I have a feeling that as most EA-people are young they are less interested in fighting aging, as it is remote to them, and they also will survive until Strong AI anyway, which will either kill them or make immortal (or even something better, which we can’t guess).
There’s a general point that lots of futurists are the sort of people who would normally be very low time preference (that is, they have a low internal interest rate) but who behave in high time preference ways because of their beliefs about the world, and this causes lots of predictable problems and is not obviously the right way to cash out their beliefs about the world. (For example, consider the joke of ‘the Singularity is my retirement plan,’ which is not entirely a joke if you expect AI to hit in, say, 2040 but for you to be able to start collecting from an IRA in 2050.)
Maybe the right approach is that it’s worth explicitly handling the short, medium, and long time horizons and investing effort along each of those lines. Things like life extension that make more sense in long time horizon worlds are probably still worth investing in, even if there’s only a 10-30% chance we actually have that long.
There’s a general point that lots of futurists are the sort of people who would normally be very low time preference (that is, they have a low internal interest rate) but who behave in high time preference ways because of their beliefs about the world, and this causes lots of predictable problems and is not obviously the right way to cash out their beliefs about the world. (For example, consider the joke of ‘the Singularity is my retirement plan,’ which is not entirely a joke if you expect AI to hit in, say, 2040 but for you to be able to start collecting from an IRA in 2050.)
Maybe the right approach is that it’s worth explicitly handling the short, medium, and long time horizons and investing effort along each of those lines. Things like life extension that make more sense in long time horizon worlds are probably still worth investing in, even if there’s only a 10-30% chance we actually have that long.