Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.
Virtually every single advancement in science, engineering, and technology disproportionately benefits the wealthy, because they already own everything. That's a great reason to fight against the massive imbalance of wealth distribution, but a terrible reason to halt all human progress.
1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
3. Unlike other technological advantages, life extension is a _multiplier_ for inequality. The Undead pay no estate tax. The Undead never change their minds. The Undead never have to give up their bought-and-paid-for seats in Congress.
Wouldn't a treatment for Alzheimer's be more accessible to the wealthy than the poor, making it unethical by your definition? Isn't it good that evil rich people often lose their cognitive capabilities thus limiting the harm they can do?
Alzheimer's treatment levels the playing field by restoring to sufferers something of which they have been bereaved: normal mental function. Even if only a subset of the population has access to it, all they're gaining is normalcy. Moreover, it can plausibly be comped by health insurance, especially in countries with universal healthcare. In a healthy economy, the political class has an incentive to keep workers healthy and productive longer, and to reward them for their service with a comfortable and dignified retirement, by making such medicines available to them.
Conversely, pure life extension creates an exceptional state of existence—no one except those using them has a chance of living a thousand years. The wealthy have a clear-cut motivation not to let these drugs become readily accessible, as it is a competitive advantage that feeds directly into their pecuniary pursuits; they no longer need to worry about:
1. Dynastic management (heirs are unreliable—be your own);
2. Estate taxes (the government wants some of your money—hiding it adequately can be tiresome);
3. Religious threats of punishment after death (if such things matter to them—probably not); or
4. "You can't take it with you," which is perhaps the main reason why billionaire philanthropists exist.
As such, we aren't going to see lobbying efforts to democratize life extension cures—ever. There are real incentives for the rich and powerful to lobby against such a possibility.
Finally, we already know that many proponents of life extension research in the VC space have neo-reactionary sympathies or aspirations; our favorite whipping boy Peter Thiel has contributed directly to the "Dark Enlightenment" movement. These are people who are not hiding their desires to become feudal lords and absolute despots, and not taking them at their word in such matters is the sort of 5D mental gymnastics that belongs on 4chan.
It is much less of a problem if the playing field is level, which is an eventual outcome with conventional quality-of-life efforts like Alzheimer's research. While it is not out of the realm of science fiction possibility that all humanity could someday be blessed with the gift of immortality—as well as fix the planet and somehow keep our population at a replacement level—the nutjobs currently militating for it are about as trustworthy as a Ferengi handshake.
Oh no, not a CGP Grey video. And a parable, at that!
It's a shame the humans in the story still die of natural causes, otherwise it might actually be relevant to the discourse around the ethics of life extension. The dragon is a metaphor for normal preventative diseases and does not scale well to the demographic crises caused by functional immortality.
> It is a very specific, high-effort kind of ... whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
Yep. Welcome to like 99% of cutting-edge medicine, stretching back into prehistory.
> But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
There aren't many ailments that affect rich folks but don't affect any poor folks. I'd rather the rest of mankind wait twenty years for the treatments than to never have had them at all.
The ailments peculiar to the rich (gout notwithstanding) are largely ameliorated by functional immortality, but these ameliorations are greatly diminished by universal immortality. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment and then rethink again whether you want to give these people unlimited time to cosplay as Sauron.
"It's important that you must die, so that the rich can also die" -- you. Can you really not come up with better solutions to psychopaths having too much power than everyone must die?
One intuition pump that always works well in these discussions is to imagine that death is already solved, and all your worst nightmares are true. So we live in a world where a small number of humans own and control everything forever. What is your proposed solution? Kill everyone who is old? Really? That's the best you got? Literally just force everyone to die?
We already live in a world where most people's lives are made shit by the whims of a few rich psychopaths, it's just that right now the specific set of rich psychopaths randomly changes every so often. So? Why is that better? Why does it matter to me that the boots on my neck belong to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos instead of John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt?
That sounds similar the prevailing criticism of biotech companies: their primary concern is to develop treatments for the rich or, at a very minimum, common (and often trivial) conditions in first world nations. In other words, for people who can afford to pay. The only real difference in the latter case is that wealthy nations are pulling the strings.
Not to mention everyone would be better off if the money invested in these VCs was invested in clean energy, public transportation and whatnot. Many of us just have to live with the knowledge that we are handicapping our life expectancies just by living in a heavily polluted major city. Living in São Paulo I'm reminded by national news every year how many cigarettes I am "smoking" daily just by existing in this place
Aside from being an unpopular opinion, it's also a rather stupid one. I can think of no better way to say it. Virtually every technology currently used by the majority of human beings in the world to make their lives better in some way started as a privilege of the wealthy, but the tendency of a timespan between it going from that to something widely and affordably affordable has historically not only held ground but shortened.
To deny the possibility of breakthrough medical therapies that possibly save millions of families from the tragedy of prematurely losing loved ones just out of some half baked spite against the rich is grossly short-sighted at best. If anything is unethical, it's such a worldview itself.
Immortality is not just another technological advancement. It entrenches power permanently and creates a world of slaves who will never escape the grip of their masters. Democracy would permanently die and the rule of law would be whatever the overlords decide. Imagine an immortal Caligula. Do you want Elmo to be your permanent master, for example?
Dude, let's not jump the gun here. If a fear of an entrenched immortal oligarchy is your justification for the idea of forbidding billionaires from funding medical innovations that extend life and health-span, you're being a huge bit too optimistic, to the point of absurdity.
We'll be struggling, failing and incrementally advancing with medical advancements that merely stave off the vast hellscape of age-related and degenerative diseases for a moderately longer healthy life long, long before we discover a way to enable a reality of immortal billionaires.
That aside, even if we did, I have my massive doubts about the inevitability of all you predict. The vast range of technologies already available to billionaires today would make a medieval king or Roman emperor salivate at having them with dreams of total control, yet if anything, the technologies they do have (and which states have), have only increased the complexity and Swiss cheese nature of the modern world in the direction of also expanding basic freedoms and instabilities of power of all kinds for more people than ever, often directly at the cost of former power monopolies.
What's more, right now, both massively wealthy states and huge corporations administer much of what happens in the world, and both could arguably claim to have much more power, resources and even in a certain way near immortality than any hypothetical immortal billioniare oligarch as per your prediction, yet hysterics aside, I don't see either totally killing off democracy at all.
People still protect, governments still change and fall, big companies still go bankrupt or lose market share, and no one power center is nearly as in charge as some paint it to be. If it were, you wouldn't be predicting, you'd be speaking in the present tense perhaps.
Either way, the groundwork of you fear already exists in a fashion, and it's not creating quite the total boogeyman you're trying to depict.
Don't let sci fi guide your perception too much, reality is so much more complex and counterbalanced all over the place.
This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument.
I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time.
The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks...
It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal.
The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict.
There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?!
The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin:
> To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair
> The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress
> The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people
> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish
In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good.
...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.)
If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?
It might not be the mainstream on HN, but most popular polls I've seen show similar trends of a lesser proportion of people wanting to live longer, citing the same societal collapse concerns. In any case, whether something is espoused by the majority or the minority doesn't really add much weight.
I don't think there is an "anti-aging agenda". Not everything needs to be seen through the lens of an ideological movement. But I do think that there is an unhealthy persistent cynicism underneath the current popular culture. This cynicism makes people not want to be optimistic/idealistic in fear of being wrong or looking naive. I am not suggesting we should all tint our lenses rose colored, but I do think allowing people to expand their optimistic ceiling is warranted; especially when it is so easy to imagine a dystopic future currently.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed your sardonic reply.
The distance between a scientific revolution being accessible to the ultra-wealthy and the average consumer is measured in years, and shrinking rapidly.
I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
You’re not wrong, but still most people would want to live healthily longer regardless, and it’s kind of unavoidable that the progress that can be made will be made.
Also: The Future is not really looking very bright for anyone besides the already-wealthy. I don't know why you'd want to live in the future. If you're an average middle-class American, the peak best time to live ever (stretching out into the past and predicting into the future) is probably the 1990s or so. My standard of living is slightly worse than my (Boomer) parents', and my kid's standard of living is very likely going to be worse than my own, and I would bet that her future kid's standard of living will be further worse.
