Can growth continue? A five-minute talk for Ignite Long Now 2022
In this update:
Can growth continue? (Ignite Long Now 2022)
How curing aging could help progress
Interview: Hear this Idea with Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti
Can growth continue?
I gave a five-minute talk talk forย Ignite Long Now 2022. Itโs a simplified and very condensed treatment of a complex topic
Here is a transcript with selected visuals and added links.
How curing aging could help progress
How would society change if we cured aging, and people could have as many healthy years of life as they wanted?
A common concern is that this would ossify our institutions. The old guard would never die off, and so would never be replaced by young bloods. This could threaten progress across the board, from governance to physics. If โscience advances one funeral at a time,โ what happens when the rate of funerals plummets?
Itโs a real concern. But here are three reasons why curing aging couldย helpย progress:
Population.ย One of the greatest threats to long-term progress may be aย slowdown in global population growth. Weย need more brainsย to keep pushing science and technology forward. Yet right now, many wealthy nations haveย fertility rates below replacement levels. Curing aging would help temporarily by lowering the mortality rate. It could help permanently if people decide to have more children, on average. That might happen if longer lifespan means people feel they have time for both children and a career. (Remember that fully curing aging means maintaining reproductive health for all those years.)
Burden of knowledge.ย There isย a hypothesisย that as knowledge grows, it takes longer to reach the frontier, and so individual researchers have less time to contribute advancements. They are also forced to specializeโbut breakthroughs often come from making connections across far-flung disciplines. If individuals had much longer lifespans, it would be no problem for them to spend 30 or 40 years just learning, before making major contributions. And you could spend another 10 or 20 years picking up a couple more specialties in disparate areas.
Long-term thinking.ย How would peopleโs thinking change if they felt they were going to live 150, 300, even 1,000 years or more? The very long-term becomes much more personal. Posterity is something youโre going to be around for.
I still think the โold guardโ problem is real, and weโd have to come up with new mechanisms to address it. (Perhaps influential positions would institute a mandatory retirement age of 350.) But there are other factors to consider, and itโs not clear what the net impact would be.
(Not that this is an argument for or against curing aging! Ultimately, the knock-down argument for curing aging is thatย death is bad. In light of that, other considerations pale into insignificance.)
This essay was originally aย Twitter thread, and was inspired by an online discussion about the Foresight Instituteโs book-in-development,ย Gaming the Future.
Original post:ย https://rootsofprogress.org/how-curing-aging-could-help-progress
Interview: Hear this Idea with Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti
I was interviewed for theย Hear this Ideaย podcast by Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti. We had a long, fun, in-depth conversation.
In our conversation, we discuss:
What progress is, and why it matters (maybe more than you think)
How to think about resource constraints โ why they are sometimes both real and surmountable
The โlow-hanging fruitโ explanation for stagnation, and prospects for speeding up innovation
Tradeoffs between progress and (existential) safety
Differences between the Progress Studies and Effective Altruism communities
Listen or read a transcript on theย show page, which also has links and resources. (Or listen onย Appleย orย Spotify.)