Sociological impact of immortality

What impact will immortality have on our class structure? How will a "new" immortal advance in a given field when his superiors never die? Does this open up the possibility of an elite, possibly even static, class structure forming? Will immortality first come to the developed world? If so, what are the implications for the world community?

I have some pet theories, but I would love to hear what others think. Overall I remain agnostic on these matter since they are rather speculative in nature

Physical Immortality will produce a paradigm shift in thinking. The current problems, concern about a boss stepping down from a coveted position, will probably seem a little trite compared to infinite lifespan. Think for a moment, if you really believe you will live forever, what's to worry about one little bosses position? You'll have infinite chances to rise to the ranks. You have ample chance to show your stuff.

What this really represents to me is a problem in the system of determining good leadership in the first place. I think immortality would be no more of a hindrance to the solution of this problem than anything we experience today. Take the "good old boy" system, or nepotism for example. Why would immortality be any worse? I'd think immortality would actually create new opportunity and hope... thus more enterprise. If you don't feel compelled be impending death to churn out a product with speed, you'll devote more time to quality.

To address the third world issue.... here's a quote from an article i recently did for betterhumans.com:

Social consequences

Kass believes that life extension will have bad social consequences and impair distributive justice. Extending everyone's lifespan, he suggests, could be a Tragedy of Commons in which, say, demographic changes lead to massive environmental degradation. Alternatively, radical life extension -- or even immortality -- will be unfairly granted only to the wealthy, he believes.

On both counts, says Bruce Klein, director of a membership-based longevity-promoting organization called the Immortality Institute, Kass is misguided. "Alarmists have been warning for decades that the world's population is growing too large. Yet, as populations have increased, so have the technologies that improve crop yield and increase efficiency. And as technological advancements spill over into developing countries, people's lives are improved," says Klein. "Kass yearns for a politically correct future while at the same time advocating death."

Kass is unabashedly calling for stricter state ownership over its citizens' bodies. The reality is that everyone is entitled to make their own informed choices. As Klein states, "People will rebel against any government attempting to dictate maximal levels of happiness, intelligence and lifespan. Parents will continue to want the best for their children. Individuals will continue to improve and extend their lives. The 'tragedy' would be in trying to deny people this opportunity."

And even if left only to market forces, notes Klein, radical life extension would become widely available. "In the short term, Kass is right. Wealthier people will live longer. But can the rich really bottle up immortality? It's likely they'd not succeed, nor would they even try. Quite the opposite, wealthy individuals will invest their money to promote anti-aging products in the hopes of making even more money. And because of well understood market forces and economies of scale, people will benefit accordingly."

And if not, Kass shouldn't fight life extension to increase equality. He should advocate for public health care.   Article >>

"You"ll have infinite cxhances to rise to the ranks. You have ample chance to show your stuff."
BJ Klein

To add to this point; Dr Stewart Mc Cann of the University College of Breton in Novia Scotia, says an early career success could lead to an early grave. In an interview with Reuters, he speculated that people who succeed when young may have shorter lifespans because of the stress associated with early achievement.

Children today are under such pressure to be early achievers, that they miss out on just being children, exploring the world around them, exploring who they are in relation to the world around them and their own potential. With an Infinite Lifespan each individual could develop at their own pace to reach their best potential as balanced individuals. It is the trees that grow the slowest that have the longest lifespan.

Thanks for the response BJ. I agree with everything written in Simon Smith's article, but I do have concerns about the evolutionary process which will be necessary in attaining immortality.

My personal belief is that immortality will not come instantly. It will come in progressive steps. At first the human life span might be extended to 120 or 150 years. Although this will be incredible and ground breaking, it will probably not altered the structure of society. I think it may be comparable to the increase in life expectancy from 45 at the turn of the century to 75 now, albeit much more rapidly.

The problem is that people will still view themselves as mortal. An awareness as to the possibility of immortality may start to appear, but people will not view themselves as immortal. This is because the actuality of immortality would not yet have been realized. During this period of transition is when I see problems arising.

One of the problems which I think you are overlooking (I have this debate with Lazarus all the time) is that of human nature. Ego and greed are two aspects of human nature. The old (and they would be old since their lives would be extended, not yet immortal) aren't necessarily going to make way for the new. Some may not want the variety you speak of. Some may like things just the way they are, especially where power and influence are concerned. Why wouldn't they? If they were healthy and vital into their 120s they would have every reason to remain at the top. Please note that I am not speaking of over population here. I personally think that the West, with its declining populations, could use some population growth. What I am suggesting is that a stratified elite could be created which begins to accumulate large amounts of wealth, power, and influence. This could be us by the way.

Just look at some of the relics that have just left the Senate. Strom Thurmond just left and he was 100! Now you may try to argue that term limits could be put in place, but think of who would be responsible for instituting effective term limits--the aging policy makers! Granted, if public sentiment was strong enough term limits would be passed, but how long would it be before it was realized that inequities existed within the system? Would it take fifty 110 year old Senators before people started to say, "Hey, these guys are living to long, we need to change something."

What about the private sector? There is no precedent for regulating the private sector in this manner. Capitalism is, by its very nature, suppose to be unregulated. People would start crying bloody murder if you tried to restrict their employment. Term limits for CEOs, I don't think so.

The main problem here is that systems and societies are slow to change. It is not a given that the transition will go smoothly.

The second area I wanted to touch on is how the developed world will exist in relation to the developing world once efforts in life extension begin to really progress. Once again, I am not speaking of immortality, I am speaking of technologies which may expand the life span to 120 or 150 years. Now I know the humanitarian in all of us would say that we should share our innovations with the rest of the world, but is this realistic?

We currently have AIDS cocktails which can ward off the disease indefinitely. Yet hundreds of millions of people in Africa do not receive this treatment. The reason is because it cost money. And its not just AIDS treatments, basic medicine is often not available to much of the developed world. Now if we can't (or won't) provide the developing world with the medicines necessary for a normal life span, what makes you think we are going to supply the developing world with life extending medicine? The answer is that we probably will not. Studies are constantly being released showing the discrepancy between the developed and undeveloped world. How great will this gap become? Electronic surveillance systems are already being put in place along the Mediterranean in Southern Europe. Its only a matter of time before similar projects are undertaken by the US as well. What are we going to have here? A semi immortal, ultra rich culture keeping out the desperate masses with elaborate security grids. Are we going to have people in the US living to 175 and people in Sierra Leone living to 45? I'm a conservative on matters of foreign policy which sometimes makes people think that I am uncaring about the rest of world. I am not. This is a problem that we are going to have to deal with. What I worry about is that we are going to procrastinate on this like we do on everything else. Eventually the problem is going to become intolerable to anyone who has any sense of human dignity. The question is when and at what cost.

And by the way, this is probably the most liberal statement you will ever get out of me lol .

This may surprise you Mr. Kissinger but I happen to agree with much of what you have said above.

Have you read the story I wrote called "The Meme Makers"? Link

You and I make a dynamic duo, a contrast in optimism and pessimism. You see the glass half-empty and I, full; but we both clearly see the same glass.

One of the problems which I think you are overlooking (I have this debate with Lazarus all the time) is that of human nature. Ego and greed are two aspects of human nature.  

We don't debate the "pragmatic" aspects of "human nature". We disagree on their limits, potentials, and the best path to find to overcome them, even whether or not we should try to challenge the foibles and weaknesses of "Human Nature". I have never denied any assertion that you make about human nature, quite the opposite in fact. I simply do not see them as any longer "quintessential parts" or "necessary" to the next phase of Transhumanist development for they are often atavistic and vestigial aspects of our character, not unlike a diseased and inflamed appendix.

I do not see this casual acceptance of avarice, blind ambition, gluttony, sloth, deceit, self indulgence, and blood lust as critical any longer for species survival. Hence I see these attitudes and behaviors as not only learned, as opposed to instinctive, but obsolete in a pragmatic sense. Human Selection has already replaced Natural Selection. The Rule of Law is replacing the Rule of the Jungle.

War is obsolete. We can either prove this through accomplishment and cooperative effort, or we can prove this through pyrrhic victories and Mutually Assured Destruction, either way there will come an end to war. Resting in Peace is even more likely through death than victory.

Which would you rather have, life, or death?

Ask yourself Mr. Kissinger: Is today really a good day to die?

Humans are not born with an "Original Cardinal Sin" that must be challenged all through our lives to find redemption, we are born as a "tabula raza". We are a complex balance of nature and nurture.

The dark side of human nature is a valid concern and ironically the source of some of our greatest achievement, but not just through its simple excess and self indulgence but by challenging that darkest force within our very sense of self and then transcending it, redefining who I am.

We are not born with some kind of "Christian Sin". We learn the value of sin as a consequence of growth. Our capacity to sin is commensurate with our capacity for growth.

Mea culpa, I have sinned. Mea culpa I will do so again. Mea culpa I can't help myself, after all it is just human nature and I am what you made me God so it is really your fault not mine. I don't have to challenge myself. I can live with my weakness, accept my flaws. I am OK you are OK. Do you really believe this?

I simply see this as more important when it is an internalized struggle rather then as something externally enforced. I make the attempt to maintain my focus on the prize; seeking that state of being worthy of immortality for its intrinsic value as creative, and not destructive in both intent and result.

While I don't often agree with your conclusions Mr. Kissinger, I thoroughly enjoy the fact that you raise many of what I consider to be the correct questions. Clearly we are two who see many of the same paths and obstacles to progress but what we differ upon is, which we think are the better, and which the worst paths to take, the best obstacles to confront, or those to be avoided.

I come gladly into to the arena today to confront you but I start and end each day finding balance between the warring factions of my own being.
Turn my worthy opponent for but a moment. Stand with me and together let us face the roaring crowd, hear their powerful voice and demands, feel their lusts, ambitions, and pride, touch their passion and heat, understand their frailty, and mortality.

Look at them, respect their need for glory and understand why we say:

We who are about to die salute you!

You think killing is easier than dying?

First you must survive.

I often tell my girlfriend that the day will come when I become a "liberal" (I know you don't like labels, but for the sake of simplicity...). That day will come when the world is so wealthy that matters of equitable distribution will be irrelevant. That day will come when all of humanity understands and values the principles of human dignity. That day will come when technological progress makes not lending a helping hand seem pointless and cruel. That day hasn't come yet.

I understand the mind set that goes behind being ""liberal" and indeed it is a noble mind set, but it also naive. A liberal believes that all people of the world should be helped with the utmost generosity, but they do no understand that wealth is still finite and that matters of distribution are still a zero sum game. A liberal believes that war is abhorrent and wrong, but they do not understand that there are dictators, terrorist organizations and states who have no respect for human dignity or civilized society and can only be stopped by force.

I do not hate liberals. They may frustrate me to no end, but I do not hate them. I do hate a few liberal politician. An example would be Hillary Clinton. I can see right though her. She is driven by greed and blind ambition. Every word that comes out of her mouth is double talk. I would not trust her as far as I could throw her.

I contend that one of the reasons that our great nation has reached the heights that it has is because we have unified. Our homeland hasn't experienced the hideous destructive power of a full scale war in nearly 140 years. Wars destroy progress. You'll get no argument from me on that fact. If the rest of the world could take war off the table as the 50 states of the Union have they would be better off for it.

Look at the western world. War hasn't been taken off the table among western democracy simply because of the United States' overwhelming supremacy. It has been taken off the table because the people in these democracy have realized that war is unacceptable. That it must be resisted because it is a losing equation. Democracies tend to liberalize and enlighten people.

But then there is a different war. There is the war that needs to be fought to preserve the freedoms generated by democracy. There is the war that needs to be fought to protect the enlightened world from the unenlightened world. For in the world that we live, if the enlightened world falls there will be chaos for a thousand years. It is a sorry state of affairs when so many in the western world cower away from the obligation they have to rid the world of this brutal despot, Saddam Hussein. First, he opposes our interests, and our interests are the interests of the enlightened world. We are the ones who forge ahead through the darkness to conquer the unknown. By promoting ourselves we are promoting progress. Second, liberals should be supporting the removal of this animal for, if no other reason, the humanity of it. Yes, there are others in the world like him. Yes, there are ulterior motives. But getting rid of him will be a good thing, and worth the price in blood. By down playing Saddam's atrocities the Left has revealed its political agenda.

The argument that this war is about oil is insulting. People who say this are telling halve truths. Oil is a commodity, it can be purchased just like anything else. We wouldn't be going to war if this was just about oil. The indirect correlation to oil is our interest in not being leveraged by a brutal dictator because he can exert influence in a region that has 2/3 of the world's known oil reserves. Sometimes the forces of freedom must take a stand. Negotiations with scum like Saddam are not an option. We learned that lesson long ago. In our world, wars are not preferred, but sometimes necessary.


And then there's the domestic front.

You keep saying that the world is coming to a new stage in human progress. That ego and greed are not inherent in human nature, but the systemic effects of societal ills. I simply do not agree on this point. Ego is inherent. Everyone wants to succeed, everyone wants to be at the top. That is what makes society advance. There are negative aspects of human nature which are not caused by environmental factors. A child will deceive you without being taught to do so. It occurs when they begin to develop a sense of self. Their logical brains tell them that it advantageous to deceive. You see, the human brain is not concerned with benefiting society, but on benefiting itself. The human brain is not part of a collective. It is society (their parents) which must impart to them the rule of law and its importance in maintaining order.

I want to qualify everything I say about human nature and its effects on society by saying that I am not "pro ego" or "pro greed". I am simply making observations about their nature and origin. There are things that disgust me with this society. The profit motive is often the antithesis to progressive movement. A company will always do what is in its interests over the interests of society. It is only natural. Profit is their bottom line.

And, of course, you can always follow the money trail right back to Washington. The average Joe Blow off the street can't run for high office. You need millions of dollars to make a serious run for even Congress. So how do you get that money? By pandering to special interest groups. That way when you get elected you are beholden to them. Hence the profit motive creeps all the way up the ladder to the highest levels of government.

Its not a pretty picture, but is it necessary? Isn't profit what gives us our strength? Isn't profit what gives us the resources to protect our liberties? Isn't profit the driving force in a capitalist society?

Alas, it is the nature of the beast. The evils of the profit motive are also what makes our society progress.

Sometimes there are so many ideas in my head that I feel like I am going to explode. I want to have an influence on this world, but the pragmatist in me tells me to lower my expectations. Things are slow to change. I try to analyze the world as it is, not how it should be. If I think there is a realistic way of changing the world for the better I support it, but things are not always so simple. If they were they would have been done already.

Anyone who is a student of history must be struck by the acceleration of progress that has taken place in the past 150 years. Technological innovation has limited the value of historical perspective. Prognostication for future scenarios is becoming impossible. The curve is becoming to steep, the toys more dangerous. And through all of this there is hope and fear. Hope, that humanity will reach the light at the end of the tunnel in spite of itself--that logic and reason will prevail. Fear, that the primitive ugly aspects of humankind's past will rear its head once again and take us all into a death roll. I remain agnostic.

Edited by Kissinger, 03 February 2003 - 06:41 AM.

Wow!,
I just read the article preceeding this one.

Exceptional.

Lazarus Long,

I am looking for a little clarification here.

Do you believe that humans are TOTALLY blank slates?
Or are you using it to mean that we can change are behaviors that may be innate?

Do you believe that humans are TOTALLY blank slates?
Or are you using it to mean that we can change are behaviors that may be innate?

I am suggesting we are a complex combination of both a programmable *slate* and that we possess *some* innate behaviors. Interestingly even those may be altered through sufficient conscious effort. That is how we have evolved a transition from the primitive state of the law of the Jungle to the modern State under a Rule of Law.

In a way the irony of human evolution and perhaps as a general rule of developing cognitive intelligence, is that we are designed with a programmable blank slate that has evolved to process language. This spare processing capacity combined with memetic evolution as a consequence of social evolution and record keeping, changes the rules governing Human Nature and as we come to appreciate possible change, we develop new options.

I should also clarify something about Don and I with respect to that earlier post in this thread; look at the date. He and I were simultaneously engaged in a heated debate about the oncoming Iraq War and under his screename Kissinger at that time. I was overlapping some the images here to reference that debate as well.

I see war as a crucial issue of human evolution, but only one issue of many and as such it is not to be undertaken for exactly the kind of reasons chosen to go into Iraq IMO.

There was no real threat and I argued to absolutely no avail in the long run but that debate is public record and in our archives. Don's POV has changed some since those days but here he raised points that I found interesting and important to larger social concerns and in light of our other ongoing debate I replied above.

I have a separate ongoing discussion of Human Selection that better focuses on the evolutionary biology and psychology of cognition and intelligence. The nature/nurture debate is generally used as a false dichotomy IMO. Both are in play and we mature from one extreme (hopefully) toward the other as we live.

So long as we learn we grow, so long as we grow we live, so long as we live, we learn.

The Universe may not be infinite but I wonder often that the mind is not in fact boundless in its capacity to absorb thought and even to be sustained by it. Our slate stopped being blank the moment we opened eyes and ears to the world and definitely the moment we first suckle our mothers breast and grasp that more than breath and screams pass by our lips.

Obviously our language ability, combined with the cognitive abilities of logic and formal mathematical reasoning contributed to even more advantages accruing to intelligence but the creation of records themselves begins not only the transition from an oral culture to a literate one, but to data collection and retention that allows each subsequent generation to build on the sum of all before.

Of all the significant paleontological changes which we detect that our forebears underwent, none are more significant than how our brains have successfully mutated and adapted IMO and the associative genetics of that complex blank slate with potential reasoning capacity is what has become innate and how we imprint it is called social engineering more than Natural Selection.

Does that clarify my perspective I hope?

Evolutionary Economics (CIRA)

When I ran a search of topics about Nature and Nurture this was the paltry result:
http://www.imminst.o... versus nurture

However the basic theme definitely has been debated many times under its various guises as education, genetics, evolutionary biology and psychology, Pinker's Blank Slate, or economics to name but a few. It is a theme which I suspect is elusive because it is a relationship that is not mutually exclusive as it is too often treated but synergistic and evolving.

Edited by Lazarus Long, 15 August 2004 - 04:53 PM.

Thanks and that did clear things up.

The evolution of social behaviors are NOT an exclusively human experience. Most of the Great (and lesser) Apes are social and other species like dolphins have complex social structures. This article alludes to the idea that there may in fact be forms of *charisma* at work in other species social structures.

We tend to identify these with mating behavior and *Alpha* characteristics but I suggest there may be a much more complex set of relationships involved as well.

Socialites unite dolphin groups

A few well-connected dolphins keep pods together
Dolphin groups, or "pods" rely on socialites to keep them together, scientists have claimed. 

http://news.bbc.co.u...ure/3558994.stm

Society is also a pragmatic function of networking ability and the strength of those bonds, now we see there even may be a genetic component to charisma and this relates to the ability to be a node or nexus in the social fabric.