If death is solved via uploads running at high speed, I’m not too concerned. (Still a little concerned, since computers still take up space, but the issue is close enough to negligible that I’m fine ignoring it).
Have you read Robin Hanson’s writings on the economics of uploads? He argues very convincingly that uploads will inevitably lead to a Malthusian equilibrium, in fact much more rapidly than a biological immortality scenario.
The sense of I’ve gotten around here is that “exponential growth is okay, because Space is Big”.
It can’t possibly be okay, since sustained exponential growth must eventually catch up with the expansion of our light cone, which is (barring faster than light travel) the fundamental physical limit on how much space can be available. Exponential growth always dominates polynomial growth given enough time, and I’m sure most people here are well aware of that, so you probably got a wrong impression.
The impression was given more from random one-off comments that were clearly optimized for poetry rather than factual/moral accuracy. So it’s very possible I got the wrong impression. But I’ve heard a lot of noise about eliminating death, and basically zero noise about fixing overpopulation.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to do both, but we should be working at least as hard at solving overpopulation as we are on increasing lifespan. I realize that most people here are probably not actually going to contribute to either of those fields, but a disproportion fixation on anti-aging seems dangerous to me. Are the cryonics proponents here making an effort to use minimal resources and take up minimal real estate?
Have you read Robin Hanson’s writings on the economics of uploads?
Raemon:
Have you read Robin Hanson’s writings on the economics of uploads? He argues very convincingly that uploads will inevitably lead to a Malthusian equilibrium, in fact much more rapidly than a biological immortality scenario.
It can’t possibly be okay, since sustained exponential growth must eventually catch up with the expansion of our light cone, which is (barring faster than light travel) the fundamental physical limit on how much space can be available. Exponential growth always dominates polynomial growth given enough time, and I’m sure most people here are well aware of that, so you probably got a wrong impression.
The impression was given more from random one-off comments that were clearly optimized for poetry rather than factual/moral accuracy. So it’s very possible I got the wrong impression. But I’ve heard a lot of noise about eliminating death, and basically zero noise about fixing overpopulation.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to do both, but we should be working at least as hard at solving overpopulation as we are on increasing lifespan. I realize that most people here are probably not actually going to contribute to either of those fields, but a disproportion fixation on anti-aging seems dangerous to me. Are the cryonics proponents here making an effort to use minimal resources and take up minimal real estate?
I haven’t. Can you provide a link?
Hanson’s IEEE Spectrum article is a good start. See also this discussion on Overcoming Bias and its followup. There are also numerous other posts in OB archives discussing these issues; some of them are under the tag “ems.”
The economist Nick Rowe recently wrote another good analysis along similar lines.
Thanks.