alt Hacker NewsBah, 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.
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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.
> 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...
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.
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.
> Put us in computers.
Unfortunately, that's only available for premium max customers. Also you should know, plus is now standard.
>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?
"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."
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.