Nearly every argument against longevity is a version of, “But death is good sometimes.” Death creates finitude, thereby creating meaning and forcing change. Take Frances Fukuyama’s recent piece “Against Life Extension” in Persuasion. Fukuyama argues slower generational turnover delays social and political dynamism. He does this at 72, recapitulating an argument from over 20 years ago, without a hint of irony. What is odd is that Fukuyama, like others who oppose life extension because it robs us of finitude, don’t explore any other source beyond death.
Here is Fukuyama’s claim:
“The slowing of generational turnover is thus very likely to slow the rate of social evolution and adaptation, in line with the old joke that the field of economics advances one funeral at a time. […] You will have an overlapping of generations and increasing social conflict as younger people begin to think differently and demand change, while older ones resist. The problem will not be conflict per se, but a gradual slowing of the rate of social change.”
Fukuyama opens by pointing out out that life expectancy has gotten longer and that’s good. His first implicit claim, that as people live longer society itself gets older, is, I suspect, so self evidence in government and in our movies, he doesn’t feel the need to note it. But by not pointing out that our society is already older, he doesn’t have to address the fact that it’s not entirely obvious our society is less dynamic. It is almost a truism that we live in a world of accelerating change, not just in tech, but politics and social movements. If we accept the claim that we’re already older, our society should already be getting slower, right?
We Hope We Die Before We Get Old
I don’t want a gerontocracy either, so I’m inclined on face Fukuyama’s claim that more generational turnover is better for society. We would be even more dynamic than we are now if everyone was, on average, younger. Which means we should encourage more generational turnover to get more dynamism, right? If social change is so important as to defend death then it is probably worth exploring some additional ways to achieve it!
Curiously, opponents of longevity never seem to get around to these proposals. Allow me to help! Here are a few: No one over 65 can be elected to any role, act as CEO of a public company, or have academic tenure; At 75, you lose the right to vote, marginal tax rates go up by an additional chunk every year, and you’re auto opted-in to a DNR.
If Fukuyama believes his own premise, these shouldn’t feel like radical ideas. Prominent ethicists have made similar arguments. We have plenty of elected officials to point to in the last decade as cautionary tales on both sides of the aisle. So why aren’t Fukuyama and others making arguments like these? I don’t know! Age limits are uncomfortable, sure, but they are less uncomfortable, I think, than being Team Grim Reaper!?
I’m teasing Frank a bit here because it’s fun and I’m a bit disappointed that he’s just rehashing bits from Our Posthuman Future. I read it (and enjoyed it!) two decades ago, even as I scrawled counter arguments furiously in the margin—OK fine I admit it, I see some evidence for a lack of cultural dynamism as our society ages.
Though I am pro-longevity, I am also sympathetic to the idea that finitude has value. As much as I’d love to believe the case of Hob Gadling or that our own lives are already so long that we can live multiple lifetimes within them, let’s assume Fukuyama and friends are right: finitude is necessary for meaning. How do we square that with living forever?
The answer is to separate finitude from death.
Instead of Death, Rebirth
Age limits for voting or authority show how finitude can be encouraged at the social level, but what about the individual level? How do we create meaning without death? And, as the tech gets more sci-fi, how will age limits work when being ‘forever young’ is nearly real?
We need to invent new forms of finitude. Death does something of value, so for longevity to work, we have to replace it.
Let’s do a thought experiment:
Assume longevity is now possible. Human life can be extended in two ways. First, healthspan has been extended such that living to 85 while still healthy, vigorous, and lucid is all but guaranteed. People age, albeit slower and with fewer side effects. But no one would mistake an 80 year old for a 20 year old. Second, aging can be reversed. The reversal process, however, is dramatic, expensive, and time-consuming. It requires a year in a specially designed tank in a medically induced coma—a Reverse Womb.
The Reverse Womb, by virtue of the sheer scope of biotech required, can also change almost anything about a person’s biological make up. That is, in addition to age, the Reverse Womb can change your sex, physical appearance, and more.
Recognizing the need for finitude, in the world of the Reverse Womb, death has been replaced with Rebirth. Rebirth is not just the use of the Reverse Womb, but a universal legal, economic, and social event. To be Reborn, you must give up everything. Legally, it is the same as dying. You lose all wealth, possessions, and privileges, save universal human rights. It is required that your sex and ethnicity change. You’ll be placed under guardianship of people you’ve never met, in a country you’ve likely never been. In short, you are reborn into the body of a ~18 year-old stranger entirely unlike who you were.
If you don’t agree to these terms, you don’t get to be Reborn. This is the cost of not dying. Rebirth is the replacement for death as a source of finitude.
Live, Die, Repeat
I recognize this thought experiment is a bit sci-fi. If Derek Parfit can do brain transplants I can invent the Reverse Womb. In fact, Parfit, your hero and mine, is relevant here because this becomes another one of his non-identity problems. I feel pretty confident that almost no version of “Finitude is good, so death is good” argument survives the Rebirth strategy (admittedly I’m leaning hard on Hinduism pressure testing meaning for a millennia or so), but now we have a different problem: is the same ‘person’ still alive? Who, exactly, is getting reborn?
Let’s assume the Rebirth process takes about a year. You would wake up post Rebirth fully consciousness, like waking from sleep, but also be completely disoriented about who you are, like waking up in a Severance office. You would know how to dress yourself and how to do things you learned in your prior life (code in python, nurse a baby, breakdance, etc), but also have no idea where you were, the language, or cultural norms. The world will have moved on. You will feel different, your embodied existence almost inexpressibly different. The dislocation would be bodily, social, geographic, cultural, economic, religious, familial, political, and chronological. Though entirely competent you would also be incredibly helpless and alone. The sense of loss would be enormous.
But you would be alive, with a whole new life in front of you. A different you. Parfit might argue there’s no meaningful difference between this radical discontinuity and death—that personal identity doesn’t survive such dramatic change. But that’s precisely why Rebirth works as engineered finitude. You get the identity-ending aspects of death (the social turnover, the redistribution, the fresh perspectives) while preserving something death destroys: accumulated knowledge and skills. A master surgeon who undergoes Rebirth might wake up as a young man in Bangladesh, but he still has her decades of experience operating. He still has memories of her family and friends. Her life is, in him, preserved.
The intent of the sex, ethnicity, and cultural swaps in addition to the age reversal is two fold. First, it causes maximum dislocation from prior identity. Nearly every circumstance will be different from not just your most recent point of life, but any prior point in your life. This is necessary for true finitude. Second, it forces a real version of the Veil of Ignorance. If you want to live another life, you must genuinely consider what it will be like for you in your next life, where you will, in effect, be the opposite of who you are today.
The practical objections—who would choose this, who manages it, what prevents cheating—matter less than the philosophical point. Even if Rebirth remains a thought experiment, it proves that death’s benefits are separable from death itself. We can engineer finitude. Once we accept that principle, we can debate the mechanics.
I am not arguing Rebirth is the solution to longevity’s challenges. That would be silly, as the former is even more technologically difficult and distant than the latter. I am, however, demonstrating that if finitude is what makes life meaningful, we can have finitude without death. The burden now shifts to longevity’s opponents: if we can preserve everything you claim to value about death while eliminating the dying, what’s your real objection?
Those who oppose longevity on grounds of finitude creating meaning and value must deal with the implications of their claims. If progress is so valuable that death is worth defending, then you should probably be more vocal proponents of things like age limits! If you’re not, it’s hard to take your arguments seriously, or you need to re-evaluate what it is, precisely, about longevity you’re upset about.
For those of us who are pro-longevity, fears about cultural rupture and stagnation are real and deserve to be taken seriously. You cannot just break traditions, rituals, and norms that have existed for all of human history and pre-history for free. We can either pay in advance with planning or afterwards with backlash and strife. We’ve seen over and over that technologies and social changes have costs and political consequences. To simply pretend that we’ll figure it out as we go, or to dismiss the deep deep psychological bindings of our species to finitude, is folly.
Technologists, particularly those who see human biology as the next frontier, cannot pretend that eliminating death will not cause titanic shifts in, well, almost every aspect of life. Those who are proponents of longevity should be just as interested in helping the culture adjust, adapt, and retain meaning and value as those who oppose it. I want to live more than one lifetime, and I want to do it in a world where everyone gets to do that and we’re all better for it.