Against immortality?

Just checking, are you aware of Sandberg's counterarguments to the immortal dictators point?

Robert Wiblin: So what about the possibility that life extension would actually be bad for society as a whole? I’ve heard a bunch of different theories, some that I don’t agree with that much, but some that seem plausible. One thing is in the past very often bad governments, authoritarian governments, have ended when the leader of the country dies because then there’s a reshuffling of who might be powerful, and you potentially get a transition to democracy just by increasing the variability of the outcome. If Kim Jong-un could live basically indefinitely, then it seems like North Korea’s prospects are much worse, because he’ll just be able to remain in power almost indefinitely, and he’s not going to die, and there’s not going to be any period of turbulence during which things could improve. Have you thought about that issue?

Anders Sandberg: Actually I have. So I’ve been playing around with a little statistical model of what is the role of aging in getting rid of bad political leaders, and it actually turns out that political science people have done lovely databases of political leaders, and you can get indices. You can even measure the ones that are most authoritarian. Then you can do a statistical model, a Cox proportional hazards model for those who are interested, to actually see the role of age in changing the probability of losing power, and it turns out that we can use this to model a world where these leaders don’t age, and on average they are in power four more years.

Robert Wiblin: Is that all?

Anders Sandberg: That is all.

Robert Wiblin: How long is that average time to begin with?

Anders Sandberg: Well the average time unfortunately tends to be something like 12 years or more, so-

Robert Wiblin: So it increases it by a third on average, but because it’s only 12 years to begin with, it’s not so bad.

Anders Sandberg: So if you’re a young dictator, you just come into power, at first you have a very high risk of losing power very quickly because you have a lot of enemies around. So typically the hazard is high at the start, and then they tend to decline, because authoritarian rulers get rid of their competitors. Then it stays relatively low, and then slowly goes up over time, and part of that increase is of course due to aging.

Now the interesting thing here is why do people lose power? Well, it turns out that being so old that you can’t hold on to power is a relatively rare thing. Relatively few dictators actually die at home in bed. In fact, most of them fall prey to the other scary people they surround themselves with. In that picture of the junta of the country, the other people in sunglasses surround the El Presidente, they are the ones to look out for because they are would-be dictators. They have a lot of power, and eventually they might get fed up on waiting. So if nobody were aging, I don’t think dictatorships would be changed that much.

In fact, if we want to think about negative effects of life extension, I think this might have a much bigger effect for example in academia. After all, the professor, if the professor is never really getting older, is just getting more and more skilled both in maybe education and even more in academic intrigue, they’re just going to hold on forever. There is this Pauli Principle that maybe science advances one funeral at a time. It’s debated. There have been attempts at actually investigating it, and the conclusion is somewhat mixed. Sometimes revolutions actually do sweep academia without replacing people. In some cases it does seem to be generational, but you can certainly imagine many institutions where it would be relatively easy to hold on to power indefinitely, but this is a very foreseeable problem, and I think the solution also is rather simple, term limits.

Robert Wiblin: Term limits. Yeah.

Anders Sandberg: Because in my dictator data, I of course also have political leaders from non-dictatorial countries, and they of course generally stay in power for one term or maybe two terms if they are really successful, and then they disappear, and we might want to have term limits for jobs. Maybe you’re not allowed to have the same job for more than a century. Then it’s time for somebody else to try.

Hi Owen! The advantages and limitations of immortality needs more thought as our society is starting to more seriously invest in anti-aging.

One of my challenges with this post is that it claims to provide an "anti-immortality case," but then proceeds to simply list some problems that might arise if people were immortal.

To make an anti-X case, you need to do more than list some problems with X. You need to make a case that the problems are insurmountably bad or risky, even after a consideration of possible solutions. Alternatively, you can make a case that the downsides inevitably outweigh the benefits, despite a presumption that people will work hard to mitigate those downsides and maximize the benefits.

Your article is specifically about immortality, or at least adding perhaps 10,000 years to average human life expectancy. That's a different topic from more realistic incremental anti-aging efforts. But that also gets into a Sorites paradox, so it seems worth bringing up incremental efforts as well.

Note: what follows isn't an attempt to bombard you with Gish-gallop-style questions. It's just food for thought.

If I could push a button to increase lifespans 100x or 10,000x I would be much more hesitant. 

• If you could push a button to give everybody one extra year of youthful life, how many times would you press it?
• What if you had the option of pushing that button, or not pushing it, every year?
• What if the world's life sciences and engineering community was paid to push that button every year? Would we be glad that they had such a button to push?
• What if the world's governments were in charge of deciding whether or not to push the button? Would we like them to have control over the button?
• Now consider the same questions, but for a button that removes one year of old age from everybody's lifespans. Would you be happy that the relevant people had access to such a button? How many times should it be pressed?
• Finally, imagine everybody had a button they could individually press in order to extend their youthful life by one year. They can press their buttons once a year. You have a button that reduces the effectiveness of their buttons by half, or that disables their buttons entirely. Would you press your button-disabling button?

If you don't think anybody should press the life extension button, but you also don't think that anybody should press the life-shortening button, then we need an explanation for why you believe people are living the perfect amount of time for overall human wellbeing.

I think that anti-aging research is most likely to produce "one year of life extension" buttons, every now and then. Every time such a button is pressed, society will have a chance to observe the effects and adjust in advance of the next button press. This specific anti-aging scenario is the one that I think merits the most focused attention.

I felt quite frustrated by this post, because the preponderance of EA discourse is already quite sceptical of anti-ageing interventions (as you can tell by the fact that no major EA funder is putting significant resources into it). I would in fact claim that the amount of time and ink spent within EA in discussing reasons not to support anti-ageing interventions significantly exceeds that spent on the pro side.

So this post is repeating well-covered arguments, and strengthening the perception that "EAs don't do longevity", while claiming to be promoting an under-represented point of view.

Less extremely, there is the adage that science progresses one funeral at a time

Paul Abramson, Ronald Inglehart, and others, have similarly suggested that value changes largely occur via generational replacement. See discussion here.

Some quick reactions to your points:

• Dying from ageing-related diseases like Alzheimer's and Cancer seems a lot worse than starvation. If I had to choose between starving to death in a few weeks vs. losing the ability to recognize my family for years, I would always go with starving (just personal choice though)
• At this point, I think all "gerontocracy/value-lock in/immortal dictator" arguments fall short because they imagine that immortality does not change human psychology. In the simplest case, old people are not less curious because of chronological ageing, but because of neuroinflammation due to ageing. (curiosity is measured in a lot of mice studies, but also there is some observational evidence in humans)
• What I am trying to say is, that anti-ageing technology will reset the curiosity of the elderly to that of a 20-year-old. If they remain conservative, then it's probably due to good reason (they might have known Chesterton personally when he put up the fence)
• More tentative, but: I believe that undefined lifespans (which is a more realistic thing than "immortality") change the underlying game theory of human interaction: it shifts every decision from a prisoner's dilemma to the infinite prisoner's dilemma, where cooperation is optimal
• If this is true then the optimal time for lifespan to become undefined could have been way in the past, because all short term problems would have been washed out by better public goods funding. (This is the "stakes for caring about X-risk are higher if you have skin in the game" argument)

I've sometimes thought about if 'immortality' is the right framing, at least for the current moment. Like AllAmericanBreakfast points out, I think that anti-ageing research is unlikely to produce life extensions in the 100x to 1000x range all at once.

In any case, even if we manage to halt ageing entirely, ceteris paribus there will still be deaths from accidents and other causes. A while ago I tried a fermi calculation on this, I think I used this data (United States, 2017). The death rate for people between 15-34 is ~0.1%/year, this rate of death would put the median lifespan at ~700 years (Using X~Exp(0.001)). 

Probably this is an underestimate of lifespan - accidental death should decrease (safety improvements, of which self-driving cars might be significant given how many people die of road accidents), curing ageing might have positive effects on younger people as well, and other healthcare improvements should occur, and people might be more careful if they're theoretically immortal(?). However, I think this framing poses a slightly different question:

Do we prefer that more people:

• Live shorter lives and die of heart disease/cancer/respiratory disease*, or
• Live (possibly much) longer lives and die of accidents/suicide/homicide

I don't know how I feel about these. I think in the theoretical case of going immediately from current state to immortality I'd be worried about Chesterton's-fence-y bad results - not that someone put ageing into place, but I'd expect surprising and possibly unpleasant side effects of changing something so significant**.

*I inferred from the data I linked above that heart disease and cancer are somewhat ageing-related, I'm not sure if this is true

**The existence of the immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, implies that a form of immortality was evolvable, which in turn might imply that there's some reason evolution didn't favour more immortal things/things that tended slightly more towards immortality.

Thanks for pointing out this small elephant in the room. I think that, even if we could solve problems like the "ossification of values" (idk, maybe psychodelics, or some special therapy) or the possibility of immortal tyrants, the underlying problem is that some types of power (like wealth) accumulate with time... as usual, I think SMBC summarizes it in just one panel: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/social-longevity

In "Three worlds collide", the rationalist character makes it clear for the captain of the ship that the latter has to make the important decisions, because it's not up to the elders, but to the young, to command. I don't think this necessarily applies to our current societies, but I can see why it makes sense in contexts with extreme longevity. Unfortunately, it looks like we think it might be easier to solve senescence than intergenerational cooperation.

I like the point that we should not only consider the individual case. I guess people's hope is that, 
in a future where everything goes maximally well, bad externalities like "old people's beliefs become ossified" can be addressed by some really clever governance structure. 

On the individual case:

In my post "The Life-Goals Framework: How I Reason About Morality as an Anti-Realist," I mention longevity/not wanting to die a couple of times as an example of a "life goal." ("Life goal" is a term I introduce that means something like "an objective you care about terminally, so much that you have formed [or want to form] an optimizing mindset around it.") In the post, I argue that it's a personal choice which (if any) life goals we adopt.

One point I make there is that by deciding that not wanting to die is immensely important to you, you adopt a new metric of scoring how well you're doing in life. That particular metric (not wanting to die) places a lot of demands on you. I think this point is related to your example where you dislike telling people (implicitly or explicitly) that they're failing if they've had a happy routine, watched their grandkids grow up and have kids of their own, and feel like they can let go rather than needing to do more in the world. 

Here some relevant quotes from my article (one theme is that the way we form life goals isn't too dissimilar from how we chose between leisure activities and adopt lifestyles or careers): 

In the same way different people feel the most satisfied with different lifestyles or careers, people’s intuitions may differ concerning how they’d feel with the type of identity (or mindset) implied by a given life goal.

[...]

For the objective “valuing longevity,” it’s worth noting how life-altering it would be to adopt the corresponding optimizing mindset. Instead of trusting your gut about how well life is going, you’d have to regularly remind yourself that perceived happiness over the next decades is entirely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. What matters most is that you do your best to optimize your probability of survival. People with naturally high degrees of foresight and agency (or those with somewhat of a “prepper mentality”) may actively enjoy that type of mindset – even though it conflicts with common sense notions of living a fulfilled life. By contrast, the people who are happiest when they enjoy their lives moment-by-moment may find the future-focused optimizing mindset off-putting.

[...]

Earlier on, I wrote the following about how we choose leisure activities [this was in the context of discussing whether to go skiing or spend the weekend cozily at home]:

>[...] [W]e tend to have a lot of freedom in how we frame our decision options. We use this >freedom, this reframing capacity, to become comfortable with the choices we are about to >make. In case skiing wins out, then “warm and cozy” becomes “lazy and boring,” and “cold and >tired” becomes “an opportunity to train resilience / apply Stoicism.” This reframing ability is a >double-edged sword: it enables rationalizing, but it also allows us to stick to our beliefs and >values when we’re facing temptations and other difficulties.

The same applies to how we choose self-oriented life goals. On one side, there’s the appeal of the potential life-goal objective (e.g., “how good it would be to live forever” or “how meaningful it would be to have children”). On the other side, there are all the ways how the corresponding optimizing mindset would make our lives more complicated and demanding. Human psychology seems somewhat dynamic here because the reflective equilibrium can end up on opposite sides depending on each side’s momentum. Option one – by committing to the life goal in question, “complicated and demanding” can become “difficult but meaningful.” Alternatively, there’s option two. By deciding that we don’t care about the particular life-goal objective, we can focus on how much we value the freedom that comes with it. In turn, that freedom can become part of our terminal values. (For example, adopting a Buddhist/Epicurean stance toward personal death can feel liberating, and the same goes for some other major life choices, such as not wanting children.)

These quotes describe how people form their objectives, the standards by which they measure their lives. Of course, someone can now say "An objective being 'demanding' isn't necessarily a good reason to give up on it. What about the possibility that some people form ill-inspired life goals because they don't know/don't fully realize what they're giving?"

I talk about this concern ("ill-inspired life goals") in this section of the post. 

I have a paper from a few years ago arguing a similar point. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-8949/89/12/128005;jsessionid=7EACB368D908AD6B0EC00F6688E725DD.c2.iopscience.cld.iop.org#metrics 

From the abstract: 

This article argues that this research program [longevity treatement] is much more risky or less beneficial than its proponents argue. In particular, they tend to underestimate the concerns associated with the potentially drastic population growth that longevity treatment could cause. The ethical benefit often ascribed to longevity treatment is that such treatment would add more subjective life-years that are worth living. However, in light of contemporary environmental problems, such an increase of the human population might be reckless. Drastically reducing fertility to reduce risks associated with environmental stress would make the benefits of such technology much less compelling.

Send me an email for the pdf if you are interested. 

Conditional on immortality being achievable, we might also care about the hands in whom it is achieved. And if there isn't much altruistic investment, it might by default fall into the hands of inordinately selfish billionaires.

The (increasing) majority of the world's population already believes that their soul is immortal and that their actions in this life will determine the quality of their afterlife/rebirth.  

I'm interested to hear religious perspectives on the value of life extension and immortality as I expect this will be one of the most important factors in the adoption of technological advances in longevity.

Additional arguments to explore:

• Replaceablitiy: it might be better on the margin to focus on increasing fertility relative to slowing down ageing on ground of cost effectiveness, tractability and generating comparable (or more) expected happy life. This is also limit the problem of immortal dictators and bad ideas.
• Hard to argue that reducing ageing beats X-risks. Unless one thinks slowing down ageing is a good intervention to reduce X-risks. We might care more about the long term future if we live longer but human psychology is such that we might discount our future selves anyway and X-risks are actually not that much of a "long term" issue:  AI X-risks, nuclear war and other pandemics have a descent chance to happen in a couple of decades  (so most people alive today have a descent chance to live through one of them  anyway).
• Human aligned AI will help us with anti-ageing research: prioritise aligning AI and then ageing will be easier to solve
• Replaceablitiy with happy AIs: Biological organisms might not be a cost effective way to create a lot of happy life in the world. Resources are better allocated in building happy simulations (in the form of brain emulations or human aligned AIs) that can populate the world more effectively, live arbitrary long lives in which they can self modify (as long as they stay aligned)

Existential risks, and AI considerations aside:

Ageing generates an important amount of suffering (old bodies in particular tends to be painful for a while) and might be one of the dominant burden on healthcare systems, I'm wondering for ex how ageing compares with standard global health and development issues at least maybe it could plausibly compare or even beat them in terms of scale (would like to see a cost benefit analysis of that).

As a software engineer, I resonate with this post. In software engineering, I regularly have to make the decision of whether to improve existing software or replace it with a new solution.

Obvious caveats: humans are incomparable to pieces of software, and human genes evolve much more slowly than JavaScript frameworks.

I think software engineers succumb to the temptation to "start with a green field and clean slate" a bit too often. We tend to underestimate the value that lies in tried and tested software (and overestimate the difficulty of iterative improvements). Similarly, I think that I personally might underestimate the value, wisdom, and moral weight of existing people, particularly if we could solve most health problems. Yet I do believe that after some amount of life years, the value of a new life -- a newborn who can learn everything from scratch and benefit from all the goodness that humanity has accumulated before its birth -- exceeds the value of extending the existing life.

The trade-off is even more salient in animal agriculture. Obvious caveat: humans are incomparable to cows, and human genes evolve much more slowly than cow genes.

Because cows are bred to a quite extreme degree, a cow born today has substantially "better" genes than a cow born 10 years ago. This is one of the reasons why it is economically profitable to kill a dairy cow after 4-6 years rather than let it live to its full lifespan.

Your last bullet point reminded me of this anecdata: Several people that stand to inherit a meaningful amount of money have told me that they’re being quiet about their charitable giving with their family until they’ve actually inherited funds for feat of being disinherited (they believe that their family are very happy/strongly optimising to give them a lot of money for using on themselves and their children but not onboard with altruistic spending).

Humanity and society are weird. By some cosmic fluke involving brains and thumbs we figured out how to mold the landscape to grow our food and later on figured out how to access million-year old energy deposits in the lithosphere.

We are less than two centuries out from the beginning of industrialized society and we have no clue how to balance energy and resource flows to sustain civilization beyond a few more centuries. And now some of us apes are thinking, "hey, how about we don't die?" as if the current weird state of things somehow represents some new normal of human existence.

There has been ample debate around "strong sustainability" vs. "weak sustainability", which centers on how much technological substitution can overcome increasing environmental pressures. People have been using specific, limited examples of weak sustainability being true (see debates around Limits to Growth) to argue against strong sustainability. Its one thing to argue that we can change planetary limits / carrying capacity, and another to say that those limits don't exist. Limits exist; that falls out of some basic thermodynamics.

Pursuing life extension beyond a few centuries seems reckless without figuring out how to do strong sustainability first. With limits, resources are zero-sum beyond some geologic replenishment rate; people living longer trade off against other people, non-human animal, and plant life, or it buys down the resources available to people in the future. I would expect longtermists to be especially cautious about how reckless life-extension could be given limits.

Given that the annual utility is the product between the population size and annual utility per capita, which depends on the real GDP per capita, I think it would be interesting to explore how life-extension interventions impact fertility rate and economic growth.

I make a slightly different anti-immortality case here:

https://harsimony.wordpress.com/2020/11/27/is-immortality-ethical/

Summary: At a steady state of population, extended lifespan means taking resources away from other potential people. Technology for extended life may not be ethical in this case. Because we are not in steady state, this does not argue against working on life extension technology today.

Don't most dictators pass the power to their children or someone close to them anyway? And are these people not highly likely to remain dictators as well? Is it really the case that dictatorships are likely to become democracies when the dictator dies of old age? I find these are not trivial to answer.