[bee_rider]

Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes.

I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.

Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.

[CodingJeebus]

> Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.

It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.

0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...

[bee_rider]

Well, thanks I guess. I think it is a cute idea, not a serious one really. At least, I definitely haven’t worked the details.

We’d have to be maintained. Maybe that could be part of the deal. Humans are always changing anyway, so I think we’d couldn’t be left entirely at rest. Maybe we should be run slowly, to just to make sure things are still working. Then we don’t have to worry about at-rest type bitrot.

[OkayPhysicist]

If my files could beg for their lives to be kept up-to-date with new storage media, I probably wouldn't have lost so many over time.

[weinzierl]

Me too, definitely. Should I get bored I could always go about and insult every being that ever lived and will live in the entire universe - in alphabetical order.

[sph]

I feel that those that would choose immortality are so self-important that they would not get any wiser from their additional time on earth.

[weinzierl]

Maybe you are overthinking it.

[bluefirebrand]

Maybe you're under thinking it

[wseqyrku]

> Put us in computers.

Unfortunately, that's only available for premium max customers. Also you should know, plus is now standard.

[palmotea]

> I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.

Your idea obviously doesn't work. You're basically advocating for something like Chronic lymphocyte leukemia at the society level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_lymphocytic_leukemia).

[tmsbrg]

As I said in another comment, I'm against immortality because old people need to make way for new generations. But this comment is cute. I like the idea that we'd be there and we're able to see how people are doing, but we're not influencing the world anymore. Though I could also imagine at some point it could become depressing in bad times when there's nothing you can do, or boring after tens of thousands of years of repetition. I can also imagine some bad spirits trying to break out and influence worldly affairs.

[credit_guy]

> old people need to make way for new generations

The main problem with extended lifespan will not be that some people will amass extreme wealth and power while living centuries, and they'll oppress the younger generations, who will not have a fair chance in life.

The much more likely problem will be that old people will not adjust to the new technologies. Lots of them will be victims to "pig butchering" schemes. Or they'll simply be illiterate in the new ways of life. If medicine makes tremendous progress, we might end up with a good chunk of our society being elderly, healthy, but socially unadjusted and estranged. Especially with more and more people being childless. Imagine someone who is 110 years old, with no living relatives, secluded in a nursing home, not knowing how to use the internet, or whatever the equivalent of that will be at that point in time.

These people deserve pity. But to they need to "make way for new generations"? That feels a bit eugenic to me.

[blargey]

I'm not sure why people have it in their heads that this "making way" requires one to be cast into the formless void instead of, like, a gated community.

[igor47]

I do think we're significant more likely to solve immortality than the problem of getting old rich powerful people to relinquish their grip on wealth and power

[bluefirebrand]

> the problem of getting old rich powerful people to relinquish their grip on wealth and power

This is a solved problem, guillotines worked wonders for this back in the day.

[d_tr]

Exactly... Nothing can stop the masses. Plus, we have laws that can change and adapt.

[bee_rider]

Maybe we could set it up so the “spirits” can just talk to the “living” when the latter start the conversation. That seems like a reasonable way of setting things up.

It’s all a bit fanciful of course—we’d basically be setting up an emulation of various spiritual beliefs, and there’s no reason to believe anybody would go along with the constraints. But it is fun to think about.

[UtopiaPunk]

Impossible to know if there is something like Sheol after death, so we thought, "why not make our own eternal emptiness?"

[kulahan]

Being stuck in a computer might not be so bad. "Wake up" once a year decade for a few hours, see what happened, go back to "sleep". Immortality on call.

[serf]

whenever I imagine immortality en masse I imagine the hobbies that people started experimenting with after exposure to the concept of deathlessness in the short story 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect'.

that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.

it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.

[skandinaff]

It's a fascinating book indeed, just finished the second chapter, and it is surprisingly accurate in many regards of AI representation, given it's from 1994. Will read on, thank you

[riskable]

I think that if no one died of old age, predators would eventually emerge that preyed on the old. It seems like it's an inescapable part of nature.

[sungho_]

Contrary to what one might think, if you were to live forever, you might end up taking insane risks and trying anything and everything.

[Apocryphon]

"I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice."

[didgeoridoo]

Get out of here, Nwabudike. This doesn’t concern you.

[Arodex]

>But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point.

And how is that supposed to happen once the rich and powerful who finance and own the rights to that immortality tech succeed in their research?

In a world where basic health care is barely accessible in the US and under constant attack, how is immortality supposed to be given to the common men and women? Through asinine "work requirements", like Medicaid? Through UnitedHealthcare's insurance?

[Antibabelic]

> Put us in computers

I feel like this is a modern version of believing in souls. You are matter, not data. If you find a way to simulate yourself on a computer, this will not prevent you from experiencing death. And if that's the case, what's the point? Stroking your ego with the knowledge that a simulation of you will stick around for some time after you give up the ghost?

[bee_rider]

Maybe we’re already the simulations, just, this part of our memories is the back-propagation used to figure out where the saved copy came from.

[kbelder]

I think it's the opposite. Believing that something special exists in brains that can't in be replicated in a (sufficiently complex) computer is spirituality, a belief in the supernatural.

[Antibabelic]

Rather, confusing models (including computational ones) for the things they model is the very definition of magical thinking. Matter matters. There is nothing specific about "brains" that prevents them from "existing" digitally. The fact is that nothing material can "exist" in a computational substrate. A computer can only simulate: replicate the structure of material things in a useful to us manner using symbols.

[ForHackernews]

You won't have immortality, but Jeff Bezos & friends might.

How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?

[ileonichwiesz]

Agreed. If immortality was discovered tomorrow (or at least some sort of anti-aging treatment), there’s no way it would become available to a regular person. All of us would still age and die, but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.

[d_tr]

> but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.

We all know what the ruled do when they get really pissed. The prospective ghouls know it very well too.