Unfortunately, that's only available for premium max customers. Also you should know, plus is now standard.
It’s all a bit fanciful of course—we’d basically be setting up an emulation of various spiritual beliefs, and there’s no reason to believe anybody would go along with the constraints. But it is fun to think about.
The main problem with extended lifespan will not be that some people will amass extreme wealth and power while living centuries, and they'll oppress the younger generations, who will not have a fair chance in life.
The much more likely problem will be that old people will not adjust to the new technologies. Lots of them will be victims to "pig butchering" schemes. Or they'll simply be illiterate in the new ways of life. If medicine makes tremendous progress, we might end up with a good chunk of our society being elderly, healthy, but socially unadjusted and estranged. Especially with more and more people being childless. Imagine someone who is 110 years old, with no living relatives, secluded in a nursing home, not knowing how to use the internet, or whatever the equivalent of that will be at that point in time.
These people deserve pity. But to they need to "make way for new generations"? That feels a bit eugenic to me.
This is a solved problem, guillotines worked wonders for this back in the day.
And how is that supposed to happen once the rich and powerful who finance and own the rights to that immortality tech succeed in their research?
In a world where basic health care is barely accessible in the US and under constant attack, how is immortality supposed to be given to the common men and women? Through asinine "work requirements", like Medicaid? Through UnitedHealthcare's insurance?
It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]
Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.
0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...
We’d have to be maintained. Maybe that could be part of the deal. Humans are always changing anyway, so I think we’d couldn’t be left entirely at rest. Maybe we should be run slowly, to just to make sure things are still working. Then we don’t have to worry about at-rest type bitrot.
that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.
it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.
I feel like this is a modern version of believing in souls. You are matter, not data. If you find a way to simulate yourself on a computer, this will not prevent you from experiencing death. And if that's the case, what's the point? Stroking your ego with the knowledge that a simulation of you will stick around for some time after you give up the ghost?
How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?
We all know what the ruled do when they get really pissed. The prospective ghouls know it very well too.
Your idea obviously doesn't work. You're basically advocating for something like Chronic lymphocyte leukemia at the society level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_lymphocytic_leukemia).
I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.
Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.