Most of the world suffers from the health problem of never even reaching a ripe old age, and much of the rest from the problem of not being able to afford it, and increasingly so.
This is not about making the world a better place. This about allowing the elite that can afford it to live forever.
Your logic can be dismissed as nonsense with a very easy thought experiment.
Imagine you have two groups of people: Group A and Group B. You are voting on a technology that can prevent 90% of deaths in Group A. Do you vote yes or no?
If you vote no, congratulations, you just condemned a large group of people to continue dying for the sake of egalitarianism.
(The reason this thought experiment is powerful is that it strips the scenario of value-judgments such as "elite" and "poor.")
Of course. After all, it is simply a stripped down version of the parent comment that I responded to. He polarized the scenario such that it was a false dichotomy, but even then it was flawed.
Simple: indefinite lifespan for the members of tiny minority Group A will turn them into a ruling elite even if they're not one already. You can't separate the issue of lifespan from social hierarchy.
Okay, let's attach numbers to the scenario. Assume there are 1 million people in Group A and 990 million people in Group B.
By voting no, you just condemned 900,000 people in Group A to eventually die, simply because you wanted to prevent them from becoming the ruling elite.
Stated differently, you had the power to prevent 900,000 deaths (and in fact many more than that, moving forward), and you chose not to because of ideology.
Surely it is better for people to not die - to not cease to exist - even if that means they rise to the top of the social hierarchy?
>>We eradicated smallpox for everyone, without distinction between rulers and ruled. That's the difference!
You may want to familiarize yourself with the history of smallpox eradication before continuing this debate. The vaccination was available mostly in wealthy countries first.
"...coordinated efforts against smallpox went on, and the disease continued to diminish in the wealthy countries. By 1897, smallpox had largely been eliminated from the United States.[66] In Northern Europe a number of countries had eliminated smallpox by 1900, and by 1914, the incidence in most industrialized countries had decreased to comparatively low levels..."
>We eradicated smallpox for everyone, without distinction between rulers and ruled.
Notwithstanding the daughter comment that disproves this, try substituting 'smallpox' for 'cancer'. Cancer treatment is by no means available to everyone, or even the majority, yet it extends lifespans (of good people and dictators alike). Should we not have developed treatments for cancer?
There have been several times in human history where the majority have decided it would be best if the 'elite' should have their lifespans shortened. Arguably with positive results.
I can't think of any times when people have had their lifespans shortened for fear they would become the elite, and the shorteners were on the right side of history. That sounds more like The Crucible.
The point is they are not potential elite, they are already elite. The fact that they can get hold of the treatment when the majority can not shows they're already placed at the top of society.
Personally I agree with the logic that if we have the choice between 0 and 100,000 people living for ever we pick 100,000 (Even if that 100,000 include such greats as Un and Assad). Having said that If I had the choice between 100,000 living forever and 3 billion people living forever with less private jets in the world I'd pick the later. Perhaps I'm cynical but if we do indeed get this tech I'm a lot less confident about my values being satisfied in the second instance than the first.
French Revolution versus Red October, Mao's Cultural Revolution, gulags and concentration camps for every communist country. In 90% of these "elite trimmings" society is pushed back decades at least. Unruly mobs do not move the world forward.
They may not move their country forward, that doesn't mean they don't move the world forward. Say what you will about the French revolution's effect on France but it greatly influenced the spread of democracies and republics world wise. Similarly the presence of socialism(in the production owned by the people sense) hugely encouraged improvements in working conditions in countries that feared similar upheaval and loss of property.
But I wouldn't argue with you that the majority of these 'elite trimmings' set the society back. The question is after the set back does it move forward faster than it was or in a better direction (Often the answer to this would be hugely reliant on your personal values).
And lo and behold! When we fail to implement estate taxes, compounding investments ensure that the bloodlines of the well-off and long-lived become the rich elite!
Remember, this is a scenario where we're talking about 1% of the population getting life-extension while everyone else remains stuck with 80-120 years of maximum lifespan. Those indefinite folks are going to get very wealthy very quickly (as in, within one century), because they can afford to wait for long-term investments to pay off in a way nobody else can.
> When we fail to implement estate taxes, compounding investments ensure that the bloodlines of the well-off and long-lived become the rich elite!
Right, so compound interest isn't magic as long as you have taxes (and, actually, compound interest per se is rarely a problem when you have taxable interest, appreciation of capital assets that works like interest but isn't is the problem -- and it comes about specifically because of the choice to give tax-favored status to long-term capital gains.) Estate taxes are a mechanism that works to mitigate the problems caused by favoring capital income when death is a reliable periodic effect, but you could acheive much the same effect in a progressive income tax system, without sensitivity the frequency of death, by simply not giving long-term capital gains a tax-favored status, and treating income as income, especially if you add more upper-range marginal tax brackets for super-high-end incomes.
Yes, that's my point. Capitalism is bad, not increased lifespan.
However, given a capitalistic or otherwise zero-sum/proprietarian social system, I cannot support inegalitarian life extension as moral. You need a broadly egalitarian society and broadly egalitarian life-extension.
As long as we have social systems designed to maximize strife and toil, we should be working to destroy those social systems and replace them with systems for creating peace and happiness, yes.
Medicine and life extension as a public service is great. As a private luxury of the rich it's abominable.
Think about the implied statement of making radical life-extension available to the rich alone! "Whereas I will live to 160, you will only live to 80. Because I can afford these treatments, it means my life has double the moral worth of your life."
If you honestly believe that moral worth and financial net worth are two different things, you cannot support setting lifespan in accordance with money. Period.
its not about whether elite is saved or not ... its about whether you're healthy or not ....
Imagine you have two groups of people: Group A and Group B. Group A is living longer but unhealthy and Group B is living shorter but extremely healthy , which one do you pick - I rather pick Group B ... dont know whether Calico will be about living longer or living healthier - its not a easy thing to crack but I hope they succeed ...
Can you name something that was only for the elites fifty years ago that isn't available to pretty much everyone today? This is what progress always looks like.
Those things are available to the vast majority of the planet. Clean water, for example, is available to seven of every eight humans[1]. In the places those things aren't available, you'll usually find a corrupt government getting in the way. As you said, these aren't expensive problems to solve, so there's no intrinsic reason they should be limited to the elite.
26% don't have plumbing (e.g., water they can get from pipes in their house or yard) [2]
23% don't have electricity [2]
14% lack access to clean water [2]
14% lack access to health care [2]
13% suffer from chronic undernourishment [5]
11% can't read [3]
14% is about one billion people. Maybe you look at that and think, hey, 86%, doing pretty good! But if this many people can't even get access to even the most basic of technologies today, what makes you think most people, even people in the developed world, will have access to whatever mythical mortality-defying technology people are speculating about here? It's all such speculation as to what they are doing, the question is practically not worth answering. But if extreme life-lengthening technologies are truly on the table, the potential for an Elysium-like scenario should be taken seriously.
(Also, point of clarification: what do you mean by "intrinsic reason"? Can you give an example of an intrinsic reason something would be limited to the elite?)
Keep in mind when discussing internet access that effectively for the general public, the internet has only been with us for 20 years. And that was just the birth of its public mindshare - significant penetration would still take quite a few years yet in developed countries.
It also doesn't really fit in with the rest of the stats you're presenting - people can and do live quite luxurious lives without using the internet, but not so for the other items.
Yes, I wasn't trying to imply Internet access is essential, although it is such a powerful technology that lacking access to it generally sets you back a lot in the global rat race. Rather, I was trying to give a sense of how distribution of technologies progresses. It would have been helpful to have a few more data points but I couldn't think of good examples. (Especially in the higher ends -- what powerful technology do the rich have now that the rest don't? Maybe travel via airplane?)
Not to mention, with smartphones getting cheaper and cheaper, a lot of people in developing nations are getting access to the internet for the first time.
"Can you give an example of an intrinsic reason something would be limited to the elite?"
Scarcity.
Sanitation and plumbing are cheap and easy if a government isn't corrupt. We're not waiting on advances in technology to make those things easy to provide to the world, so it seems tangential to anything Google could do.
Clean water. Physical safety. Electricity. Maybe when you thought "pretty much everyone," you had the bay area in mind or something, but actually it includes a pretty large group of very poor people.
This isn't a serious objection and this line of thinking is fundamentally flawed. You could say the exact same about the internet or the automobile or the MRI. It only solves the problem of "the elite".
Unfortunately this is most of the politics that drives health care in the USA. Most people in the US don't even get close to old age because they don't have access to adequate healthcare.
Bill Gates is saving thousands of lives by trying to wipe out diseases that generally affect poor people for very little money per life saved.
While in the US millions is spent per person to provide longer lives for a few people.
Life expectancy is nearly 80 years in the US at this point, even with the explosion of cancer, heart disease and diabetes that has come with obesity in the last 30 years.
You'd have to be defining old age as 140 for your statement to make sense.
Affording proper care is definitely a problem, but the diseases of aging are the greatest causes of death globally, not infectious diseases or other health problems [1]. Taking care of diseases like malaria is unquestionably a noble and important task, but if we're talking about the world as a whole, aging is actually the greatest burden on health right now. Cardiovascular problems in particular are a serious problem worldwide [2].
I worked for a startup in the electronic medical records space. Data interchange.
We had various interactions with both the Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault teams. They were both making patient facing apps, ours was physician (and staff) facing.
We had a patient facing app, because all the hospitals thought it'd drive admissions.
But at the time no doctor would trust patient's data.
To the best of my knowledge, that hasn't changed (five years on).
The "quantified self" movement may change the perception of patient gathered data. When data collection is automatic, standardized. More importantly, when doctors are doing it for themselves, so are familiar with the tools and culture.
So, in short, Google Health and MS HealthVault were just wishful thinking. There was no "there" there.
Yeah, then I guess they will just show you an annoying pop-up every now and then, basically pushing you to merge your Calico account into you Google account.
There are very specific laws in place in the US that make this more than unlikely, probably illegal. I sincerely doubt Google wants HIPAA to start applying to far more of their business and data.
> This is not about making the world a better place. This about allowing the elite that can afford it to live forever.
You're probably right. But any advantages in medicine eventually will boost available level of tools to all. Well it worked as this so far. Elite is just able to get the best much earlier - but that doesn't mean we should stop all scientific progress and reset to the level of medicine everybody can get.
If your opinion were applied in practice universally, modern medicine would have never happened to begin with, for it was first accessible and affordable by the so called elites.
That is how all products first become available. The rich fund the R&D and scaling.
We'd all still be living in primitive civilizations if your approach ruled the day.
This is not about making the world a better place. This about allowing the elite that can afford it to live forever.