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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

Of course, the money behind actual de-aging and things like replicating a consciousness is entirely funded by rich people in their quest to live forever. If this tech ever goes ‘production’, it’ll take billions of dollars to do and thus only be something the ultra rich and their families will be able to afford. Part of this is being done by the Alphabet (Google) subsidiary Calico[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)

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Nearly all R&D is funded by "rich" people. The fact that this is too tells you nothing about how democratized it will be down the road. That entirely depends on the method of action the end product and whether or not it's scalable. If it is, money can be made selling it to everyone. If it isn't, then only people that can afford it will get it. That's how limited resources work.

Most R&D is funded by governments around the world, coming from the pockets of the population, not from the the rich. Unfortunately, the very rich are the ones putting most of the results of this research in their pockets.

Not true. At least not true for drug research in the US: https://www.drugcostfacts.org/public-vs-private-drug-funding

You are pinpointing a specific area where there is private interest in investing due to the high commercial potential of drug patents. The large majority of research areas benefit little from private investment.

I figured that was the area most closely aligned with the subject: Drugs/Therapies to reverse aging.

In the Middle Ages the rich people of the time were donating almost all their wealth to the Church on their dead-beds because they were afraid of eternal death, nowadays rich people throw a lot of money on bogus stuff like the one described in here hoping that they would actually get to live forever but in the end they'll still die (and I suspect the Middle Age rich guys' souls still didn't get to live forever on account of there not being anything after physical death).

There is no concrete reason to believe immortality through tech won't happen in the next 100,000 years. They eventually will live forever. This isn't like a speed of light limit, at least none that we know of.

Of course there is. Humanity is likely destroy civilization and/or its environment within the next 100,000 years, assuming a meteor doesn't take us out.

At first. See Peter F Hamilton's excellent Commonwealth Saga for a society where in 200-300 years the unfathomably rich are the super-rich of today, but where rejuvenation is so well-developed that it's government-provided for everyone, and immortality is just expected. The super-expensive start of the technology is covered in the short and less good Misspent Youth, which isn't really part of the main story. They get around the population explosion problem with portals to other habitable planets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_F._Hamilton_bibliography

That's not a given. Stem cell treatment could be the ticket and it only costs ~5-20k USD today for treatment.

Just like jet plane rides, air conditioning, cell phones, etc. were only for the rich and powerful initially. Capitalism encourages efficiencies which drive prices down over time.

I'm fairly certain it's the efficiencies of scale, not capitalism, that makes previously experimental products affordable.

Capitalism, all other things disregarded, would just keep the price high so long as the demand is high and the supply low.

But would also welcome and allow competition if any businessman wishes to enter a profitable market.

One merely has to look at speculative fiction to see that the upsides in letting this technology become available to everyone are non-existant to those who help fund its creation. A monopoly around this technology would form faster than DeBeers could say "Wow" - legal or not.

Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about.

Do you believe that in a communist country something different would happen?

If a cure is invented in Country X and monopolized, every other country in the world has an incentive to replicate it by some combination of espionage and reverse engineering. If it can be invented at all, what makes you think that it can be used without other parties figuring out how to copy it? The atomic bomb was duplicated within 4 years.

This is not about countries, it is about the rich and powerful vs the rest of us. Do you think the rich in the US would steal the secret of eternal youth from the rich of China and just give it to everyone? Or just keep it for themselves?

The rich? Perhaps, perhaps not, depends how much money they could make from it. Some biohacker equivalent to Linus Torvalds or Aaron Swartz? Almost certainly, and for free.

Did these rich people stop wanting money?

What you say seems to imply that every rich person is an evil and greedy. There are philantropists too.

Hey, I'm also not a fan of "Rich Bad!" simplistic narratives, but billionaire "philanthropy" is about the most dubious and laughable concept on the table here. It's pennies-on-the-dollar nature is carefully designed to dupe your statistics-naive hind brain into believing there is something being done when it's really the opposite ; it's the microoptimization of the economic world, equivalent to transforming a multiplication-by-two into shifting while the code above you is allocating one million boxed objects. Just a small, pointless thing you do to make yourself feel better for no actual reason.

A few millions here and there, no matter what they do or how much happiness they cause, is nothing compared to billions upon billions^(TM) continuesly pumped out of the world into one person's coffers.

I don't care what kind of persons billionaires are, allowing someone to have wealth equivalent to several countries' economies is ugly and injust. No amount of gift-giving and hospital-visiting is gonna make that any less of a moral disaster. Maybe when we discover arbitary-destination wormholes can we be that inefficient and injust with resources distribution, but with just one freaking planet? good luck convincing me (and the several billions who are not billionaires) that philanthropist billionaire overthere isn't stealing somebody's (probably several million somebodies) food in their pointless unending quest to pile wealth they're not going to use 10% of in their wildest dreams.

Fiction is not a good place to find evidence, else CERN would be busy looking for dilithium crystals for their antiproton factory: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/antiproton-decelerato...

It's an easy way to generate conflict in fiction. You can't use it as evidence of non-existent benefits any more than you can cite fiction for why you're legitimately worried about zombies.

And how is a monopoly going to form? You think people are going to refuse to eat synthetic diamonds-that-make-you-stop-aging because of marketing around getting "the real thing"? And you can't buy out all the mines for something that isn't dug up.

> Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about.

Whatever. People are still going to get cancer.

> Capitalism, all other things disregarded, would just keep the price high so long as the demand is high and the supply low.

You're confusing capitalism the system with individual businesses.

Capitalism's endgame is a monopoly. Why do you believe that this technology would somehow be exempt from this?

I think that capitalism's endgame may be a post-scarcity society, where technology allows us to have almost free energy, and very cheap everything that we may require for survival, with minimum human work.

how do you figure?

There's only so much money you can squeeze out of rich people; they tend to be, well, tightwads. The best way to earn more money is to reach more people (read: increase market share). You can think of prices as indicators of inefficiencies. The high price invites participation which causes competition. The players, driven by greed or desire for profit, seek to eliminate competition (or become monopolies in their field). With the right legal incentives this competition is healthy and innovation leads to lower prices to gain market share. Again, market share == people, and poor people are included in that group.

From this perspective, Capitalism (or "the market") can be viewed as a tool governments can use to increase the quality of life of its citizens.

Granted this explanation is a bit banal and hand wavey and leaves out a ton of stuff (consider impacts on jobs for instance); this is an internet post not a thesis on economics. :) Hayek, Mises, and Friedman are good sources if you care to explore more.

I just don't understand why rich people would need to share their resources with poor people at all if we live in a world that does not value labor.

Guy says "post-scarcity" but what does that really mean? Even if we have cheap energy and cheap raw goods, there will still be things that are limited, perhaps open space, nature preserves, beach property.

Or maybe even in a land of plenty, there will still be those who live in poverty (some would argue that poverty is a choice today).

I'm not sure what will be valuable in the future, but I am sure the rich will hoard it.

Capitalism is about profit. How could a post-scarcity society (assuming that were possible, which it isn't) further anyone's profits?

Further, under capitalism, you only get money from working. Minimum human work implies that most humans won't have any money of their own at all.

Markets are about optimizing allocation of scarce resources. A post-scarcity society (if it were possible) would work differently.

Capitalism isn't a system, it's a tool applicable within a system.

And it's not an individual business thing. Capitalism is amoral (note: not immoral), with a value function. If in a scenario it behaves what we consider "badly", we provide incentives to skew that value function towards what our society wants. For example through taxes or subsidies.

So what you are saying you are anti-progress? Almost everything is first paid for by the rich. That's not a bad thing.

Anti-aging technology is a bit of a game changer; it would effectively create automatic oligarchies, because the rich and powerful would never die and pass on their power.

There is effectively no reward for the rich to make this technology broadly available. There's every incentive to keep their workforces and consumers ignorant and short-lived.

> There's every incentive to keep their workforces and consumers ignorant and short-lived.

This was also the attitude in the 1700s and 1800s there were several revolutionary wars to fix it.

Anti-aging treatments won't stop bullets.

Not to mention stakes and, ahem, garlic.

The rich and powerful create oligarchies now. Even if the problem would be worse with anti-aging I'd trade not-dying for more powerful oligarchs.

I think it might make things more egalitarian. A hard working genius born to poverty only has 80 years to work their way into the upper echelons. Removing senescence means such people will have more time to rise to elite positions and demonstrate track records of competence and merit.

I don't agree that anti-aging would be restricted to the richest. One simple reason is that anyone with the know-how could make vast wealth by making anti-aging available to the masses.

Who said you'll have access to the life-prolonging tech? Parent's comment is exactly that once having this technology, the rich will only share it for such a high price that only other rich people would afford.

> A hard working genius born to poverty only has 80 years to work their way

Social Darwinism? You can do it today, just stop providing medical care for the poor... wait, this is already happening in the US.

ALittleLight seems to be saying we should give poor people more time to develop their talents. Taking away healthcare from them would provide them will less time to develop their talents.

>I think it might make things more egalitarian.

We heard that with the Internet too. And 25 years later: while certain metrics like poverty and standard of living have improved globally, things have gotten worse in Western countries. Why do you think something as Holy Grail-esque as anti-aging tech will be any different?

> There is effectively no reward for the rich to make this technology broadly available.

What about reduced training costs because you can keep your existing expert staff instead of needing to constantly hire fresh but clueless youngsters?

I can't think of a single senior-engineer position that someone can't train for in 5 years. Maybe doctors, directors, and top research scientists.

You've never seen a job posting asking for more than 5 years of experience?

I think very few people grow significantly in their field after the first 5 years.

Okay, so that's like 5/40 of your workforce that's in training at any particular moment, right? That's not a trivial cost.

You just summarized Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk book “Holy Fire”

cough altered carbon cough

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