Elon Musk opposes life extension on the grounds that it would “retard human progress.” I believe the fact that he holds this idiotic opinion is proof that the man is not anywhere nearly as clever as he is believed to be. Let’s examine this idea in a little more detail:
1) Would he suggest we take some action to shorten human life spans in order to speed up progress?
Implicit in his premise is the idea that progress would speed up if people died sooner: Or, even more implausibly, that we somehow occupy the ideal point in terms of life expectancy to maximize technological development. However, it seems extremely unlikely that this is true—what would make our current life expectancy ideal? And if shorter lifespans would indeed produce faster progress, why isn’t Niger a hotbed of innovation—all thanks to their reduced lifespan? Why wasn’t the Middle Ages an era of scientific flourishing? The correlation between longer lifespans and scientific progress, despite the confounds, gives us no reason to believe Musk’s claims are true.
2) What exactly is the purpose of technological innovation apart from improving human life? What better improvement is there than extending it?
It is not clear why we should be willing to die sooner, and have our children and grandchildren die sooner, just so that we can create some new gadgets and expand knowledge. Even if his ridiculous premise were true, and given the albeit complicated correlation between life expectancy and technology there is no reason to think it is, why would any person prefer greater technological improvement over a longer lifespan? I like my laptop, but a 120 years of reading books and attending plays beats 60 years of watching Netflix.
3) Death doesn’t usher in new ideas.
There is no reason to believe that people’s ideas are as fixed as Musk claims. If his logic were true, we would see new schools of thought emerging in the aftermath of plagues. Can Elon point to a single instance where a technological revolution was advanced by an epidemic, famine, or war? Oh, I see Elon, it is just the Goldilocks amount of death that assists progress? So, have we ever seen progress decline because life expectancies increased? Oh, I see, that is because of the confounding effect, mentioned earlier, that technological progress has on life spans. How clever of Mr. Musk to argue for something that no data will ever corroborate.
And, of course, if we are at this Goldilocks level of life expectancy, that implies that Musk would have been in favor of life extending technologies until quite recently—because when they were lower, well, we had not yet reached the ideal. However, who really believes he would have thought anything different if he had been born 50 or 100 years earlier? He doesn’t have an ideal number in mind; he has a general notion that he is stupidly infatuated with.
4) When someone dies, we lose knowledge: not gain it.
In fact, scientists are making significant contributions at older and older ages. The world is not better off because Friedman and Samuelson are dead. The world is not better off because Hawking died. These men were still expanding the frontiers of knowledge when they died—and we can imagine they would have done so even more if they had been more vigorous.
5) Ever hear of retirement?
Even if what Musk is saying were true on some level, you could achieve the same effect by simply requiring people to retire. People do not have to die in order to free up positions of authority for younger people. Upon retirement, they could all be encouraged to turn their attention to the history of their respective fields, where the presence of first-hand witnesses would be extremely helpful.
6) Sorry, Musk, spaceflight is not happening with human lifespans as they are?
It should be clear that colonization of planets and moons beyond our solar system will require life extension technologies of various sorts. That he does not realize this is astounding. But with the nearest earth-like planet being 100 light years away, some sort of life extension technology will be needed for people to make the journey. And the idea of maintaining generations of people on a “arch ship” is utterly absurd. No one would sign up for a journey when they have no chance of ever experiencing the destination.
7) As knowledge increases, the time it takes to master new knowledge will increase
This means that by Musks thinking, people need less time to produce groundbreaking research as ideas and concepts become more complicated. This is, of course, completely backwards. Indeed, we can see the average age of Nobel Laureates and Field Medalists increasing as time goes on.
All of this is yet another reason that Elon Musk is a fucking sperg who is nowhere nearly as smart as he claims to be.
But on the other hand life extension and ultimately immortality (for the rulers) is the big motivator for all of the Bay Area centimillionaires and billionaires (Sam Altman types) who are trying to produce artificial superminds that will babysit humanity forever, It goes with a lot of other Brave New World stuff -- producing designer-babies in factories so that feminism can keep doing its thing is a big one. So technological life extension is associated with an evil World Economic Forum sort of mentality.
Lots of people have always lived to be 80; 80 of 85 seems to be the natural human lifespan, the age that people get to if they don't die of diseases. So, preventing and curing the diseases that keep people from making it to 80 or 85 is one thing, getting people to 160 or 250 or 2,500 is another thing entirely.
I recently watched/heard an Eric Weinstein podcast (he's Brett's brother, some kind of mathematician physicist with an opinion about everything) that's relevant to this topic; he wants us to go to other star systems but he dismisses the idea of travelling for years and years to them in arks or whatever; he thinks that we'd be able to figure out how to slip in and out of extra dimensions, getting there in a second or two, probably in the same way in which the space vermin in their UFOs get here, if we stopped wasting so much time and energy on string theory.