The movement is called anti-aging, not anti-injury. How do people who believe they have a real shot at immortality interact with the phenomena of safetyism?
This is a great question. When we mortals evaluate risk in this way, we use something like QALY (quality-adjusted life years). How likely is this behavior to result in serious injury and how bad would my life be if it does? It's an equation like: risk-level * remaining lifespan * suffering due to injury < personal risk tolerance. We don't think about it this way, but we do behave this way.
Such an analysis is hard for someone who expects to live a very long time. Since the "remaining lifespan" term is nearly infinite for them, no behavior, no matter how low the "risk level" parameter is, can ever exceed their risk tolerance. The left hand side is always infinite, so they will (totally rationally) choose to not take the risk.
John Taylor Gatto put it best: "Immortality would mean there's always time to do everything, and therefore to do nothing." Forever.
[western] Sci-Fi certainly explores immortality, as does Fantasy (generally lesser scope). Hell, so do things like Sports (given expansive definitions). Various formats explore through different lenses and angles.
Between these:
1. Immortality comes with challenges; boredom included.
2. Boredom and stagnation are the fate of immortality (citation: Science-Fiction).
1 obviously wins. Infinity → dystopia bc human condition is ridiculous.
Interesting - the longer we have to live, safetyism enters to reduce how fast we make progress by making us more risk averse. Time to progress fills the time it's alotted.
I think 'immortality' presents some challenges to talk about coherently so why not make it a bit easier? Suppose we simply talk about extending lifespans to 1000 years on average rather than 70 or 75. Avoids a lot of problems you get when dealing with using infinity in math.
First thing that seems to happen is ‘safetyism’ is entirely rational. Getting killed doing something stupid at 20 is a larger tragedy when you would have had 980 more years to expect versus in an era when you had a 50-50 shot of making to 40. It also implies you should reduce your fertility since, well, you have literally plenty of time.
"What does a world of tenuously immortal beings look like?"
Ian Banks had an answer in his Culture novels. Most humans were immortal in the Culture but they rarely bothered to live past 1000 years or so. Just too boring. Some opted to just die, many would opt to go into ‘cold storage’ and just never bother coming out, like a book you have on your bookcase that you’ll never read but never throw out.
One plot I vaguely recall concerned something that happened thousands of years before at the Culture’s founding but the one man still alive literally can’t remember it because he had long since offloaded huge portions of his memory to external storage.
I think the ‘tenuously immortal’ humans would look a lot more like humans today than one would expect. Instead of your great great grandson doing something a bit like you 100 years from now, it will be just you doing it…but the ‘you’ aspect would have a real Ship of Theseus issue. Then again I’m not convinced we don’t already live long enough to really start to question the assumption that we are continuous over time.
Perhaps logically if we live forever we should be rationally be extra safety conscious, but I don't know how it would work out. People are perfectly capable of living irrationally. And there's a lot to behavior that's innate.
Still, you're probably right that it would be an influence.
It seems to me that the depiction of immortality here is unlikely to occur in the near term, if at all. More likely, if anti-aging succeeds, the initial form it will take will likely be through the replacement of defective parts. Because of the difficulty in replacing the biological brain, this will necessitate brain digitization, which will unlock the ability to create backups of your mental state. Under those conditions, there's no need to be excessively careful to the extent of never going outside. Actually, because these replacements will cost money, you will probably have to continually prove your right to exist; you will be forced to go outside in order to make enough money to afford these replacement parts and backups.
It's actually if immortality fails to manifest, and the only way to extend life is through therapies that prolong life, that people will be increasingly focused on safety. As an analogy, you can compare how people treat fast fashion that is designed to be continually replaced versus very expensive pieces that you cannot afford to replace.
I think we already see AI being able to handle requests like "write an answer as if you were Christopher Hitchens" quite well. Assuming it gets to the point of passing any conceivable Turing test there's still the awkward reality that while it may be close enough to Hitchens for all of his fans, maybe even his family, it wouldn't be close enough for Hitchens himself who would have no doubt preferred not to have died.
About 25 years ago, there was a serious debate between the biohackers and the computer geeks about who would achieve immortality first. The geeks had the upper hand and it looked like brain uploading was going to win. Then a girl named Jennifer invented this little thing called CRISPR. The bio guys have had the edge since.
I don't accept Noah Harari's premise that "organism is algorithm", but let's say for a moment he's right. The brain uploading geeks have to recreate the neural structure of the most complex and least understood organ in the human body in digital form. The biohackers have to figure out how to stop the body's chemical aging process. Which do you think is likely easier? I think the geeks are toast.
I suspect AGI is impossible, but if it's not, we're more more likely to build a new sentient entity (probably accidently) than figure out how to transfer human intelligence into the digital realm.
When you say chemical aging process, you mean to say that the body, left by itself, stays forever young, and it's actually various external insults which are causing cells to go bad? Because I think a better analogy is of life as a process seeking to maintain equilibria, a process which eventually breaks down. In which case, if you want to maintain the process indefinitely, you also need to fully understand it.
I don't think saying CRISPR necessarily solves anything. You can say that you are going to outsource the understanding of the system to the body itself, but that's actually an even more complicated problem. Instead of needing to understand how a system of levers operate, now you have to figure out how a higher set of levers, built on top of those levers, but also operating those levers, will work. Moreover, you only get one shot, because the immune system will develop antibodies after being injected with Cas9. So the length of the feedback loop of genetic modification for longevity is actually the length of a human lifespan. Unless this can be worked around, we certainly will not have any solution within our lifetimes.
I mean figuring out how to prevent (or as you say, at least equilibrize, which is far more likely) the gradual decline of various types of cells' ability to regenerate themselves correctly.
He got 3 treatments, each carried on the same Cas9 substrate. And yet they worked. Partly that was because they were liver targeted and he's very young. They also used dose escalation.
I suspect there are solutions to the immune response problem. But I agree, if not, that puts an upper limit on gene editing techniques for anti-aging.
Selective pressure would still apply in a world of immortals. Safetyists would remain, somewhere, safe, applying Dark Forest theory in hidden bunkers, while the frontier would fill with those willing to gamble with eternal life, and that's the sentiment that would expand there.
We already drink death like water when we consent nightly to the permanent end of the day's consciousness; a generation of pioneers with immortality and upload tech could do so with incomprehensible abandon.
Sure, but I think you're committing the same fallacy I accuse the transhumanists of. Sure selective pressure will work eventually. Eventually it will solve for timidity, and for fertility, but selective pressure works pretty slowly, while culture acts very quickly. I agree will solve it eventually, but what happens between now and then?
Also I've always felt that comparing sleep to death is not as strong as some people like to think.
Well, between now and then I happen, for one. If human biological immortality is achieved in my lifetime, it will shoot me as an invasive species to any safetyist future, with whatever tribe I've got by then, and I am not nearly the most committed to the pioneer risk-taking thing even among people I know. The risk would be a slow-cooked generation I guess, that starts and continues with luxury that's capped off with immortality; hopefully my descendants are treated with enough adversity to temper them in that case.
Perhaps you will be the brave immortal that acts as an "invasive species" I certainly hope so. But I think you may be the exception, also I think people have a hard time modeling what attitude they'll have when circumstances are very different.
The example that occurs to me is my Grandmother. You would think that when you get to 90 that you wouldn't really care what happens, you've had a good run and danger would no longer bother you, but instead this is when she insisted that bars get put on the windows and additional locks get added to the doors.
That's one reason I'm signaling my intentions now, so that if I am tempted to have a different attitude at that point I'll understand that my continuing credibility depends on acting at least to some extent like I'm planning out loud now.
Great article! I'd never thought about it this way.
This is a great question. When we mortals evaluate risk in this way, we use something like QALY (quality-adjusted life years). How likely is this behavior to result in serious injury and how bad would my life be if it does? It's an equation like: risk-level * remaining lifespan * suffering due to injury < personal risk tolerance. We don't think about it this way, but we do behave this way.
Such an analysis is hard for someone who expects to live a very long time. Since the "remaining lifespan" term is nearly infinite for them, no behavior, no matter how low the "risk level" parameter is, can ever exceed their risk tolerance. The left hand side is always infinite, so they will (totally rationally) choose to not take the risk.
John Taylor Gatto put it best: "Immortality would mean there's always time to do everything, and therefore to do nothing." Forever.
I prefer Heaven.
[western] Sci-Fi certainly explores immortality, as does Fantasy (generally lesser scope). Hell, so do things like Sports (given expansive definitions). Various formats explore through different lenses and angles.
Between these:
1. Immortality comes with challenges; boredom included.
2. Boredom and stagnation are the fate of immortality (citation: Science-Fiction).
1 obviously wins. Infinity → dystopia bc human condition is ridiculous.
+1 nuance to (2)
Stability → Probability: Stable, semi-stable, and unstable solutions apply (e.g. Control Theory)
Conditions are extremely important. Obviously impact probability of short/long-term stable/unstable desired conditions.
Interesting - the longer we have to live, safetyism enters to reduce how fast we make progress by making us more risk averse. Time to progress fills the time it's alotted.
I think 'immortality' presents some challenges to talk about coherently so why not make it a bit easier? Suppose we simply talk about extending lifespans to 1000 years on average rather than 70 or 75. Avoids a lot of problems you get when dealing with using infinity in math.
First thing that seems to happen is ‘safetyism’ is entirely rational. Getting killed doing something stupid at 20 is a larger tragedy when you would have had 980 more years to expect versus in an era when you had a 50-50 shot of making to 40. It also implies you should reduce your fertility since, well, you have literally plenty of time.
"What does a world of tenuously immortal beings look like?"
Ian Banks had an answer in his Culture novels. Most humans were immortal in the Culture but they rarely bothered to live past 1000 years or so. Just too boring. Some opted to just die, many would opt to go into ‘cold storage’ and just never bother coming out, like a book you have on your bookcase that you’ll never read but never throw out.
One plot I vaguely recall concerned something that happened thousands of years before at the Culture’s founding but the one man still alive literally can’t remember it because he had long since offloaded huge portions of his memory to external storage.
I think the ‘tenuously immortal’ humans would look a lot more like humans today than one would expect. Instead of your great great grandson doing something a bit like you 100 years from now, it will be just you doing it…but the ‘you’ aspect would have a real Ship of Theseus issue. Then again I’m not convinced we don’t already live long enough to really start to question the assumption that we are continuous over time.
Perhaps logically if we live forever we should be rationally be extra safety conscious, but I don't know how it would work out. People are perfectly capable of living irrationally. And there's a lot to behavior that's innate.
Still, you're probably right that it would be an influence.
It seems to me that the depiction of immortality here is unlikely to occur in the near term, if at all. More likely, if anti-aging succeeds, the initial form it will take will likely be through the replacement of defective parts. Because of the difficulty in replacing the biological brain, this will necessitate brain digitization, which will unlock the ability to create backups of your mental state. Under those conditions, there's no need to be excessively careful to the extent of never going outside. Actually, because these replacements will cost money, you will probably have to continually prove your right to exist; you will be forced to go outside in order to make enough money to afford these replacement parts and backups.
It's actually if immortality fails to manifest, and the only way to extend life is through therapies that prolong life, that people will be increasingly focused on safety. As an analogy, you can compare how people treat fast fashion that is designed to be continually replaced versus very expensive pieces that you cannot afford to replace.
Ted Chaing wrote a sci-fi book that touches on your themes. It's called The Lifecycle of Software Objects. You might like it.
I am incredibly skeptical that brain digitization will happen on anything like the scale it's boosters predict.
I think we already see AI being able to handle requests like "write an answer as if you were Christopher Hitchens" quite well. Assuming it gets to the point of passing any conceivable Turing test there's still the awkward reality that while it may be close enough to Hitchens for all of his fans, maybe even his family, it wouldn't be close enough for Hitchens himself who would have no doubt preferred not to have died.
I'm likewise skeptical, but I'm saying the likelihood of digitization versus immortality via rejuvenation is orders of magnitude higher.
About 25 years ago, there was a serious debate between the biohackers and the computer geeks about who would achieve immortality first. The geeks had the upper hand and it looked like brain uploading was going to win. Then a girl named Jennifer invented this little thing called CRISPR. The bio guys have had the edge since.
I don't accept Noah Harari's premise that "organism is algorithm", but let's say for a moment he's right. The brain uploading geeks have to recreate the neural structure of the most complex and least understood organ in the human body in digital form. The biohackers have to figure out how to stop the body's chemical aging process. Which do you think is likely easier? I think the geeks are toast.
I suspect AGI is impossible, but if it's not, we're more more likely to build a new sentient entity (probably accidently) than figure out how to transfer human intelligence into the digital realm.
When you say chemical aging process, you mean to say that the body, left by itself, stays forever young, and it's actually various external insults which are causing cells to go bad? Because I think a better analogy is of life as a process seeking to maintain equilibria, a process which eventually breaks down. In which case, if you want to maintain the process indefinitely, you also need to fully understand it.
I don't think saying CRISPR necessarily solves anything. You can say that you are going to outsource the understanding of the system to the body itself, but that's actually an even more complicated problem. Instead of needing to understand how a system of levers operate, now you have to figure out how a higher set of levers, built on top of those levers, but also operating those levers, will work. Moreover, you only get one shot, because the immune system will develop antibodies after being injected with Cas9. So the length of the feedback loop of genetic modification for longevity is actually the length of a human lifespan. Unless this can be worked around, we certainly will not have any solution within our lifetimes.
I mean figuring out how to prevent (or as you say, at least equilibrize, which is far more likely) the gradual decline of various types of cells' ability to regenerate themselves correctly.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/05/15/infant-born-with-deadly-disease-now-thriving-thanks-to-customized-crispr-treatment-six-months-after-birth/
He got 3 treatments, each carried on the same Cas9 substrate. And yet they worked. Partly that was because they were liver targeted and he's very young. They also used dose escalation.
I suspect there are solutions to the immune response problem. But I agree, if not, that puts an upper limit on gene editing techniques for anti-aging.
Selective pressure would still apply in a world of immortals. Safetyists would remain, somewhere, safe, applying Dark Forest theory in hidden bunkers, while the frontier would fill with those willing to gamble with eternal life, and that's the sentiment that would expand there.
We already drink death like water when we consent nightly to the permanent end of the day's consciousness; a generation of pioneers with immortality and upload tech could do so with incomprehensible abandon.
Sure, but I think you're committing the same fallacy I accuse the transhumanists of. Sure selective pressure will work eventually. Eventually it will solve for timidity, and for fertility, but selective pressure works pretty slowly, while culture acts very quickly. I agree will solve it eventually, but what happens between now and then?
Also I've always felt that comparing sleep to death is not as strong as some people like to think.
Well, between now and then I happen, for one. If human biological immortality is achieved in my lifetime, it will shoot me as an invasive species to any safetyist future, with whatever tribe I've got by then, and I am not nearly the most committed to the pioneer risk-taking thing even among people I know. The risk would be a slow-cooked generation I guess, that starts and continues with luxury that's capped off with immortality; hopefully my descendants are treated with enough adversity to temper them in that case.
Perhaps you will be the brave immortal that acts as an "invasive species" I certainly hope so. But I think you may be the exception, also I think people have a hard time modeling what attitude they'll have when circumstances are very different.
The example that occurs to me is my Grandmother. You would think that when you get to 90 that you wouldn't really care what happens, you've had a good run and danger would no longer bother you, but instead this is when she insisted that bars get put on the windows and additional locks get added to the doors.
That's one reason I'm signaling my intentions now, so that if I am tempted to have a different attitude at that point I'll understand that my continuing credibility depends on acting at least to some extent like I'm planning out loud now.