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I don't mean to be a pessimist but this entire article boils down to describing Moore's law, and saying that medical research will advance quickly because it uses computers as well. Seems a little shoddy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you not want to stop people from dying?
You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity. Also, usually, the longer someone lives, the more their ideology defines them. Could be a problem too
Biologists hate him! This programmer discovered Philosopher's stone with this one weird trick! Anyway: Yes, we will do great advances in health care, but will we _cheat_ death? Will those advancements be available? Is this something we _should_ do as a society? Technological determinism/solutionism (as presented in the article) is a really shoddy idea. It ignores so many things and assumes that progress is an arrow a…
Why would you not want to stop people from dying?
if done incorrectly, this might end up in quite a disaster
> So if you've made it to 150, you're "over the hump" (a long time ago), and then there's simply no limit to how long you can live. Even if we accept that life-extending and rejuvenating technologies will progress as described, and that all diseases will eventually be either curable or eradicated, there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder). In England and Wales in 2010, about 0.025% of the population d…
raises an interesting philosophical question: If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro? e.g. Assuming not everyone could afford the technology and you have a 30 yro killer who lacks the funds to rejuvinate committing murder on somebody much older. Would that even be a crime or could it be argued that a 2nd class citizen has only trie…
There is a huge difference between life expectancy and life span and this article [1] covers it pretty well. Life expectancy is skewed by infant mortality rates: > Our conclusion is that there is a characteristic life span for our species, in which mortality decreases sharply from infancy through childhood, followed by a period in which mortality rates remain essentially constant to about age 40 years, after which mo…
[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_05.pdf page 3
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Beyond the reduced risk of death from injury, you also have to account for a change in behavior. I posit that we would all act very differently if we knew our life expectancy to be a few thousand years. I'd venture a guess that we would be a lot more risk-averse. Society would look drastically different.
Why wouldn't we be more risky if we knew we would live for 3000 years. Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years. There no pressure to get your stuff together if you know you can mess around for a couple of centuries and still have time to get your life in order.
Plus, can you imagine the compound interest? :)
I don't mean to be a pessimist but this entire article boils down to describing Moore's law, and saying that medical research will advance quickly because it uses computers as well. Seems a little shoddy.
Not to mention that most in the know seem to agree Moore's law has come to an end, as all exponential growth must at some point in the real world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity. Also, usually, the longer someone lives, the more their ideology defines them. Could be a problem too
Your argument is "we don't want more old people because I disagree with them ideologically." Shoddy at best.