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I for one welcome my immortal transhumanist cyborg overlords. But seriously, the fact that the first thing they do is start a corporation to control the scienc

• netrus 13y ago
  I for one fear a future where anyone can become immortal. This would result in unimaginable struggles for our ecosystem. I always feel modern medicine should focus on raising life quality for as long as we are alive, rather than extending life itself. But of course this view is painted by the large number of old people living in inhuman conditions we currently have.
  • moistgorilla 13y ago
    Being immortal and having a high quality of life for as long as we are alive are not mutually exclusive. In fact, don't we have longer lives and better quality of life than our ancestors already? This would just be taking it one step further. Also, having a population that never dies has many more benefits than consequences. The amount of knowledge and experience that will not be wasted because of death is extremely valuable. Also, who says people will be giving birth to children as often as they are currently doing when they don't fear dying. Already in most developed nations the rate of population growth is plateauing. Also, don't forget we have an entire universe at our fingertips. I'm sure when we have 200 year old aerospace engineers and physicists we will be able to get to colonize other planets much faster.
    • netcan 13y ago
      Regarding quality of our ancestors: Yes, but there are downsides too. We probably have longer periods of lower quality of life. We improved both quality and length. But we improved length more. I hope for more youth, not just more life.
      • vectorjohn 13y ago
        People are and always will be free to die whenever they want. If you live a longer youth and then face a longer low quality life, either you want that longer low quality life more than you let on, or you cut it short.
        • benched 13y ago
          Without access to some humane means of euthanasia, I think your statement is inaccurate.
  • ianstallings 13y ago
    I think that as people live longer they will have less children as a result, simply because the inner need to procreate and keep humanity alive will die down. We see this in the differences between the first world and third world countries where mortality rates have a significant delta. For instance, In Africa they tend to have more children on average than they do in Europe.
  • UnFleshedOne 13y ago
    Living longer might naturally force people to take a more long-term outlook on the environment. Also slowing down growth is much more palatable on a basic level if you have that much more time to enjoy what you have and get what you don't have yet.
• jerf 13y ago
  Like with anything else, the question isn't whether the rich will be able to afford it, the question is how much progress can we make in making it cheap, how quickly, to get it to how many people? It is a moral imperative to make sure that short-sighted class warfare does not cut off the nose to spite the face by destroying this work under the guise of egalitarianism, because we can not turn on a dime and immediately grant it to everyone on day one. Yes, the rich will get it first. We need to ensure that market mechanisms remain functional and that they end up subsidizing the research the rest of us need. If we build gates and walls, they'll just end up captured in a heartbeat. Don't let them be built. (Once the market has chewed on it and made it as cheap as possible, consider subsidizing it or something, but for the love of Life itself, don't break the market and destroy the research before it even happens. Seemingly suboptimal situations may need to be relatively briefly tolerated to make sure this happens at all.)
  • ginko 13y ago
    But what about generation warfare? Imagine having to live in a world where all the positions of power are permanently occupied by people from the generation of your great-grandparents.
    • jerf 13y ago
      You mean, that there might be a war between the 150 year olds and the 250 year olds? Sign me up! I don't even care for which side! The base state of the world that we live in is that everybody dies. Your hypotheticals about how horrible it might be to live in a world where people might not die have to be pretty horrible to compete with what is already true. (Mind you, this is not an unleapable bar, in my opinion, but it's much higher than you just leapt.)
      • briancaw2 13y ago
        Dying isn't horrible at all. It's a part of the lifecycle.
        • 13y ago
• jonknee 13y ago
  > But seriously, the fact that the first thing they do is start a corporation to control the science is not exactly comforting to me. How else would they do it?
  • ianstallings 13y ago
    Well they could do a non-profit, a trust, setup labs, or just donate to existing research labs. In a business the goal of profit is not just a thing that leaders should be doing, but a legal responsibility to share holders that can't be ignored.
  • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    A nonprofit, a national lab, a university...
• netcan 13y ago
  The technology tidal wave we've been riding is going to take us to strange and probably unexpected places if we stay on long enough. What it is going to do to distribution of wealth, is anyone's guess. On the labour/production side a technology seems to be creating wider income gaps. For the winners it is a lever with which to create more wealth. For others, they are competing with machines and poor countries (enabled by technology to work with rich ones) for work. On the product consumption side, the gap is pretty small. The cheap netbook that almost anyone in Europe or the US can afford is not much different (in price or performance) from the one used by a billionaire. No matter how rich you are, you can't get a better smartphone than the models you can see in any bus. Even the low end (50-$100) smartphones are getting decent. I expect smartphones to be as ubiquitous as dumb ones soon, that means the gap between rich British & bangladeshi (measured in smartphone wealth) is plummeting. Who knows what future waves of technology will look like, especially medical technology. I think the appropriate response is keep an open mind and see where stuff takes us. Don't bind your thinking to past paradigms. Go read the Communist Manifesto. Realize how it is a product of its time, the industrial revolution. It takes a lot of contortion to try understanding the world by that paradigm. For Adam Smith, technological efficiency was about making pins.
• apr 13y ago
  Are you suggesting that I'd be better if the technology is not available to anyone lest some people live longer than others? I am pretty sure that in the beginning the new technologies will be accessible only to the people who can spare some cash, but I am also pretty sure that the cost will go down, as it has for any other technology.
  • ianstallings 13y ago
    No I'm suggesting that society as a whole should be part of the conversation about not only seeking immortality but also how much one can benefit from such wonderful breakthroughs. I would love to see people I love live forever. But there are ethical issues around the industry that we all need to discuss.
    • apr 13y ago
      What does making the society part of the conversation mean exactly? If a private company develops a technology for immortality and then chooses to charge $1million/year for it thus excluding 99.999% people what does the society has to say about that? Should it force the company to lower the price? Should it bar the technology?
• lukev 13y ago
  I agree, but existence is so much more important than availability at this point in history. Accelerate existence by whatever means necessary; availability will follow.
  • eropple 13y ago
    > I agree, but existence is so much more important than availability at this point in history. You assume that those in power will want to make more like them and I think that is mostly unlikely. Nothing attracts the powerful like an insurmountable advantage. Being able to outwait your potential competition at that scale is powerful and I have a hard time seeing powerful people wanting to make their potential competitors as powerful.
    • vectorjohn 13y ago
      These arguments make no sense. Poor / lower class people become wealthy all the time, disruption happens. The wealthy / immortal class will grow, maybe slowly maybe quickly. But it will grow. That means the poor / short lived class will shrink by necessity (or the red herring overpopulation argument). Over time, more and more of the population will become well off and/or immortal, and the great thing is they won't die. If you think we'll get to a point where nobody can disrupt the anti-aging industry ever, and nobody will be able to make it cheaper, well, you're pretty pessimistic. Because the one constant we seem to see is (immortal) corporations being disrupted by little startups. Corporations right now live forever and yet they don't stay in power forever. The same will go with this.
      • eropple 13y ago
        > Poor / lower class people become wealthy all the time, disruption happens. I don't see why you'd say this. Economic mobility in the developed world is steadily shrinking. I don't see that shrink getting better if the rich can play on the time scale of centuries. Or if the corporations they own can do so. As has been noted numerous times, poverty means you have to think "tomorrow" rather than "a month from now" or "a year from now". When you can think "eight decades from now" or even "two centuries from now", you are in an incredibly powerful position and I am extremely skeptical that people with that advantage will give it up for the rest of us.
• loceng 13y ago
  Indeed, what's the cost going to be for once someone finds a "cure" for cancer? Society should offer a bounty for such a thing, and then scientists / researchers are incentivized more towards the problem, and will be rewarded - as well as their research supporters - if successful.
  • ianstallings 13y ago
    Yes I agree, and the patrons of those ventures, perhaps all of society, could reap rewards in ways that go beyond a stock portfolio. It's funny that in the press release they mention "moonshot", because that's what we need. All of society puts in and all of society benefits. With measures and controls it could work, just like the moonshot did.
    • loceng 13y ago
      Yup. I imagine you'd be welcome and invited to stay for free, housing included, to many places around the world - if not everywhere. I do think in the future most everyone will have the ability, the benefit to travel anywhere in the world - as an incentive and reward for good behaviour; If you do criminal activity/counter-productive behaviours towards society or individuals, you lose that, etc..
• Wingman4l7 13y ago
  > I fear a future where "all men are created equal", but only some can afford to become immortal and others cannot. That future is now. We already have first-world countries with medical technology that allows its citizens to live an average lifespan much longer than those in countries where such tech is unavailable. Not to mention the everyday technologies that indirectly extend "effective" lifespan -- every hour not spent gathering cooking fuel, preparing food, washing clothes, etc. is an hour you can spend "living". Even in said first-world countries, there is a dichotomy: those who are rich & influential enough to take advantage of expensive & cutting-edge medical treatment, and those who are not. Actual life extension therapies are just the above, writ large. I don't see any difference between this tech and any other "early adopter" tech, which is always expensive and limited in availability. We can only hope that such technology will become cheaper & more widespread and trickle down to the rest of us in time for us to make use of it.