Thinking Complete

The philosophy and psychology of death seem weirdly under-discussed - particularly by the wider silicon valley community, given how strongly anti-death many people in it are. This post is an attempt to think through some relevant considerations, primarily focused on my own intuitions and emotions. See also this old blog post - I mostly still agree with the points I made in it, but when thinking about it now I frame things pretty differently. Fearing death, loving life Let’s first distinguish two broad types of reasons for wanting to avoid death: fearing death, and loving life.* Perhaps these seem like two sides of the same coin - but, psychologically speaking, they feel very distinct to me. The former was particularly dominant when I was in primary school, when a part of me emerged that was very afraid of death (in a way that wasn’t closely linked to fear of missing out on any particular aspects of life). That part is still with me - but when it comes to the surface, its fear feels vi...

(Note: this essay on designing utopias  by Eliezer Yudkowsky is still the best I've read on the topic, and was a major inspiration for this piece.) I was recently talking to my friend Julio about what key features society would need for people to be happy throughout arbitrarily-long lives - in other words, what would a utopia for immortals look like? He said that it would require continual novelty. But I think that by itself, novelty is under-specified. Almost every game of Go ever played is novel and unique, but eventually playing Go would get boring. Then you could try chess, I suppose - but at a certain point the whole concept of board games would become tiresome. I don't think bouncing around between many types of different activities would be much better, in the long run. Rather, the sort of novelty that's most desirable is a change of perspective, such that you find meaning in things you didn't appreciate before. That interpretation of novelty is actually fairl...

An earlier version of this essay was my submission to the St Gallen's Essay Competition. Current debates over the automation of human jobs by AI tend to focus on how fast it will proceed: some jobs will be safe for the next decade, some for the next half-century, some for the foreseeable future. In this essay I want to take a different approach, by asking which (if any) jobs will continue to be done by humans even after the development of arbitrarily advanced technology. This question is relevant because there are good reasons to believe that AI will eventually surpass humans in every task which is based on analysing and processing information and knowledge. By “information”, I do not mean just numerical data, but rather every form of communication: speech, text, diagrams, videos, etc. These tasks make up almost all white-collar work and much blue-collar work as well; their future should therefore be an issue of great concern. The inevitable dominance of AI in information...

This is a question close to my heart; I've been viscerally horrified by death for as long as I can remember. When I was young I refused to explain this fear to my parents, since I thought that if they really understood it, they'd suffer the same dread as I was undergoing. Now I've become quite good at ignoring it, but there are still certain strands of thought that make my stomach twist every time I contemplate them. This longstanding emotional instinct has obviously shaped my philosophical views on death; however, it's a rather complex issue about which my opinions are still evolving. To be clear, I interpret the claim that death is bad not to mean that compulsory immortality is good, but rather that it would be good for individuals to be able to choose to postpone death, perhaps indefinitely. Nor do I desire the fate of the Cumaean Sibyl who, being granted by Apollo extended life but not extended youth, eventually shrivelled away until only her voice remained. Rath...