*Google announces Calico, a new company that will harvest your private medical data in to the Google panopticon, in order to sell you to advertisers.
Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
231–240 of 400 posts
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#232Earlier 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.
> Life is all there is. When you die, from your perspective, that is the end of all things.
So? Why does that matter? From my perspective, before I was born and after I die are equivalent on account of me not being able to have a perspective. 13.8 billion years of the universe where I didn't exist wasn't horrible before so I don't see why it will be so horrible in 60 or 80 more years when I don't exist again.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is one of those rare times that powerful people make bold choices that catalyze a shift in the world's thought paradigm. Let's just go ahead and pump the brakes here before we start clapping each other on the back and talking about shifted paradigms. I'll gladly join in the happy-clappy fest once some actual results come through. But saying we've catalyzed a shift in the world's thought paradigm (that is a rea…
An interesting point from one of Calico's announcements is a statement that curing all cancer would only add ~3 years to the expected lifespan. This is thought provoking - if even a perfect solution to such a problem won't give us what we want, then we do need to "make people think differently" and try to focus on a different, bigger problem than the current approach of trying to strike out separate illnesses. By the…
To me the (potential) benefit is not life extension but healthier lives.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#234I'd rather see a high quality of life for everyone on earth for 80 years than 150+ year life spans for the first world. Which will just further increase the footprint of the rich and divert resources from the poor. Not to mention, it's a more attainable goal. It doesn't help much to keep the body going for 50 more years if you can't also keep the brain going. I believe these are very different problems. If you can so…
> I'd rather see a high quality of life for everyone on earth for 80 years than 150+ year life spans for the first world.
They aren't mutually exclusive goals; working on the social/political/distributional problems that prevent most people from having a high quality of life is not exclusive with working on the health technology problems that mean that no one is living 150+ years.
And I'd rather see a high quality of life for everyone on Earth for 150+ year life spans than either of your options.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Some more context:
61% lack Internet access [1]
35% lack basic sanitation (e.g., toilets) [4]
26% don't have plumbing (e.g., water they can get from pipes in their house or yard) [2]
23% don't have electricity [2]
14% lack access to clean water [2]
14% lack access to health care [2]
13% suffer from chronic undernourishment [5]
11% can't read [3]
14% is about one billion people. Maybe you look at that and think, hey, 86%, doing pretty good! But if this many people can't even get access to even the most basic of technologies today, what makes you think most people, even people in the developed world, will have access to whatever mythical mortality-defying technology people are speculating about here? It's all such speculation as to what they are doing, the question is practically not worth answering. But if extreme life-lengthening technologies are truly on the table, the potential for an Elysium-like scenario should be taken seriously.
(Also, point of clarification: what do you mean by "intrinsic reason"? Can you give an example of an intrinsic reason something would be limited to the elite?)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
[2] http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...
[3] http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-...
[4] http://www.unwater.org/statistics_san.html
[5] http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20f...
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#236Earlier 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…
i wouldn't be surprised if you asked people and it turned out that the dying part was the thing they feared most about death.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#237Absolutely brilliant. Finally, Aubrey De Grey's unapologetically straightforward logic [1] regarding aging has gained traction with the crowd who has the means to tackle this grand challenge. I am sincerely proud of Page and Brin for their vision and commitment. This is one of those rare times that powerful people make bold choices that catalyze a shift in the world's thought paradigm. Aging will now be seen for what…
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.
It took me a while to understand the sarcasm. I have probably been in the corporate environment too long :(
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it. Can you expand upon what you're worried I might have said, which you think is far, far worse?
It seems like you're saying, it's either Ayn Rand or Stalin, there's no middle ground.
I get ya.
From that perspective it's hard to describe exactly what I'm thinking...
If you lean towards "capitalism and free markets are good," then I really don't think you have a leg to stand on, in criticizing a corporation for offering luxury services.
If you lean towards, "Universal healthcare, and this is health care, so therefore the government should have a monopoly on it, except this should be way down low on the list of priorities," then it's a completely different conversation.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#239Am I the only one seeing the obvious connection between this, Google's general business model and technologies and the recruitment of Ray Kurzweil as Director of Engineering? If and when we realize the singularity is a real possibility, Google will have the platform ready. For better or worse.
Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being
#240Meanwhile Microsoft gives $40B back to shareholders.