Why are people unkeen to immortality that would come from technological advancements and/or AI?
If only we knew!
I’ve been around since the 1990s, so I have personally observed the human race fail to take a serious interest, even just in longevity, for decades. And of course 1990s Internet transhumanism didn’t invent the idea, there have been isolated calls for longevity and immortality, for decades and centuries before that.
One may of course argue that Taoist alchemists and medieval blood-transfusionists and 1990s nanotechnologists were all just too soon, that actually curing aging, for example, objectively requires knowledge that we don’t possess even now.
But what I’m talking about is the failure to organize and prioritize. The reason that no truly major organization or institution has ever made e.g. the reversal of aging a serious priority, is not to be explained just by the incomplete state of human knowledge, although the gatekeepers of knowledge have surely played an outsized role in this state of affairs.
If someone of the status of Newton or Kant or Oppenheimer had used their position to say the human race should try to conquer death; or even if a group of second-tier scientists or intellectuals had the clarity and audacity to say firmly and repeatedly, that in the age of science, we can and should figure out how to live a thousand years—then perhaps “life extensionism” or “immortalism” would for some time already have existed as a well-known school of thought, alongside all the other philosophies and ideologies that exist in the world of ideas.
I suppose that, compared to decades ago, things are a lot better. The prospect of immortality is now a regular subject of pop-science documentaries about biotechnology and the study of aging. There are anti-aging radicals scattered throughout world academia, there are a handful of well-funded research groups working on aspects of the aging problem, and there are hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually on biological and medical research, even if it is spent inefficiently. So, culture has shifted greatly.
Now, your question is “why don’t people in general want to live forever via technology”, which is a slightly different question to “why didn’t the human race organize to make it happen”, although they are definitely related. There’s probably a dozen reasons that contribute. For example, some proposed modes of immortality involve the abandonment of the human body, and may sound insane or repulsive.
I think a major reason is that many people already find life miserable or exhausting. Their will-to-live is already fully used up, just to cope with the present. Or even if they have achieved a kind of happiness, they got there by accepting the world as it is, accepting limits, focusing on the positives, and so on. Death is sad but life goes on.
Also, people are good at thinking of reasons not to do it. If no one dies, do we all just live under the same politicians forever? if no one dies, won’t the world fill up and we’ll all starve? Aren’t there too many people already? What if you get bored? Some of these are powerful reasons. Not everyone is going to think of outer space as an outlet for excess population. But mostly these are ways to deflect an idea that has already been dismissed for other reasons. There aren’t many people who are genuinely excited by the idea of thousand-year lifespans and then go, hang on, what about the environment, and reject it for that reason.
If only we knew!
I’ve been around since the 1990s, so I have personally observed the human race fail to take a serious interest, even just in longevity, for decades. And of course 1990s Internet transhumanism didn’t invent the idea, there have been isolated calls for longevity and immortality, for decades and centuries before that.
One may of course argue that Taoist alchemists and medieval blood-transfusionists and 1990s nanotechnologists were all just too soon, that actually curing aging, for example, objectively requires knowledge that we don’t possess even now.
But what I’m talking about is the failure to organize and prioritize. The reason that no truly major organization or institution has ever made e.g. the reversal of aging a serious priority, is not to be explained just by the incomplete state of human knowledge, although the gatekeepers of knowledge have surely played an outsized role in this state of affairs.
If someone of the status of Newton or Kant or Oppenheimer had used their position to say the human race should try to conquer death; or even if a group of second-tier scientists or intellectuals had the clarity and audacity to say firmly and repeatedly, that in the age of science, we can and should figure out how to live a thousand years—then perhaps “life extensionism” or “immortalism” would for some time already have existed as a well-known school of thought, alongside all the other philosophies and ideologies that exist in the world of ideas.
I suppose that, compared to decades ago, things are a lot better. The prospect of immortality is now a regular subject of pop-science documentaries about biotechnology and the study of aging. There are anti-aging radicals scattered throughout world academia, there are a handful of well-funded research groups working on aspects of the aging problem, and there are hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually on biological and medical research, even if it is spent inefficiently. So, culture has shifted greatly.
Now, your question is “why don’t people in general want to live forever via technology”, which is a slightly different question to “why didn’t the human race organize to make it happen”, although they are definitely related. There’s probably a dozen reasons that contribute. For example, some proposed modes of immortality involve the abandonment of the human body, and may sound insane or repulsive.
I think a major reason is that many people already find life miserable or exhausting. Their will-to-live is already fully used up, just to cope with the present. Or even if they have achieved a kind of happiness, they got there by accepting the world as it is, accepting limits, focusing on the positives, and so on. Death is sad but life goes on.
Also, people are good at thinking of reasons not to do it. If no one dies, do we all just live under the same politicians forever? if no one dies, won’t the world fill up and we’ll all starve? Aren’t there too many people already? What if you get bored? Some of these are powerful reasons. Not everyone is going to think of outer space as an outlet for excess population. But mostly these are ways to deflect an idea that has already been dismissed for other reasons. There aren’t many people who are genuinely excited by the idea of thousand-year lifespans and then go, hang on, what about the environment, and reject it for that reason.