The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
nickbostrom.com
nickbostrom.com
Most people wouldn't be able to start a family. The few who get the opportunity would probably be carefully vetted by governments.
The dragon fable is emotional, but it doesn't address any of the questions of what a "post-dragon" world of inevitable gerontocracy would look like. If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay. Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
Maybe. Or maybe there would be a push to engineer deserts to be habitable. To create undersea habitats. To colonize Mars and expand further. This might not happen, but it is a solution.
Also, with more and more interesting things to do and without the societal pressure to have children (as we have today), less people would even want to start a family. I believe the problem is manageable, and I don't buy the "we have to die, so that new people can live (and die)" line of reasoning.
> If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay.
It would probably happen. But that would be a nice problem to have.
> Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
We seem to be managing this problem with wealthy families, so we could probably manage it with individuals as well.
Would immortals risk themselves in such endeavors? If death came only through bodily harm, it makes sense that people would go to great lengths to protect their bodies.
Maybe we can assume that robots would be doing all the dangerous work. But why go to the effort of creating new more dangerous habitats for mankind, when societies could just remove the population growth pressure?
I don’t see any reason why a world of immortals wouldn’t eventually evolve into something like planet Solaria in Asimov’s Robot series: static, extremely risk-averse, minimal population to ensure maximum resources for each individual.
Even if everyone was immortal (not just unaging, as that would only reduce death rates by ≈90%), couples could still have one child each. That would leave the final population at twice the original population. 8 billion people have 4 billion kids, who have 2 billion kids, who have 1 billion kids... etc.
> Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
Nobody knows. Fixing aging will cause new problems, but those problems will not be as bad as 100,000 people dying every day.
Lastly, who thinks aging will never be fixed? Maybe we fix it in 30 years. Maybe it takes 100 years. But unless we destroy our civilization, humanity will invent anti-aging technology. So we have all the problems you worry about, though perhaps not in your lifetime.
A couple having only a single child over their infinite lifetime sounds unrealistic. We will have a population explosion with immortality.
We already have a gerontocracy, and Bezos and Zuckerberg already have empires. Blaming a fantasy of immortality for the problems of real-life capitalism or democratic decay makes no sense.
If your house is falling down from mold and termites, you don't blame the future house, you blame the damn mold.
The story is too simplistic for the point Bostrom is trying to make, even as a fable. It treats the concept of death as a singular thing that ends up being defeated by a literal magic bullet. I don't think a Manhattan Project style effort will ever be capable of eradicating death like this, and I don't think this is an unreasonable position to hold. We've already made incredible progress in improving overall health, reducing mortality, and treating and eradicating really horrible diseases. We already get to live 2-3 times as long as our ancestors. I'm definitely not a Luddite trying to claim that this is enough progress, or that this is how it's meant to be, but you'd have to be willfully ignorant to miss the obvious fact that we're now at a point where the return on effort for cutting edge health research is rapidly diminishing. Perhaps we'll have a bio-renaissance, perhaps not, but even a renaissance isn't likely going to take you to infinity.
Bostrom obviously expects pushback, as he spends a considerable fraction of the fable "defending" his effort from "critics." But he doesn't understand his critics or their criticism. In the story they take the form of caricatures of luddites, penny-pinchers, and ignorant religious fools.
I absolutely support continuing research in health and longevity, but we should be realistic about the effort required, the real possibility that seemingly promising efforts will fail, and what we hope to achieve. Eradicating cancer is a fantastic goal, but it's really fucking hard, might not work in the general case, and isn't likely to increase best-case longevity by a huge amount. After cancer no longer kills you, something else will.
Also, it would be nice to not be accused of being some sort of monsterous death-worshiper whenever I express this view.
We have many great challenges ahead of us as a species. It’s important to keep in mind our priorities and how we’re allocating our resources, even as it relates to curing aging/death.
Sidenote: I enjoyed that the CGP Grey animation of this fable cribbed off of Kennedy’s speech kicking off the space race to the Moon.
Oh, I have no doubt that the prices would eventually go down- in like a few hundred years after the cure was invented. Until then the people not able to afford it would still die in droves while a few powerful and affluent people would ascend to a kind of immortality.
Bostrom doesn't even try to think of how a very expensive panacea that cured ageing and all the ailments that came with it would be distributed to a majority of the human population that even now cannot afford basic healthcare to extend their health-span even for a few years.
How is this current state of affairs supposed to be ethical? And how can we ethically justify halting ageing for only a tiny handful of people out of the entire world population?
How do you ethically justify not pursuing such treatment if it becomes feasible? How do you justify denying it altogether, unless everyone can get it at the same time? Impossible perfection or nothing at all?
Instead of SpaceX, I'd look here at all the other medical procedures that are accessible to western citizens. No one could afford them if they were to foot the entire bill for a single-off cure. Yet somehow, through combination of private and public action and group efforts, we've figured out to make them affordable.
(Same will happen with space travel, when more companies get to the place where SpaceX is now, and if we manage to pull off the whole cislunar economy thing. Then the economies of scale and various business model magic will kick in. Note that this is what happened to air travel, to the point plane tickets are ridiculously cheap compared to the direct costs involved.)
I had no idea Boz had the patent on being very motivated. Color me surprised.
I agree though that it completely ignores all other causes of death and the incremental improvements we're making. We'll still get hit by cars even if we don't age. I see that more as a lack of detail than an important problem with the story.
I also figured that a large part of the story was unrealistic in the way society was presented. It depicts a society which is entirely cowed in its approach to the dragon... and yet is capable of a wholesale overturning of literally generations of worldview on a dime. Humanity doesn't tend to work like that. A more realistic take would have had the dragonologists fed face-first into the dragons maw so that society could avoid facing the notion that not only had they been seeing the world the wrong way their entire lives, but so had their ancestors, and it had cost them countless loved ones while they simply quietly accepted it. Those who are invested in irrationality generally react to damage caused by the irrationality with doubling down, not backing off. Especially with a whole room full of people lamenting all the people lost to the dragon, the last idea that is going to gain widespread popularity is "all those deaths were for nothing."
> Our situation with regard to human senescence is closely analogous and ethically isomorphic to the situation of the people in the fable with regard to the dragon
But I think it's important to emphasize this would not be some easy victory or simple change in society whose implications we wouldn't have to very carefully consider.
There's everything from overpopulation to society become stagnant to universal boredom and beyond to consider.
We humans are biological creatures. Aging is part of our present day existence so this level of change would change a whole lot.
So, I don't necessarily disagree that "death is bad" but I think ONLY saying may also be bad.
If you stop to consider that at all, it's equivalent to stopping to consider the idea that "old people are wasting our resources, maybe there's some value in killing them off once they start repeating themselves too much". Because it's the exact same thing but one is shoot them with a gun and the other is deny them healthcare to prolong life. Nothing wrong with considering that of course, but it should never be a reason to avoid discovering immortality.
The author frames the "death worshipper" as wrong because the dragon is an obviously artificial threat that came along one day and imposed its will on humanity, that there was a time before the dragon that the worshippers are ignoring.
As an analogy for death, this is a crock, frankly.
I find this focus on “eliminating death” to be extremely confusing. Death isn’t actually a thing. It’s a bazillion different things with a bazillion different causes.
You’ve probably seen people criticize the concept of “curing cancer” because cancer is actually a broad term for a bunch of different diseases, and there won’t be a single cure for everything. “Death” is like that times a million.
The story exists to help get people to the baseline point of acknowledging that death is bad, because even that much can be shockingly non-universal. If we could get to a point where a large fraction of people genuinely believed that, then the rest of the problem becomes far easier.
If the primary problem was simply "how do we solve this", that'd be hard enough.
Let's put it another way: do you think pharmaceutical companies and academics aren't trying hard enough to attack this multidimensional problem? Who seems to be lacking urgency?
In the parable, this would be mostly equivalent to people who find themselves on the list of next dragon transport spending money on getting themselves pushed to a list in the future. Everyone expects to be eaten by the dragon, but if there's money, you can be eaten later and not just now. Most of that money is then burned somehow, and very little of it finds its way to anti-dragon research.
This seems to reflect the views of a lot of people on on aging and death itself. "Death is good and natural, and I'll eventually die too, but I'd prefer to die later".
> Let's put it another way: do you think pharmaceutical companies and academics aren't trying hard enough to attack this multidimensional problem? Who seems to be lacking urgency?
Do you think this is how urgency looks? It isn't. Urgency looks like Apollo Program. Or every single Olympics. Lost of people working directly on a particular goal, with lots of money flowing in. As it is, there seems to be only few people working on aging/life extension directly.
Urgency would be when, besides that 10% GDP spent on healthcare, you'd spend a few percent more directly on life extension.
This whole thing seems to be about drawing a nonsensical line between “disease” and “aging” and either ignoring the former as a cause of death, or deciding that it has enough effort behind it already.
If someone has a cancer that’s going to kill them in six months, and it’s cured with a medical treatment, how is that not extending their lifespan? What would lifespan extension look like, if not a slow, broad development of myriad treatments to treat or cure the many things which kill us?
Why do you say this? I have never met anyone who thought that "death is good and natural". I've heard many people say that it is inevitable and it is futile to try and avoid it, but "good and natural"?
There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to Man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident. And even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
Simone de Beauvoir after Tolkien:
http://confusedneurons.tumblr.com/post/80683906667/all-men-m...
I've run into a huge number of people who say this, or equivalents. "It was their time." "They lived a good life." "Death gives meaning to life." Those are cliches and thought patterns that make it harder to recognize aging and death for the tragedy it is, and thus make it harder to rally against them.
If you go back through the comments on various HN stories about aging and the possible cures thereof, you'll also find many people here who seem to hold similar positions, as though death is an essential part of humanity without which various horrible problems would befall us.
There also exist a substantial number of stories featuring, for want of a better description, "immortality angst". Oh, how terrible a thing it is to live forever, how meaningful is the life of Man for its limited time, would that we could do the same... There are far fewer stories that take the opposite approach, treating immortality as a thing to be desired and death as a tragedy to be solved. Even in science fiction, where we should be aspiring to far more, I've seen many otherwise good stories and series include musings similar to those above. They reach for the comforting rationalization instead of the inspiring future.
Of these, the first two sound like empty platitudes said to avoid an awkward conversation witht the relatives of a deceased person. The last one, I don't know what it means. It sounds like a contradiction to me and I really wonder what you mean by "a huge number", for this experssion in particular. Personally, I would only use the words "huge number" to describe the behaviour of a group of people if I was talking about, say, a crowd in a stadium, which is many more people than I'm ever likely to have a conversation about death with. So, forgive me if I keep my doubts about your assessment of the general public's attitudes about mortality, only from your experience of such conversations.
Literature is another issue altogether. I agree that there is plenty of literature of the kind you describe and I'm sure someone must already have conducted a study, even. On the other hand, for every "Who wants to live forever" kind of story, there is a Dylan Thomas, or at the very least a Love Story (the 1970 film- if you google it, beware of the SPOILERS) that laments the death of a loved one as the greatest tragedy that can befall a human being. And let's not even start on religion and its promises of life eternal and raising of the dead.
But, since I'm chomping at the bit for a chance to quote this in its entirety:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Indeed, I, for one, intend to kick and scream, and bite and scratch, and drag my heels all the way to the grave.
"Hey I'm really mad that I'm gonna die! Someone do something about this!"
Wow you mean this whole time you didn't want to die. What an absolutely shocking revelation. That changes everything.
Not really, at least those that survived long enough to become our ancestors. When you take childhood mortality out of the mix, the numbers don't look that different than our current life expectancy. The other thing pulling the curve down in previous eras is the high rate of death for women in childbirth.
If you dodged those bullets, and didn't get knocked on the head or cut down by a major epidemic, living into your 60s or 70s has pretty much always been possible.
When people grow up, through a process of disappointment, failure, and gradual acclimatization to the muddy vagaries of reality, they tend to get increasingly suspicious of grand goals and simple solutions. And that's because, like you point out, doing stuff is really fucking hard.
The problem is, of course, that sometimes really amazing, or really terrible things can be done. The Marshall plan, or the Manhattan project, the end of Smallpox. World hunger is manifestly solveable - the only thing we lack is the will - i.e., as a society, we consider malnutrition and starvation acceptable.
So people who are suspicious of grand goals tend to get lumped in with the people that opposed all the grand goals that have gone before us, universal literacy, political freedom, and so on. Bostrom is just taking this pattern to an absurd conclusion, by making the grandest of all possible goals, then casting himself as being in the tradition of the people who ended smallpox, and anybody who disagrees as being in the tradition of those who opposed the vaccination program.
Which is where the whole thing gets incredibly obnoxious. The thing about the Manhattan project is, it was a technical challenge, but not a political one. There were no political interests arrayed against it. Anything that affects who dies and who lives is a political challenge - like smallpox, or nuclear disarmament, for example. And that takes a vast amount more work, even if the technical challenge is very simple. And that shows - the only vast political challenges that have been overcome were ones where the technical portion was basically a done deal.
Ending death isn't a technical problem - or at least, isn't right now. There are lots of extremely low-hanging fruit that the Bostrom line-of-thought is basically ignoring - child mortality, and so on. It's primarily a political one. So pretending it is a technical challenge, and ignoring the low-hanging fruit, is a kind of fantasy, where Bostrom gets to play the role of revolutionary, without actually having to do anything, make any messy compromises, or actually say anything controversial, all the while burrowing the mantle of all the people who achieved great things, like ending smallpox, or winning universal suffrage.
However, the real criticism is actually in the fundamental goal. The ultimate point of everything is to create sustainable civilizational progress that eradicates suffering and provides the good life to as many people as possible.
Simply living longer doesn't help achieve that. Indeed, it would cement unequal power relationships. Rulers, especially those who rule for life, would be in power for much longer. There would be compound interest over longer timescales, without the asset division that happens upon death.
Of course, a good counterargument is simply that such medical progress is inevitable. But if so, the point would not be to simply fund efforts to push it forward. The point would be to fund efforts to distribute the benefits broadly, and find ways to constrain the downsides.
Well, currently, unless something else kills you, cancer certainly will. Cancer is a biological inevitability, that can only be kept at bay for so long by the efforts of the human immune system. And as we all know, the longer we all live, the more of us will get cancer, because the transcription errors that eventually cause it become all the more likely as time goes by.
Bostrom seems to think -it's not expressed in so many words- that if we halt ageing, we'd also defeat cancer, somehow, perhaps by having an immune system that is forever as powerful as a young person's. The problem with this idea is that young people do get cancer, despite their healthy immune systems.
It looks like everyone alive has a probability to get cancer at some point in their life. For younger people this probability is relatively low, but currently, we only spend a few years of our lives (let's say 20) being young. If our "young" period is suddendly extended to 50 or 60 years, or more, the probabilty to get cancer while "young" in this sense, will increase. Imagine rolling a 100-sided die every year for 20 years, hoping not to roll a 01. Now imagine doing the same for 100 years. It's obvious that you're much more likely to roll at least one 01 in 100 years, than in 20.
So maybe Bostrom's magical health-extension pills won't work exactly like he thinks. Maybe we can all extend our life spans (well, those of us who can afford that mythical panacea) but not for as long as we'd like, and maybe we will find that if we extend our life for long enough, we will increase our likelihood to die of the most dreaded of diseases to an absolute certainty.
And wouldn't that really suck?
So for something like the cardiovascular system, chronic stress, inflammation, ROS etc are the triggers, atherosclerosis and endothelial weakening is the damage, and stroke or heart attack is the failure. In the case of cancer, it is radiation or replication error, DNA mutation, and metastasis, respectively.
The key for "curing" aging would be the ability to reverse or repair damage (in this case, to selectively kill cells that are mutated or precancerous). To extend life it is sufficient to merely slow damage accumulation rate.
I also wonder whether someone living for a very long time wouldn't eventually suffer irreparable damage because of the radiation from the environment accumulating in the tissues. Nobody's claiming that we can survive, say, being thrown into a volcano (an active one, I mean), just by being more healthy and young. There are clearly environmental hazards that the body cannot withstand, senescence or no senescence. It is very likely that such environmental hazards hitherto unforseen will begin to reveal themselves once our lives are extended enough and that we will eventually find out that there is a hard upper limit for the amount of time that these frail bodies can keep serving for.
I clarify that this is not something to celebrate, or even accept. Let us not go gentle in to that good night, by all means. On the other hand I think it is ridiculous to believe that in a universe where galaxies die, human beings can keep going like the Duracell bunny for as long as we like, thanks to Nick Bostrom's Amazing Rejuvenating Pills™.
Yes, exactly. Well, the simplistic model is that you have a rate of damage (RD) and rate of repair/replacement (RP), and if RD > RP, the system will eventually fall apart. "Repair" consists of both your body's endogeneous repair or replacement processes and exogeneous things we might do.
Most researchers focus on RD, because it seems easier for us to do things about that. Calorie restriction probably mostly affects RD instead of RP, for example. In high theory, one could stop aging purely by lowering RD enough so that it is below the body's endogeneous RR.
But in reality, it is easier for the body to detect and repair some kinds of damage than others. It is quite hard for the body to detect DNA mutation in a cell before it starts actively causing aberrant behavior in a cell, although such mechanisms exist.
> I think it is ridiculous to believe that in a universe where galaxies die, human beings can keep going like the Duracell bunny for as long as we like
Well, at THAT timescale, we are talking about problems of physics and thermodynamics, not biology. But if you consider that in some sense life on Earth has proceeded in an unbroken chain for ~4B years, you can see that it is possible to go quite far by decreasing local entropy at the expense, of course, of global entropy. I do not see how physics prevents human lifespan of at least 10K years, but the technical problems are immense, and I do not predict major success within our lifetimes.
Bostrom then argues "we have compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence." Which is kinda ok I guess though I'm not sure the analogy is very good. Everyone seems in favour of better health and I'm in a minority who like the idea of semi immortality through uploading but I'm not sure the dragon story is very helpful here.
One day, an anti-dragonist on a speaking tour visited a town. When he arrived, most of the town's inns were already full, and he had to make do with a small room in a small in in a run-down part of the town. The next morning, he stood outside the inn on his soap box and told people about how the dragon could be defeated. A small crowd gathered around him. When he had finished speaking, a woman asked: "My children are hungry. My husband went off to war against the tigers and never came back. How does killing the dragon help them?"
"Well, they too will one day be fed to the dragon!"
"But they are hungry now. My baby is very weak. She cries all the time. Even if she doesn't die, she's going to grow up stunted."
"I'm sure you can find a way. Anyway, I'm here to talk about the dragon, it's..."
Another interrupted him: "My son was killed by the king's men three weeks ago. They laughed as they cut him down. No one will hear my case."
"Well, I'm sure they had a good reason. Your son was probably a criminal."
Another said: "My family beats me because I don't want to marry the man they chose for me. Right now, I wouldn't mind being eaten."
"Listen. I'm not interested in the problems of you little people. They're not my problems, and anyway, you're probably lying, or exaggerating, or just not trying hard enough. But I'm scared of the dragon, because the dragon's going to eat everyone, including me. So we should concentrate on that, don't you agree?"
And the people rolled their eyes and walked away.
(Apart from that, I'd say that the caricature you're depicting is not particularly good at responding to people in a productive or endearing way, which is unrelated to the problem itself.)
Of course, multiple factors can contribute to that, including induced "laziness" in large sections of society due to infiniteness of life.
Nick Bostrom's article is advocating exactly that:
Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.
He seems to be saying that if we halt ageing, we'll stop dying from other disease, or in any case that ageing is more important than any other disease.
(3) Administration became its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went to dragon-administration (which is also the fraction of its GDP that the U.S. spends on healthcare). Damage-limitation became such an exclusive focus that it made people neglect the underlying cause. Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.
He's equating the spending on health care with the "dragon-administration" that he describes as a pointless, misguided task. So he believes we shouldn't be spending that money on that sort of task, i.e. the US should not be spending a seventh of its economy on healthcare, because that's just "damage limitation".
He's further saying that instead of "a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging" we're spending that money on "researching individual diseases". In other words, he thinks that that money would be best spent on that "massive publicly-funded research program". Else, what's the meaning of "instead"?
Bostrom's belief is that halting ageing will cure all other disease. According to his allegory, ageing is the one big disease that kills everyone eventually. So if we cure it, we save everyone. Therefore, we should be working to cure ageing and abandon all attempts to cure all other diseases. That's the morale of the story: don't bother with tigers and snakes ("individual diseases"), don't bother with dragon-administration (healthcare), just kill the dragon, save the world.
Note that he's saying all that quite straight-faced, completely ignoring infant deaths (5.6 million under-fives died in 2016) and deaths of people in young age, i.e. many millions of deaths that have nothing to do with ageing and that a magic immortality pill will never get the chance to help in the first place, because they will be dead long before it can stop them from ageing. He's not explaining how a cure for senescence will cure or prevent infections, or genetic diseases, either.
His whole point is completely illogical, irrational, and it's obvious that even people who broadly support it have not really realised what the heck that guy's talking about.
There certainly exist quite a number of diseases that have nothing to do with aging. On the other hand, there also exist quite a few health problems, including many that represent a substantial fraction of healthcare spending, that do relate to age-related degeneration. Taking that into account would produce a better allocation of resources.
A fictional narrative tries to do an end-run around our cognitive biases by presenting a logically consistent, but still very fictional, story and then inviting comparison to real-world parallels.
Since the person performing the comparison and championing each side is yourself, it's much harder to dismiss one of the views as being purposefully misrepresented, or portions being played down or up to fit the argument. The way to deal with the logical inconsistency is to reassess and admit the faults of each side (if any exist).
This is fairly common in Science Fiction, and why if the author has done a good job it can often change how you think the future will be in a much more definitive way that some simple statement might.
In other words, far from the dragon of ageing getting bigger and bigger and ever more hungry, humanity has been winning fight after fight after bloody fight against this evil beast.
I cannot believe the chutzpah in Bostrom's allegory, that sweeps this remarkable achievement aside as insignificant and misguided, with his description of "the king" sending "his army" to fight minor, incompetent battles against the lesser evils of "tigers and snakes" - presumably that's governments funding medical research into such minor threats as HIV and malaria, that claim mere millions of people every year.
What's worse, he actually advocates that we set aside this actually, currently, life-extending research and instead focus on finding ways to defeat ageing: "Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases."
We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them. We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.
He is absolutely advocating that we do exactly that. He believes that halting ageing will cure every other disease and make people live longer, healthier lives. Therefore he's arguing that we should spend the majority of resources spend on health to combat ageing.
My other post, above, replying to chroma quotes the relevant passages from the original article.
That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality. Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.
> We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them.
First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and billionaires like Bill Gates.
Second, I doubt Bostrom is arguing against curing diseases such as malaria. It's just that malaria kills 450,000 people per year, while aging kills more than that every week. If we value lives equally, we should probably spend much more on anti-aging research than we spend on malaria research. Sadly, the opposite is the case. Billions are spent on malaria each year. The WHO alone spends over $60 million per year on malaria. A generous estimate of anti-aging research would be $10 million per year. So aging kills 100x more people than malaria, but the world spends 100x more on malaria than anti-aging research.
> We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
That's also not true. On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing.[2] These improvements have come from a combination of government efforts and private companies. And if you're going to do an accounting of early deaths, governments will not come out ahead of private companies.
> This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.
Every new technology starts off expensive. The original iPhone was too expensive for most people, and it wasn't very good by today's standards. A decade later, smartphones have gotten cheap enough for people to afford in the developing world. The same thing has been happening with computers, cars, televisions, radios, air travel, and medicine.
I think it's a good thing that some parts of the world have eliminated malaria. I'm glad we didn't wait for a magical malaria-eliminating pill. Likewise, I think it would be a good thing if some parts of the world eliminated aging. The sooner that problem is solved in one place, the sooner it will be solved everywhere.
1. See table 6.4 in the WHO's World Malaria Report: http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/world-malaria-report...
That's absolutely what he's arguning for. This is how he elucidates his allegorical points about dragon-administration and war against tigers and snakes:
(3) Administration became its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went to dragon-administration (which is also the fraction of its GDP that the U.S. spends on healthcare). Damage-limitation became such an exclusive focus that it made people neglect the underlying cause. Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.
He is clearly equating healthcare spending with "dragon administration".
If he believes that we should still spend as many resources in healthcare and researching individual diseases, then why is he portraying these as futile and misguided tasks, that have "become their own purpose"?
Also see the point I quoted above:
(5) The lack of a sense of proportion. A tiger killed a farmer. A rhumba of rattlesnakes plagued a village. The king got rid of the tiger and the rattlesnakes, and thereby did his people a service. Yet he was at fault, because he got his priorities wrong.
The king "got his priorities wrong" because he went after lesser evils. That doesn't seem like a resounding endorsement of continuing the research on "individual diseases".
After all, Bostrom seems to believe that most causes of death will vanish if we can halt ageing. So he's advocating that we stop bothering with every other cause of death and focus our research on "the underlying cause" of all of them, so we can save everyone in one go.
>> That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality. Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.
In what sense is the fact that most people die at an older age not an expansion of human life span? Are you saying we care about the mode, more than we care about the mean?
That certainly seems to be Bostrom's way of thinking. I believe he is way more interested of his chances to live to 300 than any other person's chance that their kids will live to 70.
But that's not ethics. That's just pure selfishness.
>> First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and billionaires like Bill Gates.
And yet:
Examples of health inequities between countries:
the infant mortality rate (the risk of a baby dying between birth and one year
of age) is 2 per 1000 live births in Iceland and over 120 per 1000 live births
in Mozambique;
the lifetime risk of maternal death during or shortly after pregnancy is only 1
in 17400 in Sweden but it is 1 in 8 in Afghanistan.
Examples of health inequities within countries:
in Bolivia, babies born to women with no education have infant mortality
greater than 100 per 1000 live births, while the infant mortality rate of
babies born to mothers with at least secondary education is under 40 per 1000;
life expectancy at birth among indigenous Australians is substantially lower
(59.4 for males and 64.8 for females) than that of non-indigenous Australians
(76.6 and 82.0, respectively);
Quotes from: http://www.who.int/social_determinants/thecommission/finalre...
>> On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing
And yet again:
The benefits of the economic growth that has taken place over the last 25
years are unequally distributed. In 1980 the richest countries, containing
10% of the world’s population, had gross national income 60 times that of
the poorest countries, containing 10% of the world’s population. By 2005
this ratio had increased to 122.
International flows of aid – grossly inadequate in themselves, and well
below the levels promised – are dwarfed by the scale of many poor
countries’ debt repayment obligations. The result is that, in many cases,
there is a net financial outflow from poorer to richer countries – an alarming
state of affairs.
Also, from the source you quote:
Global income inequality is still very high and will stay
very high for a long time
How many people in the developing world have iPhones?
Where are you getting "as many" from? You realize that it is in fact possible to spend less money on a thing without spending $0? You're acting like we have no choices between "spending 1/7 of our GDP on healthcare" and "ban all healthcare forever".
> The king "got his priorities wrong" because he went after lesser evils. That doesn't seem like a resounding endorsement of continuing the research on "individual diseases".
Lesser evils are still evils. We should spend more than $0 on eradicating them, but less than we spend on eradicating greater evils. That's what having proper priorities means.
> After all, Bostrom seems to believe that most causes of death will vanish if we can halt ageing. So he's advocating that we stop bothering with every other cause of death and focus our research on "the underlying cause" of all of them, so we can save everyone in one go.
These inferences about what he believes are nonsense and unsupported by the text.
> How many people in the developing world have iPhones?
Far more than did 10 years ago.
My other reply to your comment is, regretably, extremely long but I wanted to repeat this point:
Global income inequality is still very high and will stay very high for a long time
Even under a very optimistic scenario it will take several
decades for the poor to reach the income level of the global
top 10%.
2% is roughly the growth rate that the richest countries of
today experienced over the last decades (see here). We have
seen that poorer countries can achieve faster growth, but we
have not seen growth rates of more than 6% over a time frame
as long as necessary to reach the level of the global 10% in
such a short time. If the past is a good guide for the future,
the world will very likely be highly unequal for a long time.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality#global...
In short: the developing world is nowhere near "catching up" to the West.