I notice that you use the word "stagnation" here, which definitely has a negative subtext. Most people probably feel that same negativity towards the thought of that long period of slow change / stability. I wonder, however, whether that subtext is appropriate. Perhaps they were happy with their lives? Maybe there were no changes because we'd reached an equilibrium, and people were happy enough that no one did anything radical that would change their way of life.
Or, to take a middle ground between those two stances, maybe, well, it was just an equilibrium (sans value judgment about whether it was a 'good' one or a 'bad' one). What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?
Depends on how are you satisfied with the state of things. For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death.
Still, I don't believe there ever was a real stagnation, or equilibrium. Things were always changing, just for most of the recorded history, those changes were very, very slow - unnoticeable to individuals living then. The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat.
I'd love to live in one of the futures the bio/cyberpunk people dreamed up, where you could enhance your mind and body with all kinds of unimaginable technology, adapt to any kind of environment (instead of adapting the environment to you), colonice space, etc etc.
Ironically, I believe we're on a good way to develop the technologies that were needed for that - just, with how things are developing right now, I'm pessimistic that we have the sociological skills to to put them to any kind of positive use.
If we're already fighting increasingly agressive political battles about where we should steer the part of the world we are able to control, how would that look in a virtual reality wher we had control over absolutely everything?
If you're annoyed today that your programs, books, movies, games, phones and cars are tethered to their vendors over the internet, can be used to spy on you and can be updated with changed functionality on a whim - imagine if your own body or mind suddenly required a cloud backend owned by someone else.
I think before we get the technological transhumanist utopia, we have to realise a society that would be able to deal with it. Otherwise, it would be a rather grim irony if we defeated death only to replace it with biblical eternal damnation.
I completely agree with what you wrote here. I too fear this bad vision is quite likely to happen, and I strongly feel we're socially too immature for the technologies we already have. But I still feel it's better to risk it and fail, and hopefully get to try again, than to enter an "equilibrium" state, a stagnation phase right now (not that it's possible).
> For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death.
For me this doesn't make sense. I'm all for alleviating suffering, illness and death but can't see how total freedom from those things would be possible, or even desirable. I am aware that something called 'trans-humanism' exists, I'd just be interested to hear if anyone could argue for such a stance with reasonable integrity.
Lets flip the desirability question. Imagine we invent fast space travel and go out there and meet a smart alien species. Evolution for these aliens has given them an extremely robust bodies and, say, ten million years ago these aliens stopped dying or getting seriously ill. You say to them, "This is not the way to live. Its a much better life if after 100 years every individual self-destructs because XYZ?"
That's a very seductive argument for the individual, but most species do have a finite lifespan, and that in itself is actually an argument for its adaptive benefit. Consider that genetic code could become dated or fragile over long time periods: it's never going to be in the individual's benefit to die, but it's much better in the long term for the species to be adaptable. It's not entirely implausible, but I'm skeptical that this would change in the far future.
We've escaped the reign of biological evolution millennia ago. Ever since humans figured out how to learn and later write, we've been evolving society and technology orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution could ever hope to work. We are no longer bound by it. And given what's been done over the past couple decades, we're about to take control of our own genetic future as well. We will be able to repair, "update" and adapt our species' genetic makeup as we see fit, and this might actually be a prerequisite knowledge to achieving life extension.
So no, I don't think this argument for species holds either.
It must be a prerequisite for this kind of hyperbole that the technology it describes does not exist yet. Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free.
> Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free.
Well yes, there's heat death of the universe that we still have to contend with :P. But beyond that, what you wrote is not a problem. The biology itself works around it - it "repairs" by copying and checksumming, and does so using energy. It's not perfect (this is what enables evolution), but it's perfectable. We already know enough to realize that we can design systems which allow for reducing the probability of incorrectable errors to arbitrarily low amounts - that's practically infinite repairability. No one is saying maintenance is ever going to become free.
You're focusing on the error rate, which is not actually the concern. You could have a perfectly working VAX in front of you, and it would be essentially a museum piece, because technology has moved on. Suggesting that any physical process is perfectable is...subject to qualification and requiring of strong evidence, shall we say. However, if true, it would still be insufficient.
Better is not universal nor uniformly distributed, therefore evolution occurs, therefore death has adaptive value even in otherwise ideal conditions, and there is no reason to believe in truly ideal conditions even assuming arbitrarily high technology.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. "Evolution" occurs, but we've already freed ourselves from the grasp of biological evolution, and are already employing a much more efficient and effective human-controlled evolution. There is no need for death of individuals to play a part in this any longer. Most of our adaptations can be freely removed and replaced without harming their user.
That's irrelevant. You're not going to "roll back" a brain replacement. Future technology does not allow arbitrary reversible manipulations of molecules. Creating new individuals is much less effort than rewriting old ones in any case.
But I'm not talking about brain replacements. Just regular technology. My point is that the evolution of collective human civilization is orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution of individual humans, making the latter irrelevant. The only "death" that happens in that faster evolution is loss of mindshare, these days most often seen as failure on the market.
You do not get to hand-wave away the fact of evolution, regardless of the level of technology. Populations change genetically over long periods of time, because math, and the idea that gene editing will not occur in the future (near or far) is not credible.
You seem to be making the naturalistic fallacy in this thread of comments - that which is ought to be. That evolution adapts the species, therefore that is good and any "unnatural" modification of human body is bad.
Once evolution created the human species, a species that is smart and can debate ethics, there is no need to depend on evolution to improve either the species or the individual. Technology and our ethics can allows us and guide us to improve. Whether we like it or not, transhumanism is going to come in the next few centuries and then we will be able to systematically improve our bodies and brains as we chose to improve them, not by the random statistical process of evolution by natural selection.
There's a decent argument to be made that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was far better than most of civilized history, and we've only recently really dug ourselves out of that hole.
If you gloss over all the "nasty, brutish and short" bits of that lifestyle, sure.
Also, you need vast amounts of land to maintain that lifestyle. You can argue that there are too many humans, and I'd agree with you. But to have less humans we either need to have less babies, or live a lifestyle that involves lots of infant mortality.
Modern civilisation tends to have less babies - there's a strong inverse correlation between country development and family size.
Hunter-gatherers solved it the other way.
I get the argument for living in touch with nature, etc. It's all very romantic. But arguing that watching most of your babies die is "better" than this... no, sorry, that doesn't work for me.
It wasn't pretty. But the argument was made that people were happier and healthier then.
Also, child mortality (and general mortality) was probably much lower - a lot of diseases, and especially pandemics, are tied directly to agriculture making people live with animals, and urbanization making a lot of people live together with a lot of animals on a small piece of land.
We know that present-day hunter-gatherer peoples have high infant mortality.
We know that hunter-gatherers need a lot of land per person, and so therefore need to control their population, without birth control.
Yes, agriculture and high population density brings different problems and diseases, but to argue that somehow those are worse is to ignore basic statistics.
I do get the mental health argument, but only if you accept a bunch of stuff about human mental health that isn't fun. For exactly the same reasons that veterans don't get PSTD or depression until they stop fighting, we're going through a process of de-traumatising developed populations. We don't really know what lies the other side, because we've never been in a prolonged multi-generational period of peace and plenty.
It's not like the life of a medieval peasant was nice, friendly, and long. I don't doubt that we're better off now, but was the life of the average civilized person prior to a couple hundred years ago better than that of the average hunter-gatherer? It seems like you still have all of the same downsides, plus more like worse diseases and having to work nearly every waking moment.
If it takes thousands of years of worse conditions to get to a better lifestyle, is that progress?
Progress isn't a smooth line, for civilisations, startups or individuals. In Europe, the Roman Empire invented a whole bunch of stuff that we're only reinvented recently (and some things, like concrete, that we still aren't as good at). The Dark Ages were not a progression from that.
There were, however, more people living in medieval Europe than there were when Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers. So yes, I'd count that as progress. As for lifestyle, it's hard to say... the life of a medieval peasant in Europe wasn't that bad. They had a lot of security, a community around them to support them, rights that were guaranteed by that community. They worked hard, but at work that was meaningful to the community. Things might have been worse in the cities, but the vast majority of people in medieval Europe lived in rural farming villages. I wouldn't necessarily say that they had it worse than a hunter-gatherer. Or even than a modern tech worker...
You were just arguing that high rates of infant mortality made it crazy to think things were better. Now you're saying that the life of a medieval peasant, where infant mortality was 30-50%, wasn't any worse than the life of a modern tech worker?!
Or, to take a middle ground between those two stances, maybe, well, it was just an equilibrium (sans value judgment about whether it was a 'good' one or a 'bad' one). What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?