I just found this video yesterday by Aubrey de Grey and was wondering what you all thought of his work.
http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html
It could be relevant to utilitarianism in the sense that there is a tremendous amount of lost knowledge (including knowledge about promoting utility) when someone dies. Regardless, I want to live and be young forever!

I interviewed him for 80K a while ago:
http://80000hours.org/blog/42-living-to ... ey-de-grey

I think the lost knowledge argument has been overused by the longevity research advocates. The reason is that there are not that many people who have knowledge that can't be transmitted in relatively short times, that is practically relevant, that is not redundant and that stays relevant as time passes. The effect is not zero, but these are still strong conditions on the practical usefulness of preserving individual human brains, and I think the argument is overused because many people just don't want existing people to die, especially themselves and their friends, and people generally like stories in which individuals, rather than statistics or abstract transmission processes, are important (think hero stories, or the overfocus on individuals and their personality in politics). In other words: It's a rationalization.

There is also the possibility that society is better off if some individuals aren't powerful or influencial forever, without succumbing to the conditions in which intentional physical violence against such individuals occurs.

One advantage may be that longevity + contraception use can reduce the relative life-years spent in childhood and disability from old age, which is more productive and implies more total autonomy for individuals. OTOH, maybe once aging is "solved", some miserable suicidal people will never be allowed to die. And maybe some bad values only change if old people die off, e.g. in-vitro meat may be embraced by more people in a generation that grew up with it, but rejected by many who grew up with the knowledge that "real meat comes from a real animal".

Interesting. The hypothetical possibility of being permanently suicidal and unable to die does sound like the worst thing in the world. De Grey doesn't talk about making suicide impossible, though, as far as I know. If we could prevent human aging, it's possible there would be a massive increase in human well-being, though, as everyone would be able to exercise regularly and wouldn't have to worry about their own health or that of loved ones. Although that would be good in its own right, it might incidentally decrease the prevalence of suicidal thinking.

What about the possibility of the entire living world being prevented from aging and/or death? (Lowering or preventing reproduction might also be necessary.) If we grant that negative emotions evolved to motivate individuals to avoid danger and we eliminated the ultimate danger to our existence (death), perhaps there would be much less if any negative emotion. It might still be necessary to change the brain mechanisms that perceive danger, though, or perhaps over millenia of unnecessary use they would gradually atrophy.

There is a part of me that simply wants eternal youth for my own benefit though - no doubt.

Elijah wrote:If eternal anything really is possible, than in some branch of the UWF, an eternal and unimaginably painful Hell has been created. I'm probably creating a few googols just by telling you all about the possibility. So I hope desperately that eternal perpetuation of consciousness is impossible.

What is UWF? It seems to me like eternal physical life on this planet is a better bet than dying and having the mere possibility of spending eternity in a religious hell that could exist.

Universal Wave-Function. Elijah's comment relates to concepts like quantum immortality.

Of course, the longevity research doesn't literally try to achieve eternal youth, just negligible senescence. To my knowledge, de Grey doesn't believe his research can prevent the heat death of the universe.

I'm probably creating a few googols just by telling you all about the possibility.

There is a roughly equal probability that you prevent a few googols instead. Generally speaking, if utility is scalar and unbounded, and infinitarian possibilities aren't ignored, all possible actions have infinite expected utility, which makes the concept of expected utility practically worthless for decision-making (infinitarian paralysis). But this is quite a different discussion from the implications of individual longevity research alone.

Another relevant distinction is negligible senescence vs. "curing death", e.g. by making backup copies of individual connectomes. A non-aging person can still be hit by a bus or die of an illness. In contrast, a backed-up personal identity can have a form of (relative) digital immortality. The latter also includes the possibility of multiple concurrently active copies of individuals, which opens up that whole other much discussed can of worms (brain uploads, near-instantaneous reproduction of mature individuals etc.)

The reason is that there are not that many people who have knowledge that can't be transmitted in relatively short times, that is practically relevant, that is not redundant and that stays relevant as time passes.

I disagree. I'm 22, and I've spent most of my life in school. It wasn't too redundant and irrelevant for me to learn it, and if I die, my successor will also have to spend well over a decade learning it.

Of course, knowledge is only part of it. During much of my life, I was physically unfit to work, and mentally unfit to learn much. I had to be cared for, which is expensive. Time had to pass, which is also expensive. The problem is that replacing people is horrendously expensive in general, and education is just one piece of that.

DanielLC wrote:

The reason is that there are not that many people who have knowledge that can't be transmitted in relatively short times, that is practically relevant, that is not redundant and that stays relevant as time passes.

I disagree. I'm 22, and I've spent most of my life in school. It wasn't too redundant and irrelevant for me to learn it, and if I die, my successor will also have to spend well over a decade learning it.

Of course, knowledge is only part of it. During much of my life, I was physically unfit to work, and mentally unfit to learn much. I had to be cared for, which is expensive. Time had to pass, which is also expensive. The problem is that replacing people is horrendously expensive in general, and education is just one piece of that.

And efficiency is lost on the back end of your life too. I think there would be plenty gained if people had the physical bodies of 20 to 25 year olds indefinitely.

Probably all true, but then it still doesn't follow that longevity research is the best way to facilitate knowledge. Let's say you could give 1 billion more people uncensored access to wikipedia, google scholar and lectures on youtube OR you could give all existing people 5 more years healthy life expectancy. It's not clear to me that the live expectancy increase would be more productive. Or cheaper to achieve.

Other ways to increase intellectual productivity could be cheap and safe cognitive enhancements, or to make education more goal-driven and efficient.

And then there's the inevitable question whether this productivity will create more pain or pleasure in the long run (higher GDP = better torture on a larger scale?)

Hedonic Treader wrote:Probably all true, but then it still doesn't follow that longevity research is the best way to facilitate knowledge. Let's say you could give 1 billion more people uncensored access to wikipedia, google scholar and lectures on youtube OR you could give all existing people 5 more years healthy life expectancy. It's not clear to me that the live expectancy increase would be more productive. Or cheaper to achieve.

That is a fair point. I think in a utilitarian paradise people would be able to stay young and healthy for as long as they wanted to, though. It's hard to imagine there being optimal psychological well-being if people are still aging and dying. So I do think De Grey is contributing knowledge that would be useful to such a paradise but there likely are more pressing areas to do research on first.

De Grey appears to have the support of Peter Singer.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-ethics-of-anti-aging-by-peter-singer

You could find an upper bound on the value of eternal youth just by looking at the average person's net profit at their peak, finding the present value of that carried on for a lifetime, and subtracting the present value of their life.

The fact that people tend to learn and get better over time suggest an improvement over this. From what I understand, your ability tends to improve logarithmically with practice. After ten years or so, you're not going to improve significantly, so it probably won't make all that big a difference.