Comment by wnkrshm
8 years ago
I can see a world with the means to escape natural death be one of social, cultural and technological stagnation.
Just living longer doesn't mean that humans become any wiser on average. There will maybe be some benefits of longer-lasting first-hand experience of historical events (pushing the 'historical horizon' to more than 100 years) but to me it's like switching from a simulated annealing method (or stochastic gradient descent) to a simple local gradient descent in terms of getting society/culture/technology to adapt and find anything better than the status quo.
Worst case, such a technology serves to create an almost eternal ruling class. Best case, it results in societies with either two classes of people (those who may extend their lives longer and those who may not) or societies that tightly regulate who may have children.
Getting rid of suffering and cancer is one thing, getting rid of natural death carries a rat-tail of consequences.
If we get rid of cancer, are you going to object to getting rid of heart attacks? If we get rid of heart attacks, are you going to object to getting rid of telomere shrinking, an equally pernicious disease? There won't be an immortality pill, it'll just be lots of preventative treatments that eventually add up.
> Worst case, such a technology serves to create an almost eternal ruling class. Best case, it results in societies with either two classes of people (those who may extend their lives longer and those who may not) or societies that tightly regulate who may have children.
You should read (or watch) Altered Carbon.