challenges that have been overcome were ones where the technical portion was basically a done deal.
Ending death isn't a technical problem - or at least, isn't right now. There are lots of extremely low-hanging fruit that the Bostrom line-of-thought is basically ignoring - child mortality, and so on. It's primarily a political one. So pretending it is a technical challenge, and ignoring the low-hanging fruit, is a kind of fantasy, where Bostrom gets to play the role of revolutionary, without actually having to do anything, make any messy compromises, or actually say anything controversial, all the while burrowing the mantle of all the people who achieved great things, like ending smallpox, or winning universal suffrage.
> We already get to live 2-3 times as long as our ancestors
Not really, at least those that survived long enough to become our ancestors. When you take childhood mortality out of the mix, the numbers don't look that different than our current life expectancy. The other thing pulling the curve down in previous eras is the high rate of death for women in childbirth.
If you dodged those bullets, and didn't get knocked on the head or cut down by a major epidemic, living into your 60s or 70s has pretty much always been possible.
I somewhat agree about the diminishing marginal utility.
However, the real criticism is actually in the fundamental goal. The ultimate point of everything is to create sustainable civilizational progress that eradicates suffering and provides the good life to as many people as possible.
Simply living longer doesn't help achieve that. Indeed, it would cement unequal power relationships. Rulers, especially those who rule for life, would be in power for much longer. There would be compound interest over longer timescales, without the asset division that happens upon death.
Of course, a good counterargument is simply that such medical progress is inevitable. But if so, the point would not be to simply fund efforts to push it forward. The point would be to fund efforts to distribute the benefits broadly, and find ways to constrain the downsides.
Wait, you think the dragon is... death itself? Is that actually what it's supposed to be? I supposed that it was something more like climate change due to hydrocarbon fuels or something of that nature. The story clearly depicts a world where the dragon did not exist at one point, but it then showed up and society adapted to it. That never happened with death.
I also figured that a large part of the story was unrealistic in the way society was presented. It depicts a society which is entirely cowed in its approach to the dragon... and yet is capable of a wholesale overturning of literally generations of worldview on a dime. Humanity doesn't tend to work like that. A more realistic take would have had the dragonologists fed face-first into the dragons maw so that society could avoid facing the notion that not only had they been seeing the world the wrong way their entire lives, but so had their ancestors, and it had cost them countless loved ones while they simply quietly accepted it. Those who are invested in irrationality generally react to damage caused by the irrationality with doubling down, not backing off. Especially with a whole room full of people lamenting all the people lost to the dragon, the last idea that is going to gain widespread popularity is "all those deaths were for nothing."
Tl;dr, the 4878 word parable is the dragon that kills thousands each day represents death and people say nothing can be done about it gets killed in the end by a missile.
Bostrom then argues "we have compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence." Which is kinda ok I guess though I'm not sure the analogy is very good. Everyone seems in favour of better health and I'm in a minority who like the idea of semi immortality through uploading but I'm not sure the dragon story is very helpful here.
Ooh, let me post my comment from the last time this was posted here back in 2015:
One day, an anti-dragonist on a speaking tour visited a town. When he arrived, most of the town's inns were already full, and he had to make do with a small room in a small in in a run-down part of the town.
The next morning, he stood outside the inn on his soap box and told people about how the dragon could be defeated. A small crowd gathered around him. When he had finished speaking, a woman asked: "My children are hungry. My husband went off to war against the tigers and never came back. How does killing the dragon help them?"
"Well, they too will one day be fed to the dragon!"
"But they are hungry now. My baby is very weak. She cries all the time. Even if she doesn't die, she's going to grow up stunted."
"I'm sure you can find a way. Anyway, I'm here to talk about the dragon, it's..."
Another interrupted him: "My son was killed by the king's men three weeks ago. They laughed as they cut him down. No one will hear my case."
"Well, I'm sure they had a good reason. Your son was probably a criminal."
Another said: "My family beats me because I don't want to marry the man they chose for me. Right now, I wouldn't mind being eaten."
"Listen. I'm not interested in the problems of you little people. They're not my problems, and anyway, you're probably lying, or exaggerating, or just not trying hard enough. But I'm scared of the dragon, because the dragon's going to eat everyone, including me. So we should concentrate on that, don't you agree?"
For every one person working on addressing aging and death, thousands are looking at other problems. Nobody is advocating that every other problem should be ignored, simply that we could stand to adjust the balance.
(Apart from that, I'd say that the caricature you're depicting is not particularly good at responding to people in a productive or endearing way, which is unrelated to the problem itself.)
I've read this story a few years ago. I don't think there's a conspiracy/secret advertisement: someone watched the same video as you and decided to link the text version.
Parables have a rich tradition dating back pretty much as far as written things date back. The moral lesson they're trying to get across isn't so much a twist as the whole of the thing.
Some people are resistant to logical argument on some topics, because of natural human tendencies.
A fictional narrative tries to do an end-run around our cognitive biases by presenting a logically consistent, but still very fictional, story and then inviting comparison to real-world parallels.
Since the person performing the comparison and championing each side is yourself, it's much harder to dismiss one of the views as being purposefully misrepresented, or portions being played down or up to fit the argument. The way to deal with the logical inconsistency is to reassess and admit the faults of each side (if any exist).
This is fairly common in Science Fiction, and why if the author has done a good job it can often change how you think the future will be in a much more definitive way that some simple statement might.
Human life span has risen steadily in the last hundred years or so. The
world average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was 31. In 1950, it was 48. In
2014, it was 71.5. That's an increase of 40 years achieved in 114 years of
medical advances.
In other words, far from the dragon of ageing getting bigger and bigger and
ever more hungry, humanity has been winning fight after fight after bloody
fight against this evil beast.
I cannot believe the chutzpah in Bostrom's allegory, that sweeps this
remarkable achievement aside as insignificant and misguided, with his
description of "the king" sending "his army" to fight minor, incompetent
battles against the lesser evils of "tigers and snakes" - presumably that's
governments funding medical research into such minor threats as HIV and
malaria, that claim mere millions of people every year.
What's worse, he actually advocates that we set aside this actually,
currently, life-extending research and instead focus on finding ways to defeat
ageing: "Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging,
we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching
individual diseases."
We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people
in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are
treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments
to the people who need them, because they can't afford them. We value the
profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on
the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western
medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the
world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the
other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick
Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to
really-really everyone once we find it.
> Human life span has risen steadily in the last hundred years or so. The world average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was 31. In 1950, it was 48. In 2014, it was 71.5. That's an increase of 40 years achieved in 114 years of medical advances.
That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality. Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.
> We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them.
First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and billionaires like Bill Gates.
Second, I doubt Bostrom is arguing against curing diseases such as malaria. It's just that malaria kills 450,000 people per year, while aging kills more than that every week. If we value lives equally, we should probably spend much more on anti-aging research than we spend on malaria research. Sadly, the opposite is the case. Billions are spent on malaria each year. The WHO alone spends over $60 million per year on malaria. A generous estimate of anti-aging research would be $10 million per year. So aging kills 100x more people than malaria, but the world spends 100x more on malaria than anti-aging research.
> We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
That's also not true. On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing.[2] These improvements have come from a combination of government efforts and private companies. And if you're going to do an accounting of early deaths, governments will not come out ahead of private companies.
> This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.
Every new technology starts off expensive. The original iPhone was too expensive for most people, and it wasn't very good by today's standards. A decade later, smartphones have gotten cheap enough for people to afford in the developing world. The same thing has been happening with computers, cars, televisions, radios, air travel, and medicine.
I think it's a good thing that some parts of the world have eliminated malaria. I'm glad we didn't wait for a magical malaria-eliminating pill. Likewise, I think it would be a good thing if some parts of the world eliminated aging. The sooner that problem is solved in one place, the sooner it will be solved everywhere.
This argument is whataboutism at its worst. He's not suggesting that we ignore healthcare and individual diseases. He's suggesting that we stop ignoring aging (and death in general) and take it seriously. The problem of medical patents and treatment distribution in the developing world is indeed a big one, but it's a political/economic one completely unrelated to the choice to ignore the biggest disease humans suffer from.
[+] [-] tschwimmer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|7 years ago|reply
Most people wouldn't be able to start a family. The few who get the opportunity would probably be carefully vetted by governments.
The dragon fable is emotional, but it doesn't address any of the questions of what a "post-dragon" world of inevitable gerontocracy would look like. If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay. Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|7 years ago|reply
Maybe. Or maybe there would be a push to engineer deserts to be habitable. To create undersea habitats. To colonize Mars and expand further. This might not happen, but it is a solution.
Also, with more and more interesting things to do and without the societal pressure to have children (as we have today), less people would even want to start a family. I believe the problem is manageable, and I don't buy the "we have to die, so that new people can live (and die)" line of reasoning.
> If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay.
It would probably happen. But that would be a nice problem to have.
> Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
We seem to be managing this problem with wealthy families, so we could probably manage it with individuals as well.
[+] [-] chroma|7 years ago|reply
Even if everyone was immortal (not just unaging, as that would only reduce death rates by ≈90%), couples could still have one child each. That would leave the final population at twice the original population. 8 billion people have 4 billion kids, who have 2 billion kids, who have 1 billion kids... etc.
> Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
Nobody knows. Fixing aging will cause new problems, but those problems will not be as bad as 100,000 people dying every day.
Lastly, who thinks aging will never be fixed? Maybe we fix it in 30 years. Maybe it takes 100 years. But unless we destroy our civilization, humanity will invent anti-aging technology. So we have all the problems you worry about, though perhaps not in your lifetime.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|7 years ago|reply
We already have a gerontocracy, and Bezos and Zuckerberg already have empires. Blaming a fantasy of immortality for the problems of real-life capitalism or democratic decay makes no sense.
If your house is falling down from mold and termites, you don't blame the future house, you blame the damn mold.
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohazi|7 years ago|reply
The story is too simplistic for the point Bostrom is trying to make, even as a fable. It treats the concept of death as a singular thing that ends up being defeated by a literal magic bullet. I don't think a Manhattan Project style effort will ever be capable of eradicating death like this, and I don't think this is an unreasonable position to hold. We've already made incredible progress in improving overall health, reducing mortality, and treating and eradicating really horrible diseases. We already get to live 2-3 times as long as our ancestors. I'm definitely not a Luddite trying to claim that this is enough progress, or that this is how it's meant to be, but you'd have to be willfully ignorant to miss the obvious fact that we're now at a point where the return on effort for cutting edge health research is rapidly diminishing. Perhaps we'll have a bio-renaissance, perhaps not, but even a renaissance isn't likely going to take you to infinity.
Bostrom obviously expects pushback, as he spends a considerable fraction of the fable "defending" his effort from "critics." But he doesn't understand his critics or their criticism. In the story they take the form of caricatures of luddites, penny-pinchers, and ignorant religious fools.
I absolutely support continuing research in health and longevity, but we should be realistic about the effort required, the real possibility that seemingly promising efforts will fail, and what we hope to achieve. Eradicating cancer is a fantastic goal, but it's really fucking hard, might not work in the general case, and isn't likely to increase best-case longevity by a huge amount. After cancer no longer kills you, something else will.
Also, it would be nice to not be accused of being some sort of monsterous death-worshiper whenever I express this view.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|7 years ago|reply
The story exists to help get people to the baseline point of acknowledging that death is bad, because even that much can be shockingly non-universal. If we could get to a point where a large fraction of people genuinely believed that, then the rest of the problem becomes far easier.
If the primary problem was simply "how do we solve this", that'd be hard enough.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|7 years ago|reply
We have many great challenges ahead of us as a species. It’s important to keep in mind our priorities and how we’re allocating our resources, even as it relates to curing aging/death.
Sidenote: I enjoyed that the CGP Grey animation of this fable cribbed off of Kennedy’s speech kicking off the space race to the Moon.
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
Well, currently, unless something else kills you, cancer certainly will. Cancer is a biological inevitability, that can only be kept at bay for so long by the efforts of the human immune system. And as we all know, the longer we all live, the more of us will get cancer, because the transcription errors that eventually cause it become all the more likely as time goes by.
Bostrom seems to think -it's not expressed in so many words- that if we halt ageing, we'd also defeat cancer, somehow, perhaps by having an immune system that is forever as powerful as a young person's. The problem with this idea is that young people do get cancer, despite their healthy immune systems.
It looks like everyone alive has a probability to get cancer at some point in their life. For younger people this probability is relatively low, but currently, we only spend a few years of our lives (let's say 20) being young. If our "young" period is suddendly extended to 50 or 60 years, or more, the probabilty to get cancer while "young" in this sense, will increase. Imagine rolling a 100-sided die every year for 20 years, hoping not to roll a 01. Now imagine doing the same for 100 years. It's obvious that you're much more likely to roll at least one 01 in 100 years, than in 20.
So maybe Bostrom's magical health-extension pills won't work exactly like he thinks. Maybe we can all extend our life spans (well, those of us who can afford that mythical panacea) but not for as long as we'd like, and maybe we will find that if we extend our life for long enough, we will increase our likelihood to die of the most dreaded of diseases to an absolute certainty.
And wouldn't that really suck?
[+] [-] edflsafoiewq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopmotr|7 years ago|reply
I agree though that it completely ignores all other causes of death and the incremental improvements we're making. We'll still get hit by cars even if we don't age. I see that more as a lack of detail than an important problem with the story.
[+] [-] pasabagi|7 years ago|reply
When people grow up, through a process of disappointment, failure, and gradual acclimatization to the muddy vagaries of reality, they tend to get increasingly suspicious of grand goals and simple solutions. And that's because, like you point out, doing stuff is really fucking hard.
The problem is, of course, that sometimes really amazing, or really terrible things can be done. The Marshall plan, or the Manhattan project, the end of Smallpox. World hunger is manifestly solveable - the only thing we lack is the will - i.e., as a society, we consider malnutrition and starvation acceptable.
So people who are suspicious of grand goals tend to get lumped in with the people that opposed all the grand goals that have gone before us, universal literacy, political freedom, and so on. Bostrom is just taking this pattern to an absurd conclusion, by making the grandest of all possible goals, then casting himself as being in the tradition of the people who ended smallpox, and anybody who disagrees as being in the tradition of those who opposed the vaccination program.
Which is where the whole thing gets incredibly obnoxious. The thing about the Manhattan project is, it was a technical challenge, but not a political one. There were no political interests arrayed against it. Anything that affects who dies and who lives is a political challenge - like smallpox, or nuclear disarmament, for example. And that takes a vast amount more work, even if the technical challenge is very simple. And that shows - the only vast political challenges that have been overcome were ones where the technical portion was basically a done deal.
Ending death isn't a technical problem - or at least, isn't right now. There are lots of extremely low-hanging fruit that the Bostrom line-of-thought is basically ignoring - child mortality, and so on. It's primarily a political one. So pretending it is a technical challenge, and ignoring the low-hanging fruit, is a kind of fantasy, where Bostrom gets to play the role of revolutionary, without actually having to do anything, make any messy compromises, or actually say anything controversial, all the while burrowing the mantle of all the people who achieved great things, like ending smallpox, or winning universal suffrage.
[+] [-] megaman22|7 years ago|reply
Not really, at least those that survived long enough to become our ancestors. When you take childhood mortality out of the mix, the numbers don't look that different than our current life expectancy. The other thing pulling the curve down in previous eras is the high rate of death for women in childbirth.
If you dodged those bullets, and didn't get knocked on the head or cut down by a major epidemic, living into your 60s or 70s has pretty much always been possible.
[+] [-] nwah1|7 years ago|reply
However, the real criticism is actually in the fundamental goal. The ultimate point of everything is to create sustainable civilizational progress that eradicates suffering and provides the good life to as many people as possible.
Simply living longer doesn't help achieve that. Indeed, it would cement unequal power relationships. Rulers, especially those who rule for life, would be in power for much longer. There would be compound interest over longer timescales, without the asset division that happens upon death.
Of course, a good counterargument is simply that such medical progress is inevitable. But if so, the point would not be to simply fund efforts to push it forward. The point would be to fund efforts to distribute the benefits broadly, and find ways to constrain the downsides.
[+] [-] otakucode|7 years ago|reply
I also figured that a large part of the story was unrealistic in the way society was presented. It depicts a society which is entirely cowed in its approach to the dragon... and yet is capable of a wholesale overturning of literally generations of worldview on a dime. Humanity doesn't tend to work like that. A more realistic take would have had the dragonologists fed face-first into the dragons maw so that society could avoid facing the notion that not only had they been seeing the world the wrong way their entire lives, but so had their ancestors, and it had cost them countless loved ones while they simply quietly accepted it. Those who are invested in irrationality generally react to damage caused by the irrationality with doubling down, not backing off. Especially with a whole room full of people lamenting all the people lost to the dragon, the last idea that is going to gain widespread popularity is "all those deaths were for nothing."
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
Bostrom then argues "we have compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence." Which is kinda ok I guess though I'm not sure the analogy is very good. Everyone seems in favour of better health and I'm in a minority who like the idea of semi immortality through uploading but I'm not sure the dragon story is very helpful here.
[+] [-] Zarkonnen|7 years ago|reply
One day, an anti-dragonist on a speaking tour visited a town. When he arrived, most of the town's inns were already full, and he had to make do with a small room in a small in in a run-down part of the town. The next morning, he stood outside the inn on his soap box and told people about how the dragon could be defeated. A small crowd gathered around him. When he had finished speaking, a woman asked: "My children are hungry. My husband went off to war against the tigers and never came back. How does killing the dragon help them?"
"Well, they too will one day be fed to the dragon!"
"But they are hungry now. My baby is very weak. She cries all the time. Even if she doesn't die, she's going to grow up stunted."
"I'm sure you can find a way. Anyway, I'm here to talk about the dragon, it's..."
Another interrupted him: "My son was killed by the king's men three weeks ago. They laughed as they cut him down. No one will hear my case."
"Well, I'm sure they had a good reason. Your son was probably a criminal."
Another said: "My family beats me because I don't want to marry the man they chose for me. Right now, I wouldn't mind being eaten."
"Listen. I'm not interested in the problems of you little people. They're not my problems, and anyway, you're probably lying, or exaggerating, or just not trying hard enough. But I'm scared of the dragon, because the dragon's going to eat everyone, including me. So we should concentrate on that, don't you agree?"
And the people rolled their eyes and walked away.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|7 years ago|reply
(Apart from that, I'd say that the caricature you're depicting is not particularly good at responding to people in a productive or endearing way, which is unrelated to the problem itself.)
[+] [-] ragefuel|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stephengillie|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ipsum2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edflsafoiewq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbenson|7 years ago|reply
A fictional narrative tries to do an end-run around our cognitive biases by presenting a logically consistent, but still very fictional, story and then inviting comparison to real-world parallels.
Since the person performing the comparison and championing each side is yourself, it's much harder to dismiss one of the views as being purposefully misrepresented, or portions being played down or up to fit the argument. The way to deal with the logical inconsistency is to reassess and admit the faults of each side (if any exist).
This is fairly common in Science Fiction, and why if the author has done a good job it can often change how you think the future will be in a much more definitive way that some simple statement might.
[+] [-] internetman55|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
In other words, far from the dragon of ageing getting bigger and bigger and ever more hungry, humanity has been winning fight after fight after bloody fight against this evil beast.
I cannot believe the chutzpah in Bostrom's allegory, that sweeps this remarkable achievement aside as insignificant and misguided, with his description of "the king" sending "his army" to fight minor, incompetent battles against the lesser evils of "tigers and snakes" - presumably that's governments funding medical research into such minor threats as HIV and malaria, that claim mere millions of people every year.
What's worse, he actually advocates that we set aside this actually, currently, life-extending research and instead focus on finding ways to defeat ageing: "Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases."
We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them. We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.
[+] [-] chroma|7 years ago|reply
That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality. Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.
> We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them.
First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and billionaires like Bill Gates.
Second, I doubt Bostrom is arguing against curing diseases such as malaria. It's just that malaria kills 450,000 people per year, while aging kills more than that every week. If we value lives equally, we should probably spend much more on anti-aging research than we spend on malaria research. Sadly, the opposite is the case. Billions are spent on malaria each year. The WHO alone spends over $60 million per year on malaria. A generous estimate of anti-aging research would be $10 million per year. So aging kills 100x more people than malaria, but the world spends 100x more on malaria than anti-aging research.
> We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
That's also not true. On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing.[2] These improvements have come from a combination of government efforts and private companies. And if you're going to do an accounting of early deaths, governments will not come out ahead of private companies.
> This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.
Every new technology starts off expensive. The original iPhone was too expensive for most people, and it wasn't very good by today's standards. A decade later, smartphones have gotten cheap enough for people to afford in the developing world. The same thing has been happening with computers, cars, televisions, radios, air travel, and medicine.
I think it's a good thing that some parts of the world have eliminated malaria. I'm glad we didn't wait for a magical malaria-eliminating pill. Likewise, I think it would be a good thing if some parts of the world eliminated aging. The sooner that problem is solved in one place, the sooner it will be solved everywhere.
1. See table 6.4 in the WHO's World Malaria Report: http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/world-malaria-report...
2. https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality
[+] [-] nshepperd|7 years ago|reply