Agelessness might cause some social problems, but if the choice is between "everyone dying" and "needing societal innovation to avoid stagnation", it's hardly a choice at all.

In an alternate Earth where humans never aged to begin with and society started stagnating (or worse) because of it, I doubt that the world's top minds would come up with 'kill literally everyone at X years of age' as their first option (or second, or third...). That would be comic book supervillainy.

These kinds of concerns aren't invalid, I just hope they are considered with a wide enough perspective. In terms of direct and indirect suffering, it's hard to do worse than aging.

> "Agelessness might cause some social problems, but if the choice is between "everyone dying" and "needing societal innovation to avoid stagnation", it's hardly a choice at all."

Needing societal innovation does not mean you're going to get societal innovation, though.

Also, a cure for aging does not mean that nobody will die from old age. It means that the people who can afford the treatment won't die of old age. The poor will continue to die.

Both of those things are potential issues, yes. And they should be kept in mind so the future can be less bad.

But they are not unsolvable problems, nor do they imply that aging is better than agelessness. They just imply we have to work harder, because again, the alternative is the death of everyone.

The fact that autocrats eventually die of old age is one of the main things discouraging people from bloody revolution—because it’s a lot cheaper (in lives lost, for one) to just wait and let nature take its course.

Without death by aging, this moderating influence wouldn’t be there, so we’d see far more assassination attempts and coup staging.

"Humans should only die on their own terms... except for the most influential people, who shouldn't live longer than I say they should." Hmm.

"Dictator for life" is definitely less of an issue than "Dictator for eternity".

You misinterpret my words. I meant if everyone was ageless it would be good, but influential people would get more influential the same as wealth tends to accumulate.

Scientists living forever seems like something that could accelerate progress.

"Science progresses one funeral at a time" -Max Planck

This was the quote I had in mind but couldn't quite recall.

Why do you think any other people would want to die? I would expect wanting to die to be be as anomalous as it is now unless the life extension therapy doesn't work well.

Also "stagnating the status quo for centuries " sounds bad because you expect to live decades. If you say it as "stagnating the status quo for time comparable to half of the human lifetime" you'll see it's not any worse than what we have now.

"Kill literally everyone" seems like a poor way to deal with that (or any) problem.

yeah... "accidents" ;)