Hacker News Reader

Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

The consequences of longer lifespan to social order are unimaginable. Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos, especially if the treatment will not be available to everyone. From where I stand it seems that relatively little resources are spent on the research of consequences of longer lifespan compared with the discussions we have about friendly/enemy AI, machines replacing jobs, universal income and other social order changing themes. While I am not saying scientists will stumble upon immortality tomorrow, a serious increase in lifespan may happen relatively soon.

View on HN

> Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos

Care to explain? I don't see why humans living on average a dozen years longer would inevitably lead to "wars and chaos" and a breakdown of social order. Indeed, we saw lifespans increase by two dozen in the last 80 or so years and nothing happened at all.

The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to apply to developed countries; if anything it's the opposite. So what's the big deal? And why do you assume that any negative externalities created by life extension technology are inherently unfixable?

I can think of a few pertinent cases. With every new generation you get fresh perspectives. Old practices die because generations die with them. Can you imagine slavery practices getting a "lifespan increase."

I bet the "cold war" mind set works the same way. You rarely see cold war brought up by much younger folks. It's always an old gen rehash.

What about a ruthless dictator like Kim Jong Un getting 12 extra years on earth?

All these dictators in Africa ruling for (eternal) life ?!! What a nightmare !

The nightmare would be, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the perfection of the concentration camps: the ability to torture someone forever while keeping them alive.

That's not different from having a bad leader ruling forever... That's torture. 1789 occured for a reason.

With every new generation you get fresh perspectives.

Who says we can't solve that problem as well? We've already had a bunch of research into psychedelics and countless anecdotes about people who claim drugs like LSD completely changed their outlook on life. I could envision a future where people effectively live forever and continually renew their interest in life with drugs. Selective amnesia, personality-altering drugs -- a new person from the same body!

Fresh perspectives generate fresh perspectives. Birth doesn't as well, because schools tend to standardize viewpoints as do religions. If birth was a good cure, you wouldn't get regression. Like the dark ages, or what's going on in Iran. Rolling the dice and hoping for a better outcome is inferior to building and advertising better outcomes. It would be easy to dream the pro death people die off and be replaced with more adventurous types, but its not fair to wish for someones death because they disagree with you.

It's worth noting that people getting much older (what the OP is saying) and the increase in life expectancy in the last century (what you mentioned) is quite different as the increase of life expectancy is due to a drastic decrease in child mortality not longer life for those who made it to adulthood. Once you make it to 20 or so, chances are you'll stick around for another 50-60 years even a century ago.

According to this random table[0] I found on the intergoogles, you're technically correct but misrepresenting it with your 50-60 figure.. 100 years ago it was around 50, and now it's around 60.

But finding trustworthy data about life expectancy at age X have been really hard every time I've tried to actually investigate claims regarding longer life expectancy, especially because ideally you'd want to exclude deaths by accidents and certain kinds of diseases (but not all!) to figure out at what rate actual longevity has been improved over the years. So I'm still a little agnostic about the whole thing.

[0] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

> Indeed, we saw lifespans increase by two dozen in the last > 80 or so years and nothing happened at all.

Please define "nothing" in your sentence. Lots of countries have been dealing with welfare spending recently due to general aging in their population. If we live two dozen more years that means someone will have to pay for those retirements. I don't know where you live but most developed or developing nations have some sort of government-sponsored retirement/age pension system or welfare program they have to maintain (and is usually paid by the working force alive today).

> The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to > apply to developed countries; if anything it's the > opposite.

You gotta be kidding. Haven't you ever considered what would happen if a good chunk of the world population magically started to live by the wasteful and consumption driven standards most developed countries have, like the US or Japan (or even Russia)? We still have margin for more people in the planet but certainly not with the so called "developed countries" way of life (energy-wise, amount of garbage produced, pollution emissions etc).

> If we live two dozen more years that means someone will have to pay for those retirements.

You're assuming that we'd just extend life rather than slow or partially reverse ageing as the article describes. You would assume that people would work for longer if this was the case. You may even get a "better" (from an economics point of view) ratio of working life to retirement time.

This is important. The demographics issue isn't so much people being old, it's being old and infirm.

If advances give us a healthier old age rather than merely a longer one, then they would alleviate rather than exacerbate the problem.

My mistake, I meant couple dozen of years, like 24 - 99. Also, the change will be sudden, not gradual.

I don't think it's fair to say nothing happened at all.

Aging populations, coupled with low birth rates, are causing difficult political problems. In my country (UK) pensions are the biggest government expenditure next is healthcare, which the elderly use the most. This obviously has to be paid for so you have two options, raise taxes or increase immigration. Our government chose to increase immigration and a lot of people didn't like that so the government blamed the EU, this went on for a while and brexit was the eventual response.

So the chaos is already here, war might be hyperbole but a war caused by something is not unimaginable and ageing populations would be a contributing factor.

I feel there is an increasing level of bitterness directed towards the old. The government panders to them for easy votes which takes public spending from the young and my gut feeling is having policies that cater for the old is not healthy for the long term success of of a society.

The solution is to raise the pension age. Just politically difficult.

Raised pension age vs longer life, fairly obvious choice.

This is already a potential social problem with there being a link between deprivation and life expectancy. Increasing the retirement age may result in the poorest likely receiving no pension.

An alternative solution is to raise wages.

>Our government chose to increase immigration and a lot of people didn't like that so the government blamed the EU, this went on for a while and brexit was the eventual response.

Well, your government chose to increase immigration while also suppressing housing construction and wages. The result is that the government set the immigrants against the native-born citizens in a zero-sum economic contest for basic human needs, while the rich eat up all available economic gains that could have gone to young workers or old pensioners.

>So the chaos is already here, war might be hyperbole but a war caused by something is not unimaginable and ageing populations would be a contributing factor.

You need young people to staff the armies.

Would you rather have the problem of paying for your loved ones to still be around and healthy, or the problem of them being dead right now? Seems like a good problem to have. Imagine if their brains and bodies were still equivalent to 50 years old. You probably couldn't convince them to stop working. I detect lots of bitterness to the young male and foreign and little for old and citizen. Medical progress gets rid of old people too, they just remain young instead of dead.

Increase in lifespan plus decrease in birth rate is the problem. If both grow, you just scale up. But if not, eventually you'll end up with a problem.

It's not about all humans living a decade more on average, it's about those with the wealth to afford it getting a decade more of healthy years, while the poor do not.

A decade more of time to earn more, build more, become more wealthy and pass that on to children who are then wealthier.

Damn, this would be a fantastic dystopian sci fi plot point.

Look at life spans of royalty vs commoners in 19th and early 20th century, this already happened and took the medical advances of 20th century to make similar.

Estate taxes and legacy-driven philanthropy play a huge role in the redistribution of wealth, so there is that.

> While I am not saying scientists will stumble upon immortality tomorrow, a serious increase in lifespan may happen relatively soon.

We have been hearing that for a while though, when do you think "soon" will be ?

My main fear around longevity treatments is that a panicked, conservative reaction will condemn me to an unnecessary death while arguments rage and people moralise endlessly.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change.

You could also pull out "make an omelet", but I'm partial to "more steps forward than steps back".

Also, the consequences of longer lifespan are not only imaginable, they're imagined (frequently) _and can be studied_, because it's _happened_. Even the (other) canonical problem situation - rich people live longer than poor people, by a lot - has occurred.

On the other hand, you are also correct that there an unimagined and unimaginable consequences. If people end up waiting until to have kids until they're older, will that be better for the kids (more stable / wise parents) or worse (further from similar experiences)?

Historically, as Lifespan increases war and poverty decrease. Its very easy to imagine the parade of imaginary horribles. Those horribles look out of place on a graph of global human fulfillment over time. It's so easy to dream how bad it could all go, that comments focusing on that are 10x the number of comments imagining any of the positive outcomes. Apparently the amazing and wonderful things people create together by not rotting and disappearing are harder to imagine.

If you get longer lifespan wrong you might get the problems you mentioned.

If you get AI wrong you get the end of the world, possibly not just for humans.

Don't worry, the treatment won't be available to all, unless it's a cheap pill with no IP constraints on it. Imagine the profits for the producers of a life extending miracle drug.

It would be more like spice on Dune. Hmm... if I recall correctly, the fremens (who had unlimited access to it) were a bloody waring bunch.

> if I recall correctly, the fremens (who had unlimited access to it) were a bloody waring bunch

They were, but not because they had spice. They had spice long before they became a bloody warring bunch. The interplanetary jihad was at the behest of Paul Muad'dib. The Spartan and militant culture that existed before Muad'dib was mostly out of self preservation in the face of a brutal Arrakis environment and colonial oppression.

It's a common misunderstanding that curing aging can be a pill. Aging is a quite loaded word. It means at least, curing cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, cell loss, hardening, muscle loss, vision loss... So what an aging cure really looks like is lots and lots of cures because there's lots and lots of causes. The easy way to categorize what needs fixed is: Cells: too many, too few. Junk: inside and outside cells. Mutations: nuclear and mitochondrial. Finally crosslinking.

I echo this. We're already over-populated on this planet as it is. Yes there's still a lot of available land, but there are reasons we're not using it either to live on, or to farm - too hostile, too wet, too hot/cold, and the cost of terrafirming those areas is prohibitive.

Unless we manage to escape this rock, and find a nice Earth 2.0 out there, extending lifespans is pointless. It's driven by pure selfishness, and if ever comes to fruition, will create a subdivide of people who can afford to live longer and healthier and those that can't; Homo-Richus vs. Homo-Poorus.

Escaping this rock is no relief either. What happens when there's a Muskovite Empire on Mars and all the rich people move there to let the poor die on an old planet stripped of resources to make that possible? Transfers of wealth like that are already happening - let's not make it interplanetary.

Humanity has changed so much in the last few generations and we are still catching up. Maybe we don't understand the consequences. We definitely have to figure out it soon because we'll either never make it to another planet or we'll just bring it all with us.

You mean the poor going to mars to work there, rich people will stay at earth ( sounds like the expanse )

That's ridiculous. There are vast chunks of land in the US that are perfectly fine to live on, it's just that nobody wants to because the good jobs aren't there (i.e. nearly everything between the coasts).

I was talking about the world view, not just the US.

But you've actually backed up my point, despite there actually being large chunks of land, no one actually wants to live there, so we continue to squeeze ourselves into small urban areas.

No, I didn't back up your point. There are plenty of places that are liveable that we can start to move to if cities become too expensive.

Just because lots of people want to live in NYC and can't afford to live there doesn't mean we are in any kind of crisis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com