There’s a lot to be said for the dream-time argument. Inefficiency gives room for slack, and individual misalignment with group averages is inefficient. There are fewer people than the planet could support (in the near-term; hard to know what will happen in the longer term), easing the competitive pressure.
Limiting the number of children that industrial people have lets them maintain the wealth concentrations that make their lives pleasant.
Yeah, so, this is a complex issue. It is actually true IMO that we want fewer people in the world so that we can focus on giving them better lives and more meaningful lives. Unfortunately this would mean that people have to die, but yeah… I also think that cryogenics doesn’t really make it much easier/hard to revive people, I would say either way you pretty much have to do the work of re-raising them by giving them the same experiences...
Although now I think about it there was a problem about that recently where I thought of a way to just “skip to the end state” given a finite length and initial state, the problem is we’d need to be able to simulate the entire world up to the end of the person’s life. So I guess yeah that’s why I don’t think cryonics is too important except for research purposes and I guess motivating people to put their efforts into power efficiency, insulation, computation, materials technology etc. So it is useful in that sense probably more than just burying people but in the sense of “making it easier to bring them back alive,” not really. Also sort of means having fewer people makes it more likely we can have more than a few seconds where no one dies, which would be nice for later.
In terms of numbers, “fewer” I’m thinking like 3-6 billion still, and maybe population will still keep increasing and our job will just be harder, which is annoying, but yeah. I would say don’t have kids if you don’t think the world is actually getting better is a good idea, particularly if you want to make it easier for later people to potentially bring back the people you care about that are already dead.
Life *extension* and recovery etc on the other hand is a *much, much easier* problem. I’m super interested in the technical aspects of this right now although the things I think will probably be substantially different from many people.
There’s a lot to be said for the dream-time argument. Inefficiency gives room for slack, and individual misalignment with group averages is inefficient. There are fewer people than the planet could support (in the near-term; hard to know what will happen in the longer term), easing the competitive pressure.
Limiting the number of children that industrial people have lets them maintain the wealth concentrations that make their lives pleasant.
Yeah, so, this is a complex issue. It is actually true IMO that we want fewer people in the world so that we can focus on giving them better lives and more meaningful lives. Unfortunately this would mean that people have to die, but yeah… I also think that cryogenics doesn’t really make it much easier/hard to revive people, I would say either way you pretty much have to do the work of re-raising them by giving them the same experiences...
Although now I think about it there was a problem about that recently where I thought of a way to just “skip to the end state” given a finite length and initial state, the problem is we’d need to be able to simulate the entire world up to the end of the person’s life. So I guess yeah that’s why I don’t think cryonics is too important except for research purposes and I guess motivating people to put their efforts into power efficiency, insulation, computation, materials technology etc. So it is useful in that sense probably more than just burying people but in the sense of “making it easier to bring them back alive,” not really. Also sort of means having fewer people makes it more likely we can have more than a few seconds where no one dies, which would be nice for later.
In terms of numbers, “fewer” I’m thinking like 3-6 billion still, and maybe population will still keep increasing and our job will just be harder, which is annoying, but yeah. I would say don’t have kids if you don’t think the world is actually getting better is a good idea, particularly if you want to make it easier for later people to potentially bring back the people you care about that are already dead.
Life *extension* and recovery etc on the other hand is a *much, much easier* problem. I’m super interested in the technical aspects of this right now although the things I think will probably be substantially different from many people.
Basically in summary I agree with your post. :)