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Aging is quite a sad prospect overall, but as long as everyone is subject to the same process it is a great equalizer of sorts. An unforeseen consequence that i
by strogonoff 4y ago
Aging is quite a sad prospect overall, but as long as everyone is subject to the same process it is a great equalizer of sorts. An unforeseen consequence that is often brought up regarding the philosophy of unlimited or greatly extended human age is that it would exacerbate all inequalities in a society. As it’s well-known, time is the biggest pyramid scheme of them all.
On the day of Tiananmen massacre, it occurred to me that it would have even stronger repercussions at country scale.
Taking democratic countries’ shift to the policy of non-involvement and combining it with hypothetical advancements that continuously extend Supreme Leaders’ ages essentially sentences generations of dictatorships’ subjects to hardship, exploitation and gaslit life under a kleptocracy.
Add to that increased existential threat to democracy, since such a dictator never would have to deal with inefficiencies of internal power and knowledge transfer or spending resources on facilitating an honest voting process, infinitely building connections and spinning its webs around the remaining parts of the free world.
One wicked old man interminably learning new ways to turn the world into a zero-sum game and win at it, as generations of servants come and go around him they are even easier to control.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tayne 4y agoThat’s like saying that one person will dominate the tv show survivor. In reality new cliques and alliances form all the time, power shifts and swirls as alliances coalesce and disperse. We will still have wars and disasters and things that no one person can control. Plus, people will still die just not necessarily from the disease of aging. I often notice that people resist something they are afraid of by thinking it will cause a disaster to change how things are. I think you are subconsciously afraid that it’s too good to be true. In reality it will be like penicillin or vaccines — massive improvement and not much else.
- strogonoff 4y agoYou may be thinking that this tech will automatically trickle down. There is infinite incentive to withhold it, whether by controlling access to it outright in a dictatorship or by letting it naturally be exorbitantly expensive in a market economy. Note that in thought experiments I mentioned it is considered to exacerbate inequalities even if it is distributed equally to all. A thought experiment that reflects reality a bit better would be one where the rich not only get more rich thanks to money dynamics (plus a vicious circle of theft and violence in case of dictators, who are the bigger concern) but also never die.
- tayne 4y ago
- strogonoff 4y ago> There are precisely zero things that were deliberately made to be more expensive than their intrinsic cost by a small group of “rich people and dictators” Setting aside the fact that 0) US healthcare is pretty much all “things being made more expensive than their intrinsic cost”, believing 1) the market in a democracy is not affected by information asymmetry and 2) a dictator-kleptocrat elsewhere even needs to manipulate prices hints at immense naivety on your part. > shut up If it’s my mention of the June 4th incident that triggered such reaction, I hope the Party pays you well enough to justify the stress that reading Western media must be to you. > you have no right to pose as some kind of intellectual And you have clearly run out of substance to present.
- tayne 4y ago
- hedora 4y agoThe Science Fiction work "Altered Carbon" takes this to its logical conclusions. Highly recommended (warning: despite the weird sex stuff)
- strogonoff 4y agoIs it the series or the book that you are recommending?
- mentos 4y agoYea I think of the Elves in Lord of the Rings. If a person has lived 200 years then they have lived long enough to see and understand the true costs of war.