Faced with their own mortality, a bunch of aging billionaires and multimillionaires tend to pour money into longevity research. I'd be very upset if governments increased spending on fighting senescence today, instead of lower-hanging fruit .
>It is important for us to die because most of the time people don't change their mind, they just die. If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.
There are also solutions like term limits, or generational tenure limits or something that could help reduce any negative effects without needing to continue unnecessary loss of life.
It's not (only) about old people having short term vision/not enough time for reeducation.
25 or 30 year old people are already very often set in stone and unable to change their views and they have most of their life ahead of them.
This argument is philosophical i.e. worthless. We will actually have to win with death to answer the question if it's good or not. It's not something you can figure out without doing it.
On the whole I think it's worth it, but it will definitely exasperate the problems already inherent to our economic system.
Mechanism that could be applied way earlier than old ossified out of touch rulers die now. And applied more merit based.
It is so right now only because of how good modern common people have. But it's going away now. And if security of elites depend of well being of others it's sort of self-regulating system albeit way too slowly.
There's also pressure from the other side. The longer living elites means it will get crowded at the top, so elites might be open to some means of culling their numbers.
What till he's 75 and see if he still holds that view.
But for the time being, nice to see him stating something I don't disagree with.
To add some good mood, I stole a comment from reddit [1] which describes one of millions of media dealing with this question:
> In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, immortality is fine if you're born that way. It's only if you accidentally obtain it after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator is it a bad thing that you are not equipped to deal with and so decide to insult everyone in the universe in alphabetical order.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/tpzb4e/immortality_i...
2. Even if it was, it doesn't make the "wisdom" any less relevant. There's no shortage of relevant wisdom in Douglas Adams' writing.
3. I intentionally quoted Elon specifically, because it is a relevant reply to the parent comment about billionaires pouring money to longevity research.
I meant what lower hanging fruits governments ought to spend on. However, since you asked, here are some of the things governments are currently spending on, but could bear improvement: eradicating preventable diseases, ensuring kids get good nutrition, better tracking, and hopefully prevention of e. coli/salmonella outbreaks, funding basic research into improving outcomes for patients, reducing profiteering off the products of publicly-funded research, medical pricing transparency, better organ donor policies (universal opt-out)
We, like, know how to solve some of those other problems. Sure, there's politics and bureaucracy and complications and the opportunity for corruption, but you can assign a p close to 1 we could get it done in an arbitrary timeframe.
Meanwhile, what's the probability that dumping a particular amount of money into aging is going to pay off? Even taking a thousand years you need a p>0.002 to make it worth diverting money from the safe bet of getting a couple of years off the other things.
We have a whole host of societal functions that are not geared to cope with longevity: including social security plus the associated tax-rates
PS: Oh sorry I understood that as a question of what would be useful, not what is actually spent.