When this argument is presented to me, there are two counterpoints I often use:
Simple induction. I wasn’t bored enough to want to die yesterday, nor the day after that (today). Assuming that future days are roughly as similar as the past two, that degree of novelty is sufficient.
Options are not commitments. If I ever do want to die, I can do so. If it never happens, or doesn’t happen for a thousand or a hundred thousand years, that’s fine too.
For those who really want to engage on #2, I’ve had interesting conversations about akrasia-like self-disagreements where “I am bored and would prefer to have died” but “I have FOMO and will not willingly die”. For this, there is a possibility of mechanism design, where the decision can be made rule-based. Something like “after N years (say, 3⁄4 the median lifespan of your reference group), take a permanent poison, such that you must take an antidote every week/year. If you ever get bored/unhappy enough to not take the antidote, you die.)
A tougher disagreement is the Malthusian one—old people are already too powerful, and it’ll get far worse if they’re healthy and active for centuries (let alone longer). Further, they take resources/opportunities from the young. The availability heuristic for this is vampires, not techno-utopia. I have yet to really find a good counterargument for this—it quite likely contains a fair grain of truth, at least for the current planetary and human governance limitations.
Another option on two is to go into some kind of preservation instead of total death forever. then you can write instructions on when to wake you up (if X person asks, if X event happens, in X years, etc..). you still miss out on some stuff, but not literally everything.
The second benefit is that for people who stayed it’s not like you died and they’ll never be able to interact with you again, you just took a really long vacation :)
If powerful old people go to sleep when they are bored then they run the risk of being overtaken by younger, faster, and less risk-averse people. Maybe a good model is corporations: Corporations are also immortal and can learn more and more but they also have more to lose and they seem to acquire knowledge that also seems to slow them down. If there are changes in the environment or innovations they often cannot adapt fast enough and are quickly overtaken by younger players.
When this argument is presented to me, there are two counterpoints I often use:
Simple induction. I wasn’t bored enough to want to die yesterday, nor the day after that (today). Assuming that future days are roughly as similar as the past two, that degree of novelty is sufficient.
Options are not commitments. If I ever do want to die, I can do so. If it never happens, or doesn’t happen for a thousand or a hundred thousand years, that’s fine too.
For those who really want to engage on #2, I’ve had interesting conversations about akrasia-like self-disagreements where “I am bored and would prefer to have died” but “I have FOMO and will not willingly die”. For this, there is a possibility of mechanism design, where the decision can be made rule-based. Something like “after N years (say, 3⁄4 the median lifespan of your reference group), take a permanent poison, such that you must take an antidote every week/year. If you ever get bored/unhappy enough to not take the antidote, you die.)
A tougher disagreement is the Malthusian one—old people are already too powerful, and it’ll get far worse if they’re healthy and active for centuries (let alone longer). Further, they take resources/opportunities from the young. The availability heuristic for this is vampires, not techno-utopia. I have yet to really find a good counterargument for this—it quite likely contains a fair grain of truth, at least for the current planetary and human governance limitations.
Another option on two is to go into some kind of preservation instead of total death forever. then you can write instructions on when to wake you up (if X person asks, if X event happens, in X years, etc..). you still miss out on some stuff, but not literally everything.
The second benefit is that for people who stayed it’s not like you died and they’ll never be able to interact with you again, you just took a really long vacation :)
If powerful old people go to sleep when they are bored then they run the risk of being overtaken by younger, faster, and less risk-averse people. Maybe a good model is corporations: Corporations are also immortal and can learn more and more but they also have more to lose and they seem to acquire knowledge that also seems to slow them down. If there are changes in the environment or innovations they often cannot adapt fast enough and are quickly overtaken by younger players.