I’m really really skeptical of the claim that SENS can give every person on earth 30 additional years of healthy life for a billion dollars. Billions are spent annually on cancer research, and we still haven’t cured cancer.
There are two types of benefits of SENS’s research. First is the more mundane disease reduction stuff, which is a valuable way to promote quality of life, as GiveWell points out. However, there’s no need to focus on SENS specifically in finding cures for diseases.
Second is the life-extension stuff. Another way of understanding life-extension stuff is that it increases the number of people on earth at a given time, all else being equal. But the more obvious way to increase the number of people on earth is to promote births. Of course, there are transition costs to death: people really don’t like dying. On the other hand, there may be diminishing returns to life, and people might prefer to improve their chances of being born, whatever that means. I am floating in the ether and am offered a tradeoff: I can increase my probability of existing, but this will decrease the length of my existence if I receive an existence. I’m not sure what probability-length tradeoff I’d choose as optimal.
Wouldn’t it change the nature of life? What about the distribution of resources / elites—if elites could live longer than ordinary people, they would have a ridiculous advantage and may ensure their survival as a group above the needs of those without access to this therapy? Isn’t there something good about mortality—helps you appreciate the life you have etc.? Doesn’t aging serve a purpose in terms of a wisdom or responsibility marker / confidence reducer? Don’t all these questions assume that we can organise society rationally and either ensure that only people worthy of anti-aging get anti-aging, rather than what happens with most crucial technologies involving capital to produce: they are available disproportionately to those with the most resource in society and change the underlying power structure?
This sounds like the movie In Time: “In a future where time is literally money, and aging stops at 25, the only way to stay alive is to earn, steal, or inherit more time. Will Salas lives life a minute at a time, until a windfall of time gives him access to the world of the wealthy, where he teams up with a beautiful young heiress to destroy the corrupt system.”
Does that article deserve the title you gave it? It only would if the movie were presenting itself as a credible economic scenario, but its more like Swiftian satire.
I’m really really skeptical of the claim that SENS can give every person on earth 30 additional years of healthy life for a billion dollars. Billions are spent annually on cancer research, and we still haven’t cured cancer.
There are two types of benefits of SENS’s research. First is the more mundane disease reduction stuff, which is a valuable way to promote quality of life, as GiveWell points out. However, there’s no need to focus on SENS specifically in finding cures for diseases.
Second is the life-extension stuff. Another way of understanding life-extension stuff is that it increases the number of people on earth at a given time, all else being equal. But the more obvious way to increase the number of people on earth is to promote births. Of course, there are transition costs to death: people really don’t like dying. On the other hand, there may be diminishing returns to life, and people might prefer to improve their chances of being born, whatever that means. I am floating in the ether and am offered a tradeoff: I can increase my probability of existing, but this will decrease the length of my existence if I receive an existence. I’m not sure what probability-length tradeoff I’d choose as optimal.
Wouldn’t it change the nature of life? What about the distribution of resources / elites—if elites could live longer than ordinary people, they would have a ridiculous advantage and may ensure their survival as a group above the needs of those without access to this therapy? Isn’t there something good about mortality—helps you appreciate the life you have etc.? Doesn’t aging serve a purpose in terms of a wisdom or responsibility marker / confidence reducer? Don’t all these questions assume that we can organise society rationally and either ensure that only people worthy of anti-aging get anti-aging, rather than what happens with most crucial technologies involving capital to produce: they are available disproportionately to those with the most resource in society and change the underlying power structure?
This sounds like the movie In Time: “In a future where time is literally money, and aging stops at 25, the only way to stay alive is to earn, steal, or inherit more time. Will Salas lives life a minute at a time, until a windfall of time gives him access to the world of the wealthy, where he teams up with a beautiful young heiress to destroy the corrupt system.”
The awful economics of ‘In Time’
Does that article deserve the title you gave it? It only would if the movie were presenting itself as a credible economic scenario, but its more like Swiftian satire.