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Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

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Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#171

Post by bsullivan01 »

amenod wrote: post #143
bsullivan01 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I hope that Google is humble enough to morph cross-platform mindshare in addition to growing killer channels and facilitating bleeding-edge infrastructures. This approach will surely recontextualize best-of-breed vortals, implement world-class research and innovate value-added technologies by embracing impactful infomediaries. Imagine how much longer we'd live if we leveraged sticky e-services, brand user-…

http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html ?

Yup! Should have included a link but I thought people will think it's my site, spam etc.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#172

Post by enraged_camel »

gilrain wrote: post #161
enraged_camel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Your logic can be dismissed as a false dichotomy.

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.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#173

Post by eli_gottlieb »

mason240 wrote: post #158
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank god people like you weren't around when vaccines were being developed.

45,000 people die each year in the USA for lack of medical insurance, and these guys want to offer radical anti-aging treatments to those who can afford it.

And you say they're the ones serving Life?

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#174

Post by kafkaesque »

StavrosK wrote: post #167
kafkaesque wrote: post #154

Have to put on my tin foil hat for this. NSA-related, too, so you're warned. 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.…

Oh wow... That's... a pretty big leap.

It is. I'm still excited for the details on Calico. It was just a thought that crossed my mind.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#175

Post by cromwellian »

joering2 wrote: post #165

Disclaimer: I do not hate Google; I use their search and email daily. I hate to be this guy, but... > OK so you’re probably thinking wow! That’s a lot different from what Google does today. Not really. Google is in a business of selling ads. In addition, they do make money on selling/sharing/exchanging information, mostly indirectly. > But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potent…

Guilty-by-association and paranoia. Check. (23andme is not owned by Google and I'm pretty sure their T&S/privacy policy and HIPAA cover what can be done with your personal records)

Obligatory and irrelevant Google Reader reference. Check. Right, the world would be better off if Google spent more time investing in yet more social sharing web app features, and not on reducing high way fatalities or increasing health.

Missing. No mention of PRISM.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#176

Post by rictic »

staccatomeasure wrote: post #98
rhizome wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pretty substantial body of opinion that dying of untreated cancer is, in fact, kind of horrible.

I was referring to the act of turning the lights off...the big empty. No doubt some things that precede and result in death are nasty, but those aren't death. For example, if death was embraced and voluntary euthanasia was allowed, people could just opt-out as the nastiness started (I'm not suggesting we do that, though). Anyway, the point is that we shouldn't fear the ending. It's the things that precede it that we…

If it's unavoidable, then acceptance is the right path.

If it's avoidable, then all else being equal acceptance of death strikes me as incredibly foolish. I want to live until tomorrow, and I imagine that tomorrow I'll say the same.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#177

Post by natrius »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #132
natrius wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Clean water. Basic health care. Not dying from diseases we've already been able to cheaply cure or prevent for decades. Oh, I'm sorry, you don't consider yourself part of the elite?

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.

[1] http://thewaterproject.org/water_stats.php

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#178

Post by cromwellian »

mrschwabe wrote: post #23

Apparently your internet browsing data is not enough, Google also wants your medical records and DNA. Seriously though, I wouldn't trust any company connected with Google for 'health and well being'. Their total disregard for privacy would imply they are not working in my best interest for health either.

The nutjobs who have to sully each and every Google related piece of news on HN are becoming tiresome.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#179

Post by eli_gottlieb »

enraged_camel wrote: post #146
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #96

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 s…

If Group B is 99x the size of Group A, then I vote no.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#180

Post by nostrademons »

LoganCale wrote: post #145
staccatomeasure wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember discussing this in both of my philosophy courses, Intro and MetaEthics. In the intro course, the question was "Why should you fear death? When you're dead, by definition, you're not around to fear it, so why should you care?"

In meta-ethics, the question was "What does it mean for something to be horrible in the first place? How do you decide something is good or bad in the first place? If you fear your own nonexistence, why do you not fear the nonexistence of, say, unicorns?"

I never took an evolutionary psych course, but I read a bunch of their textbooks. I'd imagine the answer they'd give is "Of course you believe death is horrible. If your ancestors didn't, they wouldn't have an aversion to death, and so they would never have been around to reproduce, and so you wouldn't have been born. Therefore, we select for animals that fear death, because all animals that do not fear death never come into existence." There's something comforting about that perspective, knowing that our fears are nothing but evolutionary chance at work, but it's interesting to think that our fear of nonexistence is a consequence of our existence.

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