I don't know how to reconcile this point of view, which I understand, with quotes like "science advances one funeral at a time," which I also understand. I understand the individual desire for advancing anti-aging techniques, but it also seems to contain extremely real risks of stagnating our sciences & societies. I can't tell whether anti-aging science is ethical or not.
You agree it is a problem, then. What are some solutions you can think of? I'm not convinced the gain is worth the pain, but maybe you have some ideas for me to think about.
I really don't know, unfortunately. It seems important that we go beyond merely maintaining people in a state of being not dead, and enable them to feel young as well. This may cure a certain entrenched resentfulness. It will not, however, prevent people from being asshats or provide a mechanism by which they will eventually go away. Perhaps the concept of limited terms in power would be made more general to fields outside politics.
Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more thought put into solving these problems before I could be convinced that longevity research is ethical.
It's only ethical because we have no power to prevent their death. If research could be done that looked likely to extend lives, but we chose not to because we'd rather people die earlier, that's equivalent to stealthily killing them. We might as well be upfront about it, and have them slain for being too old, except then they'd tend to resist.
Right, so we have two competing ethical problems: extending life is good, but also, it removes the one (ethical) tool we have to handle the problem of accumulation of power in individuals. This is the conflict I'm grappling with. I don't have a good answer to the problem.
That puts you way deep in the wishful thinking territory, again there is 0 rational connection between LLMs and immortality, especially if you're already on the way out
And no, there's no zero rational connection. LLMs and other types of neural nets are already demonstrating they can solve complex tasks. Unless there's some intrinsic barrier to how intelligent they can become, we should surpass human level intelligence within years, maybe a decade.
Once you surpass human level intelligence, you can scale scientific research by orders of magnitude.
Heck, AI already assists scientific research. We basically solved protein folding problem with AI.
When you're 60 or 70, you will wish to have a body of a 25 year old.
Dying early from rotting teeth is normal in nature, yet you probably brush, floss, and go to dentist.