Death is regarded as tragic, and once someone has a serious condition, people invest in fighting. Up close, people try to delay death.
This oversimplifies the diversity of human values around death. For a lot of people, deaths are divided into “bad deaths / premature deaths” and “good deaths / appropriate deaths / timely deaths”. Hence why few people experience significant sadness when hearing about the death of a nonagenarian, and why many elderly people adopt a relaxed attitude toward their impending demise.
It’s possible that these people feel this way only because they cannot imagine living a very long time without severe disability, and/or to prioritize a limited “grief budget” towards the saddest deaths, and that properly contemplating the possibility of defeating death altogether would disabuse them of their notion that some deaths are basically fine.
But predicting how human values generalize out of distribution when technology enables new possibilities is a hard problem, so why should we assume that people’s “true” values around death are that it is always tragic and worth preventing?
This oversimplifies the diversity of human values around death. For a lot of people, deaths are divided into “bad deaths / premature deaths” and “good deaths / appropriate deaths / timely deaths”. Hence why few people experience significant sadness when hearing about the death of a nonagenarian, and why many elderly people adopt a relaxed attitude toward their impending demise.
It’s possible that these people feel this way only because they cannot imagine living a very long time without severe disability, and/or to prioritize a limited “grief budget” towards the saddest deaths, and that properly contemplating the possibility of defeating death altogether would disabuse them of their notion that some deaths are basically fine.
But predicting how human values generalize out of distribution when technology enables new possibilities is a hard problem, so why should we assume that people’s “true” values around death are that it is always tragic and worth preventing?