I wrote 700 page book Immortality that is mostly covering the same topic. But I am afraid it is too long and nobody will read it and it is also in Russian. Therefore, I created GPTs agent-guide that explains content of the book.
This what agent-guide said about eternal dictatorship in my book
If you mean the common objection “if people stop dying, dictators will rule forever”, the book treats “eternal dictatorship” as a rhetorical scare story, not a real argument for keeping death.
Two key points it makes:
• It’s a false “only one solution” move. The objection assumes death is the only way to prevent bad political outcomes (dictatorship, stagnation, etc.). But even if dictatorship is a risk, there are many other levers besides killing everyone on a timer: institutions, term limits, checks and balances, decentralization, transparency tech, enforcement, even exile or incarceration. So “we need death” doesn’t follow.  
• “Eternal dictatorship” is often an exaggeration tactic. The text explicitly lists constructs like “вечная диктатура / infinite boredom / eternal hell” as cases where critics inflate X to infinity while keeping death constant, to make death look “necessary.” 
There’s also a very practical aside: even in a world without aging death, dictators don’t automatically get infinity—they still face coups, replacement, accidents, and competition; the book even remarks that “if there were no death from aging, dictators would rule only ~4 years longer on average, because they’re often overthrown.” 
If you tell me whether you meant this as a philosophical objection (“immortality → tyranny”) or a policy worry (“how do we prevent immortal rulers?”), I can point you to the most relevant chapter/section in the text and summarize that part.
But I am afraid it is too long and nobody will read it and it is also in Russian.
You could use an AI to translate it to English.
Actually, I hand translated most core ideas from Russian to English and made them as separate articles which can be found here: https://philpeople.org/profiles/alexey-turchin (in drafts section).
The core one is about multilevel strategy to immortality https://philpapers.org/rec/TURMSF-2
But such translation has required that I removed links on things which only post-Soviet people will understand, like poems and some science fiction as well as my personal stories which didn't fit in the article format.
I have read parts 1 & 2, and I agree. Death is a thief that has already taken from me, my father and mother. I want death defeated so I don't have to lose my brothers, or they and my kids, me.
I understand. I have also lost loved ones, and I sincerely hope that I will live to see the day when death becomes optional.
Nice. Will the FAQ stay focused exclusively on arguments for and against life extension, or do you intend to also cover topics like promising approaches and business models for developing them? (The first paragraph of Part 1 seems to allow both interpretations.) Purely as my personal preference, I would be more interested in the latter kind of content, but of course, sticking to a single theme makes sense too.
Glad you liked it! The site should be launched very soon, and initially it will be in demo mode with a basic FAQ that primarily includes arguments in favor and a breakdown of counterarguments. I also plan to add a brief overview of approaches and the science behind it in the future, but I know very little about business models. If you know of any good sources where I could find information on this, I would appreciate it.
Sure, and I'll definitely check out the website! I don't know where to find curated information about business models, but the Longevity Summit Dublin channel on Youtube has a few talks and panel discussions about startups and funding in the longevity space.
This is the second post in my chain of reflections on immortality, where I will present counterarguments to existing objections or misconceptions about life extension. I recommend reading the first part.
***
Q3: What if progress stops? (addition)
A: New ideas do not require new corpses. That is not a humane approach. A new paradigm usually wins not because the old one dies out, but because it offers better explanations, better tools, and a better quality of life.
Imagine a composer with 180 years of practice, a philosopher with 220 years of dialogue between eras, a director who has witnessed five technological revolutions, a scientist who personally carries to completion longitudinal studies that were begun a century earlier.
That does not sound like stagnation. It sounds like the possibility of depths of understanding and mastery that we never seen before.
O5: Does death give life meaning?
A: To me, this is one of the biggest misconceptions about immortality, life and death.
Do you really sometimes think: “Oh, soon I will start falling apart, experience chronic fatigue and pain, and then disappear forever. How inspiring!”?
Would life really lose its meaning if you knew that a thousand, or many thousands, of years of life and possibilities lay ahead of you? It seems to me the opposite is true.
The only thing death motivates me to do is fight against it. So that I can keep living, creating, enjoying life, so that all of this does not disappear. I do not believe I would stop striving toward other goals if I became immortal. Those goals are not connected to death, so why should death affect them?
If I want to play the guitar, then I want to play the guitar. If I want to write a book, then I want to write a book. A rose is a rose is a rose, that’s all. I do these things not because I will die, not because I have to “make sure I try them in time,” but because I simply want them.
“Death makes life valuable” is absurd.
If someone told us that our phone would always work well and never become obsolete, would we stop valuing it?
If the risk of dying gives life meaning, then does that mean the older or sicker a person is, the more valuable their life becomes? So if you had to choose between saving a 110-year-old man and a little boy, would you choose the 110-year-old man?
Is an infant’s life valuable only because he could easily die? I think it is valuable because he has many years of potentially happy life ahead of him. Death has nothing to do with that value.
In childhood we do not think about death, often we do not even know about it, and yet we still rejoice in life. In fact, we often rejoice in it far more intensely than in adulthood.
In reality, we value life not because it can be taken away, but because it contains love, beauty, knowledge, the possibility of joy, and creativity. Death does not create those qualities; it simply cuts them off.
If death really were what gave life meaning, then why do we consider murder or terminal illness to be bad?
Death can intensify a sense of scarcity. The feeling that you do not have much time left and need to accomplish a great deal.
But that is not meaning — it is anxiety.
Deadlines, as we know, do not protect against procrastination. If they mobilize our resources at all, it usually happens closer to the deadline itself, rather than making us productive throughout the entire time allotted for the task.
Finally, let me quote a random commenter from the internet:
O6: Will there be inequality between the rich and the poor?
A: Injustice in distribution is a political problem, not a problem with the good itself.
By the same logic, one could say antibiotics are bad because at first they were not available to everyone; the internet is bad because it was initially elitist; organ transplantation is bad because waiting lists are unfair.
Technologies usually reach everyone over time. Computers and mobile phones were once inaccessible to ordinary people too. Today, a poor person in Europe lives better than a king did three hundred years ago.
Second, aging is unlikely to be solved by one single intervention. It is far too complex a problem for there to be one universal panacea. By the time intervention number two appears, intervention number one will already have every chance of being available to the wider public.
And in order to develop a hypothetical “vaccine against aging,” it would still be necessary to conduct preclinical studies and then three phases of clinical trials according to all the proper rules — something that cannot be done in complete secrecy. That is simply impossible if manufacturers want to sell their drugs legally.
Creating a treatment for aging really is profitable: billions of people would want to use it, which is more than the customer base of any medicine that has ever existed before.
Finally, I want to quote a passage I took from another life-extension website:
O7: An eternal dictator?
A: I am not a political psychologist, of course, but I think that sometimes a short life may actually intensify greed, dynastic thinking, and the struggle for urgent accumulation. A long life may have the opposite effect.
But in any case: how many stories do you know in which a dictatorship ended because the dictator died from causes related to aging?
He simply died, everything ended, people started living happily, and democracy arrived. It seems to me that even if such stories exist, they are clearly not the dominant pattern.
Simply waiting for a dictator to die is a bad strategy for fighting authoritarian regimes.
O8: What about institutions, work, and retirement?
A: What if our familiar cycle of “school – university – work – retirement” breaks down? I would say: great!
Even now, that cycle fits reality poorly: people change professions, study in adulthood, and return to the labor market. You have probably experienced the difficulty of choosing a profession at a young age yourself, because according to that old model you were supposed to choose once and for all — and even now, people can still be shamed for trying to find themselves or for leaving a position.
And older people entering retirement do not always have it easy either. Some grew up within this linear model of development and devoted their lives to a single vocation, which they now can no longer practice. The meaning of life may simply disappear, and a person may find themselves alone and miserable in a rocking chair.
The linear model of life is a product of the industrial era. It was convenient when life was shorter, work was more standardized, and education was rare. A longer life would allow us to have repeated cycles of education and many career possibilities.
But that is only if you look at the world as a static picture. In reality, AI and robotics are not going anywhere, and it is obvious that the labor market will at the very least change radically in the coming years, if it does not disappear almost entirely.
UBI — universal basic income — may emerge. There would be no need for a separate category of “retirement”; income would always be there, and scarcity would recede into the past. This idea has both pros and cons, but since this is an FAQ on immortality, I will not go deeper into it here and will leave it for the FAQ on AI.
As this point and the previous two show, social problems are determined not by biological age as such, but by rules of access to power, property, education, career transitions, the structure of the economy, and so on.
Death today may function as a crude compensator for bad institutions, but the problem is not the length of life — it is the structure of our society.
***
That is all for today. If I made mistakes anywhere or offered weak counterarguments, I would be glad to hear your comments and suggestions on how to strengthen them. Wishing everyone an immortal future!
https://qr.ae/pCLZia
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/02/death-for-everyone-before-inequality-for-anyone/