Someone should write a short story (Doctorow, perhaps?) of a supercentenarian baby-boomer who is woken from a coma to suddenly find himself unwillingly young again, and explore the moral ramifications.
Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
201–210 of 400 posts
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your snark is unnecessary and very misplaced. This will result in a significant thought paradigm shift in all things health-related, and it's a great thing that a company with as many resources and as high of a profile as Google is looking into this. Google is a company that is making self-driving cars, providing incredibly fast internet to consumers, providing Internet to suffering areas with a new idea (the Loon),…
He's making fun of the buzzwords, not the message itself. Frankly, if you think "catalyzing paradigms" is a good way to say something, I'd recommend taking an English literature class.
Err... catalyzing a paradigm change makes perfect sense to me. I think Thomas Kuhn might have used that in his book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
A lit class isn't going to make any comment on a phrase like that, or management speak in general. Management speak is just a jargon.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dying isn't horrible at all. It's a part of the lifecycle.
My aunt - who died slowly and painfully, wasting away from the cervical cancer that was eating away at her body - might disagree with you were she still here.
I think this refers to death as distinct from the process of dying.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
A great problem is the current mindset. Many, many people think of life extension as undesirable . It's mind-boggling at first sight, but then you understand it for what it is: the Stockholm Syndrome, with Death as the hostage-taker, and all the life-extension-deniers as the hostages. We need to get out of that hole first. Google is doing the right thing.
Thinking that death is a problem or 'a bad thing that happens' is incredibly short-sighted. Improving the well-being of humanity in general is a great goal; life extension can be a different topic entirely.
While I'd love to live a thousand years (as long as it's in decent health), the big danger to society is obviously that it'll be the very rich that will live that long, and they'll hold on to their power that much longer. It creates an even bigger division between rich and poor.
Imagine what the world would look like if the medieval elite were still alive today. It's good that the people in power die every once in a while.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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, b…
If no one dies, what do we do with all those replacement people we keep making at the rate of about 300K per day?
We can stack them like cordwood for a while, but that gets messy, inconvenient and after a while, a bit smelly.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps I missed something... where is Aubrey de Grey linked with Calico? I didn't see any mention of him in Larry's post, the press release, or the time article. Where is this coming from?
Aubrey's reaction piece is listed on the front page of Time's website, and can be seen here: http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/18/finally-the-war-on-aging-ha...
That whole article is incredibly creepy -- 'War on Aging' -- do we really need more 'War on X' rhetoric? Regarding the fact that we know that we eventually die, he states
> So soul-destroying has this knowledge been, for almost everyone, that we have constructed our entire society and world view around ways to put it out of our minds'.
Absolutely ridiculous. Besides the fact that I think a 'soul' is a poorly-defined construct and thus hard to crush, I really don't see a problem with death; to me it's just as necessary as birth. Sure, it's sad when someone dies, and death can be a traumatic experience, but it's also simply part of being a biological organism. I suppose I find some agreement with de Grey in that large portions of societies fear death and try not to think about it. However, perpetual avoidance through the declaration of war on Death seems practically infantile in view.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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 competi…
A world in which anti-aging technology exists is strictly superior to a world in which anti-aging technology does not exist, regardless of who has access to it.
Of course, universal access is far better, and we should keep that in mind, but if it takes profit-motivated corporations to bring the technology into existence in the first place, then so be it.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#208So basically, Google are now openly admitting that they're trying to take over the world.
Not so much "taking over" as "being given in exchange for eternal life". They know how to make any deal attractive.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
In his example, he did not suggest that there were any downsides to voting yes. What was your basis for voting no?
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?
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#210There are a lot of ethical arguments happening in this thread, and I'm concerned that most of them are missing the point. They tend to center on the idea that these technologies will help the wealthy, while leaving most of the world to suffer.
I'd love to see Google work on initiatives to give the world's poor access to clean water and basic healthcare. Those are awesome causes -- maybe the world's most awesome. But if we categorize pressing third-world health issues as the World's Most Awesome Cause, well, aren't age-related diseases the World's Second Most Awesome Cause?
We should for sure allocate more resources to the World's Most Awesome Cause. But why are people attacking funding for the World's Second Most Awesome Cause? Convince people not to buy top-tier smartphones, or expensive cars, or big houses, and donate to charity instead. But don't try to convince people to die of heart disease. Even if this new Google initiative isn't the absolutely most optimal way to spend money to serve humanity, it's pretty high up on the list.
Please remember that about two-thirds of all deaths world-wide are caused by aging [1]. It isn't just the elite who are getting heart attacks, and long-term, I'd be shocked if it were only the elite who were receiving effective treatments to prevent them.
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
Edit: formatting.