[ballenf]

I worry about what immortality would do to our legal system, moral judgments and overall progress. If a life is immortal then life preservation actually becomes priceless in a non-hyperbolic way. And that means it really does outweigh everything else -- including wellbeing and the cost-benefit of taking risks gets very lopsided. People could still do risky things individually, but any business that had inherent risks would be very difficult to do on any scale. And that includes way more businesses than just the unpopular ones. Think human drug trials, eg.

Or at least that line of thinking becomes very difficult to resist. I still want to promote the research, but like AI progress I hope we think about the second-order effects sufficiently along the way.

One of the cliches around progress in certain fields is that it requires the death of those unwilling to change. Would immortality slow down progress in those fields? Would we have to place more "term limits" on those in authority (whether political or in organizations).

[yourapostasy]

Then move onto the next "immutable law of the universe" to make cry in submission: figure out how to backup mindstate and restore it into a resheathed young blank mindstate clone. Chances are good we'll have to solve both relatively simultaneously, as well as the problem space of what to do with memories/experience, which I suspect are all entangled together.