5 ms·

But would also welcome and allow competition if any businessman wishes to enter a profitable market.

by sdfin 6y ago

falcolas 6y ago
One merely has to look at speculative fiction to see that the upsides in letting this technology become available to everyone are non-existant to those who help fund its creation. A monopoly around this technology would form faster than DeBeers could say "Wow" - legal or not. Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about.
- sdfin 6y ago
  Do you believe that in a communist country something different would happen?
- philipkglass 6y ago
  If a cure is invented in Country X and monopolized, every other country in the world has an incentive to replicate it by some combination of espionage and reverse engineering. If it can be invented at all, what makes you think that it can be used without other parties figuring out how to copy it? The atomic bomb was duplicated within 4 years.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    This is not about countries, it is about the rich and powerful vs the rest of us. Do you think the rich in the US would steal the secret of eternal youth from the rich of China and just give it to everyone? Or just keep it for themselves?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ben_w 6y ago
      The rich? Perhaps, perhaps not, depends how much money they could make from it. Some biohacker equivalent to Linus Torvalds or Aaron Swartz? Almost certainly, and for free.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Did these rich people stop wanting money?
    - sdfin 6y ago
      What you say seems to imply that every rich person is an evil and greedy. There are philantropists too.
      - Banana699 6y ago
        Hey, I'm also not a fan of "Rich Bad!" simplistic narratives, but billionaire "philanthropy" is about the most dubious and laughable concept on the table here. It's pennies-on-the-dollar nature is carefully designed to dupe your statistics-naive hind brain into believing there is something being done when it's really the opposite ; it's the microoptimization of the economic world, equivalent to transforming a multiplication-by-two into shifting while the code above you is allocating one million boxed objects. Just a small, pointless thing you do to make yourself feel better for no actual reason. A few millions here and there, no matter what they do or how much happiness they cause, is nothing compared to billions upon billions^(TM) continuesly pumped out of the world into one person's coffers. I don't care what kind of persons billionaires are, allowing someone to have wealth equivalent to several countries' economies is ugly and injust. No amount of gift-giving and hospital-visiting is gonna make that any less of a moral disaster. Maybe when we discover arbitary-destination wormholes can we be that inefficient and injust with resources distribution, but with just one freaking planet? good luck convincing me (and the several billions who are not billionaires) that philanthropist billionaire overthere isn't stealing somebody's (probably several million somebodies) food in their pointless unending quest to pile wealth they're not going to use 10% of in their wildest dreams.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Fiction is not a good place to find evidence, else CERN would be busy looking for dilithium crystals for their antiproton factory: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/antiproton-decelerator https://home.cern/science/accelerators/antiproton-decelerato...
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  It's an easy way to generate conflict in fiction. You can't use it as evidence of non-existent benefits any more than you can cite fiction for why you're legitimately worried about zombies. And how is a monopoly going to form? You think people are going to refuse to eat synthetic diamonds-that-make-you-stop-aging because of marketing around getting "the real thing"? And you can't buy out all the mines for something that isn't dug up. > Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about. Whatever. People are still going to get cancer.

But would also welcome and allow competition if any businessman wishes to enter a profitable market.

by sdfin 6y ago

But would also welcome and allow competition if any businessman wishes to enter a profitable market.

One merely has to look at speculative fiction to see that the upsides in letting this technology become available to everyone are non-existant to those who help fund its creation. A monopoly around this technology would form faster than DeBeers could say "Wow" - legal or not. Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about.

sdfin 6y ago
Do you believe that in a communist country something different would happen?
philipkglass 6y ago
If a cure is invented in Country X and monopolized, every other country in the world has an incentive to replicate it by some combination of espionage and reverse engineering. If it can be invented at all, what makes you think that it can be used without other parties figuring out how to copy it? The atomic bomb was duplicated within 4 years.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  This is not about countries, it is about the rich and powerful vs the rest of us. Do you think the rich in the US would steal the secret of eternal youth from the rich of China and just give it to everyone? Or just keep it for themselves?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ben_w 6y ago
    The rich? Perhaps, perhaps not, depends how much money they could make from it. Some biohacker equivalent to Linus Torvalds or Aaron Swartz? Almost certainly, and for free.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Did these rich people stop wanting money?
  - sdfin 6y ago
    What you say seems to imply that every rich person is an evil and greedy. There are philantropists too.
    - Banana699 6y ago
      Hey, I'm also not a fan of "Rich Bad!" simplistic narratives, but billionaire "philanthropy" is about the most dubious and laughable concept on the table here. It's pennies-on-the-dollar nature is carefully designed to dupe your statistics-naive hind brain into believing there is something being done when it's really the opposite ; it's the microoptimization of the economic world, equivalent to transforming a multiplication-by-two into shifting while the code above you is allocating one million boxed objects. Just a small, pointless thing you do to make yourself feel better for no actual reason. A few millions here and there, no matter what they do or how much happiness they cause, is nothing compared to billions upon billions^(TM) continuesly pumped out of the world into one person's coffers. I don't care what kind of persons billionaires are, allowing someone to have wealth equivalent to several countries' economies is ugly and injust. No amount of gift-giving and hospital-visiting is gonna make that any less of a moral disaster. Maybe when we discover arbitary-destination wormholes can we be that inefficient and injust with resources distribution, but with just one freaking planet? good luck convincing me (and the several billions who are not billionaires) that philanthropist billionaire overthere isn't stealing somebody's (probably several million somebodies) food in their pointless unending quest to pile wealth they're not going to use 10% of in their wildest dreams.
ben_w 6y ago
Fiction is not a good place to find evidence, else CERN would be busy looking for dilithium crystals for their antiproton factory: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/antiproton-decelerator https://home.cern/science/accelerators/antiproton-decelerato...
Dylan16807 6y ago
It's an easy way to generate conflict in fiction. You can't use it as evidence of non-existent benefits any more than you can cite fiction for why you're legitimately worried about zombies. And how is a monopoly going to form? You think people are going to refuse to eat synthetic diamonds-that-make-you-stop-aging because of marketing around getting "the real thing"? And you can't buy out all the mines for something that isn't dug up. > Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about. Whatever. People are still going to get cancer.