23 May
Dear Jason Crawford,
Early in May, you tweeted something that fascinated me. You asked “how would society change if we cured aging, and people could have as many healthy years of life as they wanted?” [1]
The idea is alluring indeed. I myself wish that I could live long enough to see all the wonderful things on Earth — from my great-great-great grandchildren to scientific achievements and best-selling novels that are yet to come.
I am, however, less optimistic than you are about the global consequences of mainstream immortality.
For starters, you state that one of “the greatest threats to long-term progress may be the slowdown in global population growth”. The idea being that “we need more brains to keep pushing science and technology forward”.
While there is a strong correlation between population growth, population size, and technological progress over the long arm of history (see Kremer 1993), progress depends just as well on the quality of our institutions and organization.
Maybe before pursuing everlasting life, we ought to check first if society can produce less bankers and more scientists?
Many of our pressing problems, as defined by the Sustainable Development Goals, are not due to insufficient people but to failures in policy-making, coordination, and resource allocation. People know what needs to be done to make the world a better place. We just can’t seem to get our act together.
True, a cure for aging may address the “burden of knowledge” as you’ve described. But I don’t believe that more and longer-lived people will resolve the complex dilemmas of our times. What we face are collective action problems.
Your third argument on “long-term thinking”, however, is the most interesting. And it’d make for some great science-fiction writing, don’t you think?
The problem, as I see it, is the range of good and bad unintended consequences that we cannot yet account for. You’ve rightly pointed out the danger of ossifying institutions.
Just imagine what might happen if a certain demagogue and his cronies get to live forever? That sounds like hell.
And it’s not just a problem of people and institutions. Immortality will be a problem of fairness too. From diabetes medication to clean water, many twenty-first century families still cannot afford the basic necessities that you and I enjoy on a routine basis.
In this light, I find it hard to believe that a cure for aging would be accessible to everyone. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an expensive, inescapable thing. And any miracle cure that delays the inevitable would, I imagine, involve a lot of check ups and maintenance (much like a very expensive dentist).
Look at the debt burdens that young students take on just to attend four years of college. How exactly will society pay for immortality?
So not only might we create archaic institutions run by long-lived autocrats, we’d be adding further to the stratification of society — drawing economic and social dividing lines between those who live forever and those who live as we do today.
Unfortunately, it may not matter whether we think this is ethical or not. Like the agricultural revolution and industrialization, once a privately beneficial technology presents itself, some pockets of society will adopt it. And once general-purpose-technologies and autocatalytic processes are underway, there’s no turning back for society.
As I write this out, I cannot help but wonder if I’m being rather Luddite in my way of thinking. Humankind has long sought the elixir of immortality. How bad could it be? Advances in medicine over the last few centuries, after all, have added enormously to our quality of living.
But as Shakespeare asks in As You Like It, “can one desire too much of a good thing?”
Now, if only I could live forever. Then I would know the answer to this!
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your views in more detail, Jason. Your thoughts on this topic deserve more than a few tweets!
Warm regards,
Tobias
[1] Original tweet, Jason Crawford (May 2): https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1520955421682405377
Tobias Lim
Tobias Lim