Confronting Death

Our biggest problem is Death. We must confront it. Despite incredible technological progress, our political parties, our religions and our institutions are not ready for that.

This percolates down to people, who themselves have given up on the fight. People are so hopeless that they see fighting Death as Sci-Fi or “the long term future” rather than a concrete goal we must plan for.

It is as if Death was not physical. An abstract problem that happens in fiction. Sometimes, it makes us sad, but we stop thinking about it and it goes back to its own separate spiritual realm.

This is the peak of denial and cowardice. Both are unfortunately all too common.

I internally laugh when people tell me to not worry about extinction risks from superintelligence because at some point, when the risks become obvious enough, humanity will rise up to the challenge.

Even without AI risks, we all live on a clock and we have all seen close ones die. Yet there is no global project to end Death, nor any measurement of how far we are in ending Death. We just awkwardly avoid the topic and come up with shit excuses.

Death

I am not a poet. I will not write greek tragedies, the fable of the dragon tyrant, or anything like that.

Simply put, every day, people die and get obliterated. Every day, we are left to suffer their losses.

Losing someone is deeply sad and traumatising. When someone close to us dies, we mourn. As we mourn, it becomes obvious that we lost a part of us, and that Humanity lost a part of itself.

“What does not kill you make you stronger” is bullshit in the context of losing a closed one. We just lost. There’s no participation trophy, and we became worse people for having lost them.

—

Until we end death, our time on earth is extremely limited, making each of our decisions much graver.

We are similar to all the unfinished adults teenagers with no professional experience who are forced to decide on their careers right before and after high school.

At each instant, we are forced to decide on whether we’ll invest our time to guarantee our survival, to please ourselves, for our closed ones, to help others who suffer right now, or to gain ground on death.

We have not yet found a definitive answer to this question. Ironically, this means that at each instant, we are also forced to decide on whether we’ll think more about how we spend our time.

This is heavy.

This is what I mean by “We live in a harsh world.”. We are constantly forced to make decisions we do not want to make, between shit and shittier.

We are obviously not equipped to deal with this. Very few of us are enlightened buddhist monks who have deeply contemplated and accepted death. We are stressed, afraid of fucking up and losing it all, we get angry around children on bad days, we mourn for years and we never truly recover.

A life where we can die at any instant and are destined to rot in around a hundred years is much too heavy for beings such as ourselves.

In a world where we have ended death, our decisions would be much lighter: with much more time for each of us, it would matter much less whether we fucked up our first career or spent too much time on video games for a year. We would have much more time to reflect about ourselves and experiment. Time itself would be cheaper.

—

Death is humanity’s greatest enemy. But to be clear, It is one of many.

Even alive, many fleas plague us. Disabilities, sicknesses, mental degeneration, psychiatric diseases, weakness, hunger, and more.

Life is harsh.

Status Quo: Doing Nothing

As humanity, when facing Death, our main reaction is cowardice. We are Refusing our Call. We are not staring at the abyss.

We can get into deep psychoanalysis. Death is traumatic, and it is the most natural instinct to avoid thinking about traumas.

Thinking of Death as preventable is even more traumatic. It means that people experiencing the Survivor’s Guilt are right. In a real sense, we are guilty of not doing more to end Death, and we are partly responsible for each person who dies, at every passing time.

Furthermore, religions have taught and spread numerous literal falsehoods on the topic of Death: from reincarnation and karma to heaven and the soul. Similarly, many “atheists” are just people who have defaulted to the most convenient beliefs (no mass! no prayer!) while still deluding themselves around Death with vague spirituality.

—

What does it mean to not be a coward, to be brave?

Bravery does not mean dropping everything to end Death.

We should take our leisure time seriously, pleasing ourselves and spending time with our loved ones. We unfortunately also must spend some time working to ensure our survival, at which we could even slack off given that this is just fighting for survival.

Bravery is acknowledging that this trades off against helping others who suffer, against getting closer to the time where we won’t suffer needless deaths anymore.

We can always do more, and we choose not to. This is morally correct: we should not completely give up on ourselves and our families just because others suffer more. That it is morally correct does negate the harsh reality of it: deciding to please ourselves and our close ones does trade off directly with ending death.

Bravery means reflecting about this. Instead of fighting with each other, instead of fucking around on social media, we could spend half of that time and emotional energy finding ways to work together to end death. Are our hatred and mindless compulsions truly worth more than making an honest attempt at ending Death?

—

We disagree a lot. And we disagree in lots of ways. Religiously, politically, aesthetically, and more.

From my point of view, these disagreements pale in comparison to the gravity of Death.

I would expect that after thinking about it for a while, people would agree. In other words, if there was a clear choice between continuing with current conflicts, and coordinating to end Death, I expect most people would go for the latter.

This does not mean that each of us should separately go for the latter. We do not have an actual plan to coordinate to end Death. Even if one was to individually stop engaging with current problems and go on their crusade to end Death, this would not do much. The hard part is coordinating on this, and building an actual plan for what this coordination would look like in practice.

For instance: what do we do with the people who disagree with this vision? Some people are plain fucking assholes, and genuinely would prefer trampling over other people during a short life than have everyone thrive. Or let’s say that we actually managed to put those priorities in international treaties: what do we do with states who abide by the letter of the rule but not the spirit?

But even if such questions and global coordination are hard, we should at least consider them. It’s much better to consider them, and then fail than just assume we can not do anything.

What would it look like for there to be worldwide coordination on ending Death? What would it look like for this coordination to have precedence over other conflicts?

—

We have not made a honest attempt at global coordination to end Death. We might not be strong enough to do it, but we have not even tried, which is the responsibility of the weak.

Given this, I believe we collectively hold some serious collective moral responsibility whenever people die.

In order words, we owe it to everyone who died, who’s dying and who will die. We should at least give it a shot.

Our Duty: Fighting Back

Until the advent of Science, there was roughly fuck-all we could do about death. We still managed to some extent, with more-or-less primitive technology.

Fortunately, we now live in a time where we can end it all. We might reach Longevity Escape Velocity and end scarcity. If we manage to not kill ourselves through uncontrolled AI, we might see some existing people escape organic decay and truly live without the fear of dying or seeing their close ones die in the next century.

Life, Death, The Universe are all harsh. But we can fight back. We should be much more focused on fighting Death and making life materially stress-free for everyone.

At school, we should be taught that this is Humanity’s Challenge. Every year, we should do a worldwide assessment of where we are in ending Death.

—

Research is humanity’s vanguard in ending death. As societies, we put a lot of resources aside and train people for decades so that we can gain ground on this.

We could do more to help people who are currently suffering, but we divert resources away for a better future.

Receiving those resources comes with very strong moral responsibilities: a duty to do the best that you can.

Unfortunately, I do not see researchers consider nor uphold these responsibilities. Instead, I have seen researchers clearly state that their priority is to work on fun topics that they find interesting and motivating.

There is no Research Bar from which researchers get disbarred in case of fraud. Researchers constantly protect each others and “help” their protégés by helping them write shit papers to increase their citation count.

What is even going on?

I am not saying we should disband Academia and private R&D. That would be a stereotypical myopic change. Obviously, our strategy of putting smart people in a playground yields some benefits. Look at academic theoretical computer science or San Francisco. I would not give up on these benefits without an incremental plan with fallbacks.

Still, this should bring us pause. Is this truly the best we can do? Putting our brightest minds in gilded playgrounds and hoping to get some useful crumbs from the toys that they build? Possibly. But in that case, if we can not come up with a better alternative, we should make it explicit.

—

This is the state of affairs everywhere, it’s not only research. Politicians, capital allocators, journalists, civil servants. Too few are trying to make a dent into our main problems.

Humanity has no focus on its goals. The direct result is a lot of waste.

This is one of the first things that I teach when people ask me how to be more efficient. Keep your eyes on the prize. Know your North Star. Distrust any action that does not further your goals. Stay focused.

Without clearly stating humanity’s goals, it’s easy to bullshit about how bad or good we are doing. It’s easy to bullshit about how a specific project is helping humanity or not.

—

There are a few communities of people who do not flinch away from Death. I am happy to have met them. To name a few: the longevity movement, transhumanists, rationalists, and effective altruists.

But overall, they are fringe communities. Depending on the community, they are either not attempting or just failing at becoming mainstream.

Ending Death should not be the exclusive domain of a few weirdos. This is humanity’s ultimate common denominator: we all suffered and suffer from Death.

—

We should play to win. We should eradicate hunger and obesity. We should eradicate all diseases. We should make our bodies resilient to organic decay. We should end scarcity over food and shelter.

Many angry debates are overly myopic and do not acknowledge the transient nature of what they are dealing with. My go-to example is abortion. The abortion topic stir up a lot of hate between people. As if the situation was not shitty enough, political fighting makes it shittier.

In a more technologically advanced world, the abortion debate does not exist.

Imagine if we had perfect contraception: it works 100% reliably, costs nothing, works with both males and females, and you don’t even have to think about it. Just a switch, that you can toggle on-and-off whenever.

Imagine if we had much greater medicine: there are never complications during pregnancy, grave disorders, foetal anomalies or risks to the mother.

In that world, we might have a debate around how many children people should have. Fewer than 2? More than 3? Is there a fixed ideal number across places and cultures?

Or we might have a debate about the morals behind sex. Should people just have sex casually, completely detached from any bonding, as if they were just playing a video game with a stranger? Should people never masturbate, nor have sex without intent of procreating?

But abortions would just be obsolete. They are not a thing that happens because people enjoy having abortions. They are compromises, least bad options, that people sometimes take because we all live in a harsh world. In a more lenient world, they would not happen and there would be no moral debate around them. We would just never even think about them.

Conclusion

I care little about whether after ending Death and Scarcity, we decide to build an artificially stable global ecosystem with nature everywhere, conquer the stars or meditate all the way up to enlightenment.

Right now, we are losing much too hard to think about those things.

I take it as self-evident that people should just not die stranded and physically suffer.