Interview
What if dictators could live forever? | Anders Sandberg
- Life extension efforts are projected to enable indefinite survival by allowing humans to acquire future advances, potentially requiring a willingness to incur seven million dollars in debt for a better than five percent chance of cryonics success.
- Medical budget allocation may need to shift 5-10% toward anti-aging research to yield long-term societal benefits and a "longevity dividend," though the transition from laboratory theory to clinical application could take quite a long while.
- Demographic shifts toward an older population without addressing aging could create tremendous pain, lost opportunity, and costs, yet extending life might increase cognitive productivity and openness to new ideas rather than rigidity.
- Institutional risks in a long-lived society include the "Gray Block" effect where dictators or powerful individuals hold power indefinitely, and a potential "gray block" of older voters taxing younger generations at rates up to 80 percent.
- Current scientific skepticism regarding extending life beyond 80 to 90 years is expected to diminish as understanding grows, with metformin trials underway and personal strategies planned to begin interventions in one's 40s.
- The risk of nuclear war per year is estimated between 0.1 and 1 percent, with the "anthropic shadow" effect suggesting the system is relatively stable despite the possibility of disturbingly high probabilities.
- External natural threats include a Carrington-class solar event occurring roughly every 150 years, which could damage power grids requiring weeks to months for repair, and a mass extinction risk from nearby supernovas occurring about once every hundred million years.
- Anthropogenic risks are considered more immediate than natural ones, with persuasion robots and fake news automation identified as significant threats, while killer robot campaigns may be more effective than those against sex robots.
- Super-normal stimuli from advanced robotics or pornography could lead to new forms of addiction, causing distraction and physical issues, whereas infinite time would allow for the completion of all reading queues regardless of production rates.
- Biological interventions such as reducing sleep by one hour could extend waking life by three years, though polyphasic sleep is generally limited to one or two weeks due to social incompatibility.
- Future predictions regarding geoengineering or personal risk assessments are expected to be difficult to formulate with clarity, often resulting in overconfidence regarding likely outcomes or disagreements on the current state of the world.
- The economic instability of wealth inheritance may increase if life extension shifts inheritance timing from death to retirement, while the "Unilateralist's Curse" implies that more agents increase the likelihood of rash actions.