Thoughts on immortality and its implications on personal and societal aspects of life have long been a favourite subject here. It has also been an area of interest from a philosophical standpoint. For instance, if we could live forever, what would be the relevance of time? Would our current existential questions be rendered irrelevant? There is also an understanding that it is a process – our lifespans would progressively increase – as we replace our bodies (and later, minds) with mechanisms (augmented human) even more robust than the ones nature gave us.
I found an excellent post on Quartz which dwells on the evolution of time management and makes the point that time management is actually making our lives worse. It also brings up something I had written about recently in the context of work, money and AI – the never ending race for efficiency. The article argues that the idea that managing time would get one back in control is a fantasy that only works in a finite world and that our to-do list is actually like the mythological Hydra!
This led me to re-think my notions on the impact of increasing life spans on our lives. I had naively thought that when time is infinite, efficiency by definition would be irrelevant. But yes, that only makes sense when we have finite things to do. While the article does state that we should change our focus from time to say, something more important, like attention, I doubt that will happen. I think money as a concept will continue to hold sway!
My utopian concept was also disrupted by something I read in this fantastic, nuanced post on GigaOm – an interview with Aubrey de Grey on lifespan expansion. To quote, as your life span increases, your propensity to take risky behavior declines, because you just have that much more to lose. I had always imagined that when lifespans tend towards infinite, our detachment would grow proportionately, because we would have all the time in the world to go after/back to various things systematically, that the limited nature of time and desire to acquire/experience it all before our time’s up is the reason why we now rush after things and experiences. But maybe it is our attachment that will grow with increasing lifespans. Imagine what that means when a lifetime is infinity! Here dies hope!
