[ExI] ?Risks: Global Catastrophic, Extinction, Existential and ...

[Dan]

On Thursday, March 8, 2012 4:55 PM BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/3/8  Natasha wrote:
>> If we consider radical human life extension,  what type of risk might there
>> be?  (Extinction risk is obvious, but I'm wondering if extinction risk is
>> more relevant to a species rather than a person.)  So, I started thinking
>> about the elements of a person that keep him/her alive: foresight, insight,
>> intelligence, creativity, willingness to change, etc. I also thought about
>> what might keep a person from not continuing to exist: depression/sadness.
>> Then I thought about what someone else might do to keep me from
>> existing: inflicting his/her values/beliefs onto my sphere of existence that
>> would endanger my right to live. I arrived back at morphological freedom, as
>> understood by More on one hand and Sandberg on the other, which pertains to
>> a negative right --  a right to exist and a right not to be coerced to
>> exist. But again, here the behavior of morphological freedom is a freedom
>> and does not answer the question of what could a risk be that reflects a
>> person's choice/right to live/exist?
> 
> Humans have no experience of radical life extension. e.g. 1,000 year lifespans.
> 
> So we are guessing what it will be like. Asking 80-90 year olds is not
> much help because they will mostly have ageing health problems to cope
> with.
> 
> I expect boredom and 'seen it all before' attitudes to appear in a lot
> of cases. Ennui is a good word.
> 
> Now I know that this claim will immediately have all the 20-30 year
> old list members protesting that they will *never* get bored and will
> always find something new and interesting to occupy their time. But
> from the 70 year POV youngsters are already noted for having strange
> and impractical opinions.  ;)

There might be something else going here. A typical 70 year old is not exactly the same as a typical 20 to 30 year old with simply more years of life experiences. The 70 year old is likely to be functioning in a different way because of aging. E.g., she or he might be less active, less driven, and even suffer from depression. (E.g., let's say you love to snowboard, but now that you're older you either can't do this at all or ache and are in pain for days afterward, and you just can't keep up like you used to. You're no longer having fun not because you've done this before, but because you've done much better before and your current performance and enjoyment are way below your former expectations.) And this decline might have been going on for decades, so that the 70 year old's perspective here is different not simply because she has been there done that, but because her brain has altered to make her not seek out new experiences, no have great
 expectations, and so forth.

Presumably, if radical life extension is successful, it's not going to be extending a wretched decrepit state*, but revivifying the aged and preventing aging in the not yet aged. So, I think some of these problems will be attenuated if not avoided completely.

Regards,

Dan

* It also seems to me that some of the improvements in life expectancy have been slowing down aging or at least avoiding some of the usual things that go along with aging. Watching old movies and old TV shows, I tend to see people who are relatively young looking worn out and much older. Mayhap many people alive today are aging less slowly already -- albeit not radically enough to live, say, thousand year life spans.
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