Anti-aging divide? I'm all for anti-aging, I was obsessed by it since my teens and got a degree in molecular biology thinking I want to dedicate my life to it, I even own dontage.com.
However, I'm concerned about implications of potentially high-price anti-aging treatments. Till now, death has been the great equalizer. Life is inherently unfair. If you are born in poverty there is high chances you'll stay there, but at least you always count on everyone dying at the end.
With high-price anti-aging treatments people who have wealth can live longer (maybe one day indefinitely) and accumulate more wealth and those without money will just dye twice or three times as fast with no way out of the cycle. You can argue historically we always had this type of divides, for example in early stages of invention of antibiotics or vaccines or ability to buy them in black market in areas where they were scarce. However, we're moving from preventing premature deaths to extending life beyond its natural extension and that brings a whole new set of issues.
Will there be enough retirement funds? If we do democratize anti-aging treatments, lets say increasing the average life span to 100 or 120. Will there be enough funding? As is, the social security is feeling the pressures of increased average life-span. So if we are able to make a 60 year olds be 20 (in some aspects of aging) or 90 year old to 30 and as the article alluded to, decrease the risk of cancers (perhaps). Then, who will pay to cover the retirement funding gap?
We're heading toward a world were you can choose to live longer and have the wealth to support your life for extended time, and those who will only live 1/2 or 1/3 as much just because they were born in a different household.
Among all the technological breakthroughs, anti-aging will probably have the biggest social impact and as a society we're not even thinking about it or are even preparing for it yet. But then again, if you have the money, why should you care.
There are many downsides to curing aging, but none of them are as bad as the current situation: 100,000 deaths every day. It's worse than you can imagine; those 100,000 people experienced decades of mental and physical decline before they died.
I think you are confused about the economics of the situation. Who will pay for retirement benefits? Aging is why we retire. If we never got old, we could work as long as we wanted.
Even if anti-aging treatments remain expensive for decades after they're invented, it will still be economically worthwhile to treat everyone. This is because age-related diseases are more expensive. Alzheimer's. Cancer. Heart disease. Dementia. COPD. These diseases slowly kill their victims, causing immense suffering. Treatments for most of them are ineffectual and cost millions for each patient. When it comes to cost, rejuvenation therapies have a low bar to get over.
My grandmother died this month. She had a form of rheumatoid arthritis that slowly turned her lungs into scar tissue. My only consolation is that her mind didn't go before she died. If only rich people could avoid her fate, I wouldn't mind a bit. The fewer people who suffer as she did, the better.
>I think you are confused about the economics of the situation. Who will pay for retirement benefits? Aging is why we retire. If we never got old, we could work as long as we wanted.
Completely backwards. "We're old and can't work anymore" is the excuse used to publicly justify finally being allowed not to work anymore in a Calvinist-capitalist culture. What we actually want is to minimize the portion of our lifespan spent working for mere wages.
Mind, one reason I've come to support anti-aging and automation advancements is davka that they force our culture to actually confront these issues, that they "heighten the contradictions" as we Marxists say, rather than pretending everything's fine and letting the system get away with its sins.
Were scientists from the past worried about this when they worked to improve medicines and public health that has increased the global average lifespan from 31 years to 70 years in the past century?
No one knows the answers to your questions, but I think there will be solutions to those problems. Birth rates are averaging out and hopefully starting to go down. Automation of work is going up. The reach of education has increased.
Also even if everyone was immune to death by aging, some actuaries showed that humans will still be limited to 400 years due to accidental death.
I think that people in different parts of the world today have life spans that are 1/2 to 1/3rd of other countries. Maybe if we're not losing all our most experienced and knowledgeable people to senility, old age, and death, we may come up with solutions more quickly.
Everyone says this when the subject comes up and it's ridiculous. Many countries have government subsidized healthcare. Additionally patents only last for 20 years or so. And there is no reason to think it would inherently cost a lot. Do only rich people have iphones?
And anyways, who cares? Better that some people live longer than none do.
You're assumption that people want to retire is wrong. People are retiring because the aren't capable of full work hours. With right medicine people would work more, maybe in the future there won't be such thing as "retirement funds".
I'm talking about right now. Most people are retired by 65. Now we suddenly extend their lives to 100. You think anyone would hire them again after being out of work force for 10-15 years?
You're missing the point. Sure suffer in the minutiae of all the implications / implementation. End of story its a single question: Do we want to have this "problem" ? Yes.
To phrase differently: Lets NOT have planes because they might burst into flames once in a while. Do you see the absurdity ?
Want to know a good way to pull yourself out of squalor? Fix aging.
However, I'm concerned about implications of potentially high-price anti-aging treatments. Till now, death has been the great equalizer. Life is inherently unfair. If you are born in poverty there is high chances you'll stay there, but at least you always count on everyone dying at the end.
With high-price anti-aging treatments people who have wealth can live longer (maybe one day indefinitely) and accumulate more wealth and those without money will just dye twice or three times as fast with no way out of the cycle. You can argue historically we always had this type of divides, for example in early stages of invention of antibiotics or vaccines or ability to buy them in black market in areas where they were scarce. However, we're moving from preventing premature deaths to extending life beyond its natural extension and that brings a whole new set of issues.
Will there be enough retirement funds? If we do democratize anti-aging treatments, lets say increasing the average life span to 100 or 120. Will there be enough funding? As is, the social security is feeling the pressures of increased average life-span. So if we are able to make a 60 year olds be 20 (in some aspects of aging) or 90 year old to 30 and as the article alluded to, decrease the risk of cancers (perhaps). Then, who will pay to cover the retirement funding gap?
We're heading toward a world were you can choose to live longer and have the wealth to support your life for extended time, and those who will only live 1/2 or 1/3 as much just because they were born in a different household.
Among all the technological breakthroughs, anti-aging will probably have the biggest social impact and as a society we're not even thinking about it or are even preparing for it yet. But then again, if you have the money, why should you care.