Immortality

Scott Pinsker at PJMedia writes that humanity could achieve immortality as little as ten years from now. 

It’s a shame Ray Kurzweil is such a dreadfully boring, unbearably monotonous speaker. Arguably, he’s the most interesting man on the planet. Everyone wants to know what the future holds, and for most of us, we must (checks wristwatch) wait, wait, and wait some more, and eventually, the future arrives. So, we still get to see the future… It just takes a while.

But that’s no fun. We wanna know what the future holds now — today!

And that’s where Ray Kurzweil steps in. He’s not a prophet or a clairvoyant; he’s untrained in crystal balls, divining tea leaves, or manipulating rabbits’ feet. Instead, he tracks technology the way Wayne Gretzky played hockey: What made “The Great One” so great wasn’t that he skated where the puck already was; he had a sixth sense for where the puck was heading next. That’s Kurzweil’s M.O.: He’s the most successful technologist in history at projecting the rate of advancement.

After a long section on advances in artificial intelligence and the Singularity, Pinsker gets to the point. 

In his assessment, we don’t need to “solve” immortality to live forever, as long as we reach the point of “longevity escape velocity.” This will occur when — thanks to AI — our life expectancy will increase by at least 1+ year(s) during each calendar year. As long as science keeps giving us extra year(s), we’ll be functionally immortal (barring sudden catastrophic injuries, of course).

If he’s right, then this is an astonishing advancement: 2029 and 2035 aren’t that far away. It’s within the grasp of all of us, even our more-elderly readers — and certainly within the timelines of all our children and grandchildren. Even if Kurzweil is “only” off by a few decades, this is a civilization-altering development.

I hope Ray Kurzweil is wrong. I hope we never develop an artificial intelligence smarter than we are. I particularly hope we never devise a way to become immortal. 

I wouldn’t mind living forever. Who wouldn’t? Nobody wants to die unless they are suffering such extreme pain or grief that death seems a pleasant release. Immortality, however, would be a disaster for the human race. 

Social and scientific progress largely occurs because the old die off and make way for the young. The old would never die off in a world of immortals, even after millennia. Worse, to avoid overpopulation, there must be very few children born. In such a world, with largely the same population existing for centuries, change would occur very slowly. 

What if the means to achieve immortality had been discovered a thousand years ago? What if there was still a significant population today that was born in the year 1000? Think of all the quarrels and controversies in history we have forgotten about. Catholics and Protestants no longer kill each other over religion. This is because the people who felt strongly enough to kill for faith died centuries ago. No one in Britain is a Jacobite anymore because no one who wants to restore the Stuarts is alive. No one in France advocates for absolute monarchy because the absolute monarchists are no more. No one wants to go on Crusade anymore. No one thinks burning heretics or witches is a good idea today. But what if the veterans of all these conflicts were still alive?

Imagine if Roger Taney were still the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with no sign of retiring even after almost two hundred years. Would the justice who believed the Black man had no rights the White man was bound to respect support any civil rights legislation? What if we still had people serving in Congress for a century or more? Imagine how out of touch they would be with ordinary people’s lives. What if the segregationist governors were still active in politics? 

It is true that two of the most notorious segregationists, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, later changed their minds and supported civil rights legislation. Perhaps they were sincere. I don’t have to be too cynical, however, to suspect that they wanted to appeal to a new generation that was repelled by racism. In a world of immortals, that new generation would never come. The old attitudes would prevail, perhaps forever. 

What about scientific progress? Scientists like to believe that they only follow the facts. Scientists are human and like all humans, they believe what they want to believe. New theories do not replace old theories because many scientists change their minds. New theories replace old theories because old scientists die or retire. What kind of reception would Einstein have gotten from a scientific community who still thought Galileo’s heliocentrism was radical?

Worst of all, imagine if Stalin or Mao were immortal. Tyrants like these could torment their subjects for centuries. At present, even the worst dictator must die and there may be hope his successor might be milder. In a world of immortality, such an expectation would be futile. As the centuries pass, such a despot would grow ever more cunning. Any prospect of his overthrow would be ever less conceivable. 

A world of immortals would be a stagnant world. It would be a largely unchanging world. It would be an old world almost entirely lacking the novelty of youth. It would be a world of people set in centuries-old ways. Since the world continually changes, it might be a world of people incapable of adapting to new circumstances. 

I have always been a lover of scientific discovery. I certainly do not object to medical research that leads to a longer and healthier life. But, perhaps there are limits to how far such research should go. Immortality is a desirable thing for an individual. Who wants to die? It would be a disaster for the human race.