[adovenmuehle]

The takeaway I have from this is that people are people, no matter their status: not sure if what they're doing is what they should be, insecure about other's love for them, never satisfied.

It reminds me that we're all people, all human.

Also reminds me of a bible verse (Ecclesiastes 9:10): "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom."

Whether rich or poor, happy or not, we all die.

[georgieporgie]

we all die.

That will probably be changing soon.

[VladRussian]

it will be changing to "some [ who can afford it] will not die"

[michaelochurch]

Anti-aging, once developed, will be cheaper than geriatric care: the "ounce of prevention" effect. Governments will be pushing the treatments on people and opt-outs may eventually be denied social services (especially once the knowledge of how to treat advanced pathologies that are now common geriatric conditions fades away).

Very few people want to live to 100000, much less forever. What will produce the very long lifespans is the day-to-day iterated decision, which won't be life vs. death or stay-young vs. get-old, but well vs. sick, where there's an obvious victor: being well. There's the saying, "Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die." I disagree. Everyone wants to die (at some point in the future, possibly millions of years off) but no one wants to get sick.

[kovar]

Why would governments encourage people to stay alive longer? I can think of several reasons not to do so:

-there is an associated cost per citizen that may not be offset by revenue/taxes -this will spur population growth, with all the associated problems

[michaelochurch]

Advanced pathology will probably always require human labor to treat (liability, moral issues) and therefore it will always be expensive. Anti-aging treatments will start out expensive but be very cheap within a generation: a $2 pill every month. Technology's pace of change is accelerating, not diminishing.

Aging and dying costs the medical system about $500,000 per person. Then there is the loss of that person's productive potential. Anti-aging treatments are going to be incredibly cheap in comparison to death.

Post-aging population growth is likely to be closer to linear than exponential. Would you really want to deal with 5000 kids for a million years?

There will be a lot of problems with post-aging humanity, but they aren't the ones people propose, especially not the ecological ones. Humanity's ecological load on the planet will max out some time early this millennium. As a cautious transhumanist and a deistic Buddhist, I worry about spiritual emptiness. I think post-aging, post-scarcity might look like the realm of the devas and ashuras in Buddhism (often mistranslated as "gods" and "demigods") which may exist only as metaphor now, but is likely to become reality (for some) in a few hundred years. I see no need and no way to prevent these changes (end of aging and death) and we have no right to do so, but they do run the risk of allowing people to lock themselves into sub-optimal and stagnant states. Also, I may be wrong about the post-aging world and I hope I am. A world with a 50,000-year lifespan may be a spiritual paradise, a pure land. Currently, we have an 80-year lifespan and people only get to use 10-20% of their living time due to economic needs, so we have a world where most people don't develop much at all.

[billybob]

I think none of this will happen, but if it does, another problem I'd forsee is personality decay.

We all accumulate quirks. If you're mauled by a dog, you will understandably be afraid of dogs afterwards. Probably excessively, irrationally so. If you live through a depression, you may become obsessive about saving. If you have a great time polka dancing, you may scoff at electric guitars.

Eventually these things build up to the point where you're a curmudgeon. We say old people are "stuck in their ways." But young people, for all their foolishness, see their parents viewpoints and habits and virtues and prejudices, not with objective eyes - they have their own faults too - but with fresher ones.

If humanity ever consists mostly of people with thousands of years of life experience, accumulated habits, etc - well, that sounds like a pretty miserable existence to me. And maybe a fragile one if larger threats arise. How will you "think outside the box" to respond if you've been building your box for centuries?

[michaelochurch]

Singularity is not going to eradicate death. Aging, yes. That will probably be gone by the mid-22nd century, if not before. Death of the whole brain will always mean what it does today: the end of one's earthly existence. Mind uploading assumes there can be physical control over qualia, and there's absolutely no evidence for that.

In the middle 3rd millennium, aging will be gone and death will be rare (very rare, and exponentially declining so as to make humans post-mortal) but extremely traumatic when it happens. "Breaking News: 134-year-old honors student dies in lunar train crash." 4th-millennium humans will probably store their brains in very safe repositories and control robotic, replaceable bodies through electronic telepathy. Some people alive will probably live to see this, and if I take my next rebirth here, I probably will as well. But I kinda hope not to "make the cut". A hundred years in good health I'd love, but I don't really want to wait around till the heat death of the universe to pass on.

[orangecat]

Mind uploading assumes there can be physical control over qualia, and there's absolutely no evidence for that.

Well, the alternative is magic.

[michaelochurch]

My religious viewpoint, as a deist who believes existence in a higher power to be the most rational belief but denies the existence of "miracles", divine interventionism, prophecy or revealed religion: qualia is a miracle, probably the only one in this world, and the only one we need.

[StrawberryFrog]

In the middle 3rd millennium, aging will be gone and death will be rare

In several comments here, you use the word "will" a lot. It's possible, but it makes you sound like a crazy prophet. No-one knows for sure how the future will play out.

[michaelochurch]

Replace "will" with "will probably, based on a variety of assumptions, most notably continued technical progress in the long term". Economy of words.

[samth]

The Brooklyn Bridge authority is on line 2; they say they have a great deal for you.