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The Expensive Art of Living Forever

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Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#41

Post by dragonwriter »

henrikschroder wrote: post #37
monktastic1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Resume your consciousness" does not apparently mean to me what it does to others -- hence the thought experiment I gave. Just because there's a computer out there churning out bits that match mine (for some acceptable definition), in what sense would my consciousness "resume" if you killed me? Whatever sense that is, it doesn't interest me in the slightest. If I proved to you that such a machine already exists for y…

I like the Star Trek teleporter angle, because it shows us how we're susceptible to narrative explanations over actual explanations. The way the Star Trek teleporter works is that you step into it, and then you are dismantled, picked apart atom-by-atom. You cease to exist. You die. You are gone. But immediately afterwards, elsewhere, atoms-by-atoms are put together again, to form a thing that looks like you and talks…

> I see the arguments downthread about how sleeping or going unconscious aren't guarantees of your unbroken consciousness, and the rabbit-hole of existential dread that entails.

It's not a matter of guarantees; “unbroken consciousness” is, itself, only a “narrative” for the experience of memory; insofar as it denotes anything that exists at all it is nothing but present consciousness plus memory, and any other explanation veers into the realm of magical metaphysics.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#42

Post by vkou »

chr1 wrote: post #35
vkou wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that: 1. A world where Ghengis Khan or Emperor Tiberius, or Joseph Stalin were still alive today.... 2. Would be no worse from the world we have, except a few powerful people would have not had to die. The interests of the wealthy and powerful are not aligned with those of the rest of us. Death is one way in which dynasties and despots lose power - moreso if they have multiple successors.

I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely. First of all that would assume rejuvenation is very costly, more costly than raising a child, which is unlikely. Second, the despot doesn't work alone, he needs to have other people who do all the killing, and these people are going to want to not die as well. All of the despots you mention…

> I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely.

That's not an assumption I'm making. Death resets ossification and concentration of power every couple of decades, regardless of whether rejuvenation therapy would be available to the top 10%, 1%, or 0.001%, or whatever. The problem is not the therapy, or even who gets it, the problem is what happens when it is available.

The problems that immortality causes are social, not technological. People with wealth and power tend to accumulate more wealth and power, at the expense of everyone else. When they die, it is distributed among their successors. A slow, and inefficient form of trickle-down, if you will.

Ever hear the expression "Science advances one funeral at a time"?

Well, so do politics, except that they have a far more dangerous (to us) positive-feedback cycle.

> Third, since the technology is not a magic ring to just hide, people who fight against the despot would be able to use the it as well, and next to despots gaining more experience, you'll have people fighting agains them living longer and having more chances to fight.

Life isn't an RPG where you punch wolves to get experience points, having a therapy that lets you live longer doesn't help after you starve to death in a GULAG, and most revolutionaries are young men with little to lose. You couldn't have picked a better example of asymmetrical technology if you tried. (Well, I suppose there's also the surveillance state, and drone armies...)

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#44

Post by reasonattlm »

People who think that rejuvenation therapies are only for the rich are not paying attention.

Look at first generation senolytic drug candidates that clear ~25% of senescent cells in mice, varying by tissue type. These vary from $100 per dose, for things like dasatinib plus quercetin, to a few thousand dollars per dose where you need a biotech company to one-off synthesize it for you, such as foxo4-dri. One dose is needed every few years - more than that won't help further.

The story will be the same for glucosepane cross-link breakers.

The trend in this type of technology is towards engineered small molecule / enzyme / peptide / etc that will cost next to nothing a decade after it is introduced, and can in any case be manufactured to order in China and shipped in if the patent holder decides to try charging monopoly rates. Alternatively, gene and cell therapies that can be mass produced, all the complexity baked into that manufacture, and then administered by a bored clinician. The cost will be similar to present day biologics, which are largely in the $1-10k/dose range. Again all of these treatments will be once-every-few-years, not any more frequently. That is the point of damage repair as a strategy - you only need to do it as often as the damage builds up. There is no point in doing it any more often.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#45

Post by philipkglass »

QAPereo wrote: post #36
theothermkn wrote: post #4

I think what dismays me about this article is that it contains exactly the kind of profound vacuity that passes, inexplicably, for wisdom about the possibility and impact of life extension and the character of those who are interested in it. It's difficult to know where to begin. First, and most glaringly, death is not a solution to overpopulation, in any sense. It hasn't worked so far, for example. Additionally, the…

https://undark.org/article/peak-pharma-drug-discovery/ Offers a fair amount of substance to back the notion that in general, medicine is going to be breathtakingly expensive in the near future. The state of biological and novel treatments now seem to support that notion. If you want to say that may change, even reverse, you need to offer more than personal incredulity to be convincing.

The article claims that the costs for developing small-molecule drugs are soaring, as the number of druggable targets without good existing drugs falls and the difficulty of finding something sufficiently improved and new goes up. It also claims that the dwindling number of molecules that do make it to the market are going to increasingly be targeting small patient populations and charging enormous sums while still under patent to make up for those huge development costs. I agree with all that.

It doesn't say that small-molecule drugs developed today will remain expensive after the patents expire. Small molecule drugs discovered now should have approximately the same manufacturing cost as those discovered 10 years ago, even though the discovery cost has gone up a lot. So this is not going to make medicine in general breathtakingly expensive; in our lifetimes most people will never have the rare disorders that orphan drugs target, and in a couple of decades the exclusivity will be gone anyway.

I don't even think anyone expects a simple "take one pill per day" small molecule drug to prevent deleterious effects of aging. It would be great if that happened, of course. It couldn't be monopolized after the patent expires and it would be the complete opposite of an orphan drug; nearly everyone is going to suffer from aging eventually. More likely IMO it'll take genetic interventions, biologics, and a bunch of analytical techniques and frequently adjusted treatments to suppress deleterious aging effects, if it's possible at all.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#46

Post by matte_black »

eunoia wrote: post #31
matte_black wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the poor have outlived their utility. What’s next then? A culling?

I have no idea, and to be completely clear I think this is an incredibly dark and dystopian line of thought. I'm just very curious what the world looks like when the rich no longer have any need for the poor. It feels like this is a novel situation in human history. Interested in being proved wrong...

I find it hard not to have dark thoughts when thinking about this topic.

Feedback loops are powerful and dangerous. A positive one can carry you to ever increasing wealth, wisdom and power, but a negative one could destroy not just yourself, but your entire family and the generations to come.

The poor have fallen into a highly negative one, and they are increasingly going too far in to have any escape velocity to get out. If we try to help them, we only prolong the inevitable and create an even greater population of poor that we simply can't support. If we let them die, then the blood is on our hands, but we may be left with a world that is more balanced.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#47

Post by chr1 »

vkou wrote: post #42
chr1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely. First of all that would assume rejuvenation is very costly, more costly than raising a child, which is unlikely. Second, the despot doesn't work alone, he needs to have other people who do all the killing, and these people are going to want to not die as well. All of the despots you mention…

> I think the scenario of a despot like that keeping rejuvenation technology to himself and ruling for a long time is not likely. That's not an assumption I'm making. Death resets ossification and concentration of power every couple of decades, regardless of whether rejuvenation therapy would be available to the top 10%, 1%, or 0.001%, or whatever. The problem is not the therapy, or even who gets it, the problem is w…

> "Science advances one funeral at a time"

This is mostly due to age related brain function degradation, most scientists now have to relearn and try new things several times in their middle age. Unfortunately many lose that ability with the age, but retain the power they have gained before that.

If scientists could retain the abilities of their young brain for longer, science would benefit greatly from improving the ratio of learning/working time.

In general i agree that without death resetting ossification and concentration power would take longer, but is the death of billions of people worth that? Is the current interval the perfect one, or maybe we should intentionally create antibiotic resistant bacteria to make it faster again.

If no why is intentionally hindering the development of life extension any different than trying to destroy the effects of life extension we achieved so far?

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#48

Post by ansible »

ansible wrote: post #33
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attempts thus far in history by the wealthy to "manage" the poor have worked reliably only insofar as the poor believed they were OK. Beyond that, violent revolution with massive bloodshed is common.

Attempts thus far in history by the wealthy to "manage" the poor have worked reliably only insofar as the poor believed they were OK. Or more properly, the poor were afraid of their own lives getting worse. This is all speaking from an USA citizen's perspective... If the elites had their own act together, they could easily avoid a violent revolution this time around. Get the masses all addicted to some new forms of e…

I had a further thought...

Whatever the failings of feudalism and royalty from centuries past, there at least was a system in place for the elites to train the next generation of elites. The goal was to teach them how to rule, how to maintain their power base, and so on. A tradition to carry on, because they all knew they wouldn't be around forever.

We live in such chaotic times now. There is no tradition, no body of knowledge and custom to guide the elites of our society now. Now they do whatever the heck they want, with seemingly little regard for their own family's future, much less the fate of society in general.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#49

Post by QAPereo »

philipkglass wrote: post #45
QAPereo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://undark.org/article/peak-pharma-drug-discovery/ Offers a fair amount of substance to back the notion that in general, medicine is going to be breathtakingly expensive in the near future. The state of biological and novel treatments now seem to support that notion. If you want to say that may change, even reverse, you need to offer more than personal incredulity to be convincing.

The article claims that the costs for developing small-molecule drugs are soaring, as the number of druggable targets without good existing drugs falls and the difficulty of finding something sufficiently improved and new goes up. It also claims that the dwindling number of molecules that do make it to the market are going to increasingly be targeting small patient populations and charging enormous sums while still u…

First point:

Get used to this. Moderately-priced mass-market drugs will disappear. Or rather, they will go off-patent and become generics. With no R&D expenses to recoup, they will become cheap commodities, costing a few dozen or hundred dollars per treatment. New drugs, especially those protected from competition by the Orphan Drug Act, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Don’t be surprised when the first million-dollar treatment hits the market.

Which dovetails with:

These developments are no kind of tragedy — drugs cannot do much more to lengthen human lifespan. Nor are these developments the result of a conspiracy or of unusual levels of greed. They are just the end-stage of the depletion of a resource.

We are specifically talking about life extension, and the claim is that the modern pharmacopoeia is moving away from traditional drugs, to far more expensive alternatives with more therapeutic potential.

Re: The Expensive Art of Living Forever

#50

Post by henrikschroder »

dragonwriter wrote: post #41
henrikschroder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the Star Trek teleporter angle, because it shows us how we're susceptible to narrative explanations over actual explanations. The way the Star Trek teleporter works is that you step into it, and then you are dismantled, picked apart atom-by-atom. You cease to exist. You die. You are gone. But immediately afterwards, elsewhere, atoms-by-atoms are put together again, to form a thing that looks like you and talks…

> I see the arguments downthread about how sleeping or going unconscious aren't guarantees of your unbroken consciousness, and the rabbit-hole of existential dread that entails. It's not a matter of guarantees; “unbroken consciousness” is, itself, only a “narrative” for the experience of memory; insofar as it denotes anything that exists at all it is nothing but present consciousness plus memory, and any other explan…

You are arguing that since to the me that is now, there's no way of knowing if I am a restarted perfect clone of me, or a resumed me that woke up from a nap; dying and falling asleep are the same thing.

That is crazy talk.

I understand the reasoning that leads you there. It's still crazy talk.

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