Suppose that things in general are being run by pervasive AI that monitors everything, with every human being watched by many humans-worth of intelligence, and fast enough, ubiquitous enough robotics to stop most or all human actions before they can be completed. Why would you even have prison sentences of any kind?
If you hold everything constant and just vastly extend everybody’s life span, then maybe they stay in prison until it becomes unfashionable to be so punitive, and then get released. Which doesn’t mean that kind of punitiveness won’t come back into fashion later. Attitudes like that can change a lot in a few centuries. For that matter the governments that enforce the rules have a shelf life.
Yes prison sentences don’t make sense after the fact. To be clear, I mean existing life sentences.
For those, I think it depends on how much the rule deciders decide to uphold laws. To let them out requires rewriting current laws and retroactively applying them. If the the rule decider generally follows democratic will eventually they will be let out.
OTOH, if they vaguely uphold the status quo and rigidly follow a constitution, I can see certain people locked up forever. Some prison sentences are written in years and many life sentences still have a time limit. In reality, some old criminals under a life sentence are also let out. I can see immortal entities under existing life sentences arguing their punishment is cruel and unusual and eventually succeeding.
I also meant existing life sentences. At any given time, you may have a political change that ends them, and once that happens, it’s as much a matter of law as the original sentence.
I can’t see any given set of laws or constitution, or the sentences imposed under them, lasting more than a few hundred years, and probably much less.
I could see a world where they didn’t get the treatments to begin with, though.
How much does the rest of the world change?
Suppose that things in general are being run by pervasive AI that monitors everything, with every human being watched by many humans-worth of intelligence, and fast enough, ubiquitous enough robotics to stop most or all human actions before they can be completed. Why would you even have prison sentences of any kind?
If you hold everything constant and just vastly extend everybody’s life span, then maybe they stay in prison until it becomes unfashionable to be so punitive, and then get released. Which doesn’t mean that kind of punitiveness won’t come back into fashion later. Attitudes like that can change a lot in a few centuries. For that matter the governments that enforce the rules have a shelf life.
Yes prison sentences don’t make sense after the fact. To be clear, I mean existing life sentences.
For those, I think it depends on how much the rule deciders decide to uphold laws. To let them out requires rewriting current laws and retroactively applying them. If the the rule decider generally follows democratic will eventually they will be let out.
OTOH, if they vaguely uphold the status quo and rigidly follow a constitution, I can see certain people locked up forever. Some prison sentences are written in years and many life sentences still have a time limit. In reality, some old criminals under a life sentence are also let out. I can see immortal entities under existing life sentences arguing their punishment is cruel and unusual and eventually succeeding.
I also meant existing life sentences. At any given time, you may have a political change that ends them, and once that happens, it’s as much a matter of law as the original sentence.
I can’t see any given set of laws or constitution, or the sentences imposed under them, lasting more than a few hundred years, and probably much less.
I could see a world where they didn’t get the treatments to begin with, though.