A thought experiment

[brin_bellway]

Inspired by a choice game I saw once and perhaps somewhat by torture vs dust specks.

[fairly strong cw: death, aging; FWIW, I would probably advise a version of me who had not already thought of this not to read it]







Say you were granted the power to, once per day, steal one day of lifeforce from a human with which you are in skin-to-skin contact. On each day that you use the power, you do not age, and the target you stole from ages two days.

(You *cannot* store up charges: if you *don't* use your power on a given day, that opportunity is lost.)

Would you use it? To the extent that you consider this a distinct question, *should* you use it?

Follow-up questions in a comment, to give you a chance to think it over first.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

If you'd use it but with rules for which targets are suitable (possible examples: pre-sapient infants, people who are dying of something other than old age†, people you've never stolen from before), would you resort to a non-suitable target if you didn't have access to any suitable ones that day? How high a priority would you assign, when making lifestyle choices, to ensuring steady access to suitable targets?

(As for people with injuries or illnesses from which they will recover: I feel like ceasing to age should not prevent you from healing from such things (and that people dying of their injuries should not die faster if stolen from), so to be symmetrical let's say that accelerating someone's aging does not cause them to heal faster.)

If you wouldn't use it, how tempting would you find it?

Bonus question: what do you *predict* my answer will be? (I'll give my actual answer later.)

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†In this thought experiment, lifeforce is fungible: stealing from an injured or sick human will not, in itself, damage you. (But remember that it does require physical contact, so exercise appropriate levels of caution regarding stealing from contagious targets.)

[thedarlingone]

This may say more about my current level of touch deprivation than about the thought experiment itself, but my first thought is "where are you getting access to any targets?" Presuming a handshake or high-five is sufficient, I'd have... three days this year where I could have used this power, all high-fiving various supervisors at work. If I can do it through clothing (but it has to be an intentional touch, not just an accidental bump), that adds two more people and a few more days from shoulder-pats and hugs. So it's not like I could slow my own aging or accelerate anyone else's to any appreciable amount, quite apart from my actual attitude toward the concept (which as you can guess is pretty much "meh, why would I bother?" I never expected to make it past thirty. Which is apparently a PTSD thing, but still. If I live long enough to die of old age I'll be very startled.)

[brin_bellway]

They do not need to intend to touch you: bumping into someone ""by accident"" works, as does, say, a cashier's hand brushing against yours while they're giving you change. For that matter, even *you* don't necessarily have to intend to touch them: while the power will not activate by accident, if an accidental contact lasts long enough for you to have the thought process "hey, this is an opportunity to steal some lifeforce, I'm going to do that", you are free to act on said thought.

(Also, ouch.)

[skarosdrones]

I wouldn't. I spend enough time worrying about being evil as it is without doing something like that

[sigmaleph]

Only from consenting targets (in exchange for something, or if they are not expecting to die of old age, or something). That might add up to 'nobody'; I don't have a lot of money or special access to sick/suicidal people.

I would find it tempting. I don't know how well my ethics would hold up against that kind of temptation, but the above is what I consider necessary for ethics. Given enough temptation I might go for nonconsensual acquisition from targets *I* expect to die of something other than old age, but again I have no special access to such people and don't trust I can engineer it.

[sigmaleph]

(I can probably accept next-of-kin consent in case of comatose patients who are going to be unplugged and similar. I probably *can't* accept consent from minors, even if it might be convenient if they want something like 'age faster so people assume I am an adult and have actual rights')

[brin_bellway]

Consent is great and all, but it *would* require telling people about your power, and I worry what people might do to you if word got out. Especially if someone comes into physical contact with you and *then* finds out, even if you didn't use it on them (and anyway they might not *believe* you didn't).

(I mean, if you use it a lot *eventually* people are going to notice you being weirdly youthful, but not right away. I don't know about you, but I figure if I stopped aging right now I'd have 5 - 10 years before it seemed even *slightly* off, and 15 or so before people might start to actively wonder what's going on rather than just casually assuming I had some good luck with genes. That's a lot of time in which to research rare disorders I can pretend to have, how to fake my death and start a new life, and think of yet other possibilities for how to deal with it.)

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>>targets *I* expect to die of something other than old age, but again I have no special access to such people and don't trust I can engineer it.<<

"Hospice volunteer" is definitely a thing in America, and after spending a few minutes with search engines and machine translators I found that it is also at least somewhat of a thing in Argentina. (A few minutes was not enough to turn up anything in Buenos Aires specifically: the closest I found was Pilar.)

[sigmaleph]

look I will do a lot of things for immortality but a regular commute to Pilar to spend time among religious people is not one of them

(this is a joke. the existence of such a thing as hospice volunteers is relevant to the hypothetical though if they are likely to be that visibly Catholic it might actually be a problem to me, because trans.)

I think I kind of cheated in my answer above, though. Consent is the standard protocol I'd want in a society where life-leeches are some fraction of the population. If I was in the hypothetical guaranteed to be the only one (and the only person with similar supernatural abilities), it's easy to make the calculations come out in favour of nonconsensual leeching in various cases. But I don't trust people to be good utilitarians who check their math carefully when they have incentives to make it come out in their favour, an I am certainly not an exception; I genuinely worry about edge-case creep and don't know how to prevent it without harder rules like 'consent'. So my answer is that consent is me possibly leaving utility on the table and more flexibility risks eventually harming people even in expectation and I don't know what I'd actually choose because ethics is hard.

***

I tried to do a quick estimate of how long I can expect to live if I manage to stop ageing right now; if you treat it as a negative binomial p= 1- (probability of death at my age as given by actuarial tables) the expectation is about one and a half millennia but the variance is huge (standard deviation is very similar to the mean, can't usefully approximate as a normal distribution to get an intuition). I should do this more carefully but not right now (among other things, I don't know if it matters that I'm treating probability of dying as a discrete per-year event and doing something finer-grained would change much)

[brin_bellway]

>>Consent is the standard protocol I'd want in a society where life-leeches are some fraction of the population.<<

Yeah, true. Especially since it'd be easier to pull off a consent protocol in a world where life-leeches are a Known Thing. I mean, I expect they'd still be *distrusted*, and one might still want to be closeted about it†, but also if there's a lifeforce-donation distribution system set up (and if there are enough donors to go around) people are somewhat more likely to believe you if you claim not to steal from them (after all, why bother with the ethical issues of theft when you can just take donations instead?).

(convenience. the answer is convenience. (also sadism.) (also not having to out yourself to anyone, even the donation system.) hence a lot of the distrust.)

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†I just caught a glimpse of a possible world where this was the premise of a YA series, and there is *definitely* discourse about the problematic connotations of making your oppressed minority be people who literally steal the lifeforce of others.

[brin_bellway]

Utilitarianism and avoidance of zero-sum transactions are useful heuristics, in that a world where people abide by them tends to be a better place to live than one where people screw each other over.

But helping to build the kind of world you want to live in doesn't do you a whole lot of good if you don't get to *live* in it. Useful heuristics! Worth a certain amount of sacrifice to uphold! *Not* worth dying for.

So yes, I'd use it. I'd try to reduce the harm where I could, look into hospice volunteering and the like (though I would *not* choose a career based on this: it seems like that would lead to things like "nurse" or maybe "daycare worker (at a high-turnover place)", neither of which I think I could stand), but on days where I can't make that work, non-preferred targets will have to do.

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As for how I'd feel about being on the *receiving* end of the power, it's a lot like how I'd feel about being possessed: I'd really rather they didn't, but I *get* it, you know?