And will we create a society of paranoiacs?
A concept originating in economics, the utility of a thing is a subjective measure of its value. Although it is subjective and therefore not transferrable from one person to another, it can still be treated in a logically rigorous manner.
For example, someone offers you $1000 to miss a day of work without telling your boss. What chance of being fired would you accept to take this deal? If you say a 1% chance would be acceptable, it follows that for $100,000 you would quit the job straight away. In reality we’re missing some variables from this equation; for example the excitement you get from taking the risk and from the novelty of the event. These would be Utility Value (UV) positive and would cause the absolute value of the $1000 to go down. Nevertheless in theory we could include all factors and come up with the exact value $1000 had to you relative to keeping your job, and thus the exact value to you of your job. In fact if this situation were to occur, the logical way to approach it would be to decide upon the sum you would accept to leave your job, then reverse engineer the rest.
Now suppose you are offered $1M for a 1% chance at losing your life. Many people would go for this. If you are one of these people presumably you would be prepared to die right now in exchange for $100M…?
Clearly something is wrong with this picture. Because the utility of our own lives is infinite, right? Apparently not. People sacrifice their own lives to save those of others, not just in thought experiments but in real life. They even do it for nebulous entities like nation-states and moral values. And if we placed limitless value on our own survival all of us, or at least the most logical among us, would be far more cautious than we are about anything (read: everything) that carried any risk at all.
Let’s see if a better definition of life UV will clear things up. I propose:
UV <life> = UV <moment> * sum<moments>
Physics is still undecided on the nature of time, but I’m going to assume that the human mind perceives it as being granular, not continuous. I think it is central to our sense of consciousness, selfhood and sanity to perceive this moment as having some intrinsic ‘thingness’ that is partitioned off from a frigidified past and a fluid future. Without this, perception would be nothing but blur, process-interaction-movement ad infinitum. If we could time these moments (probably again both subjective and variable, but bare with me) then we could count how many went into an individual’s lifespan. Here’s my point: a finite but experientially continuous life would contain infinite ‘nows’ and therefore infinite UV, regardless of the value of the individual moments, and this evidently is not the case.
The UV of a moment, we could call ‘the incremental value of life’ – it doesn’t just refer to the mood you are in right now. If you feel bad but expect to feel well again, your momental UV is mostly likely still positive. When a person reaches the point of suicide, they feel that they would prefer nothing rather than this, and don’t expect things to ever improve.
So I am proposing that an individual’s lifespan (not their life per se, which I don’t think ‘exists’ outside of time) has a specific value to them which is finite and by the nature of utility theory, transferrable. But hold on, I haven’t dealt with the currency of exchange for accepting guaranteed death right now. Well the reason this breaks down in my opinion is that all of the value-able things we can conceive of need time to make their effects known. In other words they too are granular, and so their exchange rate is restricted. Perhaps you would agree to live for just ten more years in exchange for $10M. There is nothing we know of that would emulate the pleasure one could derive from splashing that money around for a decade, in just one moment. That’s not to say that such a thing could not exist though. One can conceive of a VR sim that gave you the subjective experience of that length of time in what was, to your physical body, merely an eyeblink.
Now let’s relate this all to radical life extension. Life expectancies have been going up steadily but slowly – but no one is going to have noticed much difference in their relationship with risk. Yes, we’re all better educated about harmful things to avoid, but no one’s saying, ‘Man, I expect to live to 74, it was 64 not long ago, I think I’ll stop driving now.’
What happens when we approach and then reach escape velocity?
There will always be the possibility of death, so for the sake of this discussion I’m going to presume that once biological immortality has been reached, the average life expectancy before accidental death will have reached 700 years, or a roughly tenfold increase.
Well let’s see what this looks like from my perspective. These numbers are mostly plucked out of thin air but it’s a start:
Chance that escape velocity will be reached during my expected lifetime, given unhindered progress – 50%
Chance that natural or manmade catastrophes or political machinations will hold back the necessary scientific progress beyond my lifetime – 25%
Chance that I get successfully cryonically preserved and revived at a propitious point in the future – 25%
(50*.75)% I make it +(50*.25)% I make it, so 50%
50% chance of a tenfold increase in lifespan. According to utility logic that means a fivefold increase in risk-aversion. I’m not even sure what to make of that and that’s partly why I’m making this thread. I'm not sure that our intuition is good at dealing with these concepts. Up until now I’ve been ok with riding in a car or a plane, but was I 5x above my required threshold? Hard to say since I used to have my intuition tuned in to a different station.
And what about when everybody’s living 700 years? Will everyone be scared to leave the house? Or will we see the ‘admirable human spirit’ getting on with things as usual? And if so, will that in fact be an example of ‘typical human stupidity’?
