151–160 of 400 posts
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.
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.
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catalyze a shift in the world's thought paradigm Absolutely. The goal should be to enact a vector of a new paradigm, as proactive team players synergize an out-of-the-box strategy of functionality and infotainment, re-engineering the learning curve framework of your dotted-line relationship.
...responsively.
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 science is not exactly comforting to me. Genentech is known for selling Avastin, their drug that fights cancer for $55k after they received harsh criticism for the proposed cost of $100k+/year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevacizumab#Costs I fear a future where "all…
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.
This is not demonstrated at all. Increasing existence and production of food hasn't tackled food insecurity and hunger, for example. That something exists, even if cheaply, does not mean it will become accessible.
This makes me wonder just how much Google works with the US government. I'm not saying the result of whatever Calico wants or will do (because it's all pretty vague right now) is a negative.
But Calico seems to come at a time when Obama is pushing for universal health care, which will be a huge industry. Last I heard, it was estimated at $1.1 trillion.
It just feels like the US has a tendency to take something good (universal health care), and make it into something bad ("We will use this to profile/monitor every US citizen").
Instead, all the future-advancing progress seems to be made by independently rich individuals; and also not by the "aristocratic-rich" families, but by noveau riche upstarts such as Brin, Musk and others. What does it say about our current, traditional institutions if they seem unable to do that? Are they broken, and can they be fixed somehow?
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.
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.
This is a great first step. But realistically they can only move so fast with FDA regulation increasing your iteration cycle time on therapies to 10 years. Our biomedical regulatory regime is extremely risk averse. If we had a regime where anyone could voluntarily place any therapy into their own body, we'd move a lot faster. Yes, a few more people would die in testing. But a lot more lives would be saved by the ther…
In the age of patent medicines where you could freely use any kind of "medicine" or treatment this was not true at all. Medicine is not simple to understand or develop and asking the average person to make this evaluation is enabling a system that will take money from people in exchange for making their health worse. The kickstarter model is not appropriate for medicine.
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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…
Sorry, but no . Transhuman-level stuff is not safe or even morally allowable for our current society. No. Just freaking no . I was born in a world where two things in life got to everyone: death, and taxes. They've already "relieved" the elite of taxes, and now they're looking to do the same for death. No. We are not their cattle, and they are not our shepherds. You want immortality, robots, and post-scarcity awesome…
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Dying isn't horrible at all. It's a part of the lifecycle.
Of course it's horrible. Life is all there is. When you die, from your perspective, that is the end of all things. That's pretty horrible. Just because it's natural doesn't make it good.
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> You either believe in capitalism, or you don't. I hope what you really meant was far, far better than what you made it to sound like.
I don't get it. Can you expand upon what you're worried I might have said, which you think is far, far worse?