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Comment by dsign | Hacker News Reader

There is an obvious solution to the problem of ageing population and declining birth rates. Furthermore, it's a solution everybody's secret soul wants very much: keep people younger for longer. Invent rejuvenation. But politicians would never dare go in front of cameras and say that they will put a dollar into R&D for such an outcome, because the wall of insults and disdain we would hurl, for no rational reason, at them, would be higher than a tsunami. There is something seriously broken in our collective psyche.

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And while we're at it, can we do teleportation too? Think of all the parking hassles, the car accidents, the carbon emissions we could save! And yet, just try to convince those funding agencies...

You're equating teleportation...something that violates our current understanding of physics..with rejuvenation, which does have some promising peripheral research, such as studies on telomeres.

I'm pretty sure that "lack of market opportunity" isn't the reason that nobody has yet managed to invent eternal youth

It might be the obvious solution but is it the right one?

People are significantly more productive than say 50 years ago due to technological advancement. So where is all the money going?

I am no economist but it is my understanding that all this extra money goes to the rich because they've entrenched themselves in positions where they can extract a portion of a person's income with no recourse.

It's not normal that a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.

I recall danluu blogging about how multiple times he made code fixes that saved the company more than his salary just in electricity. What I see is an incredible technical achievement but also I see how he's being exploited - the money saved is value he directly provided to society, yet he sees none of it. Where does it go? To people who are already rich.

> People are significantly more productive than say 50 years ago due to technological advancement. So where is all the money going?

People have far better lives considering all the things available to them compared to 50 years ago. Most people would not want to live life like how people lived it 50 years ago.

> It's not normal that a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.

This is definitely a problem but I don't think the only one.

Plenty of people would want to live life how people lived before 2008 though, or even 2015.

Over the past decade life expectancy in developed countries first plateaued, then declined.

Yes, largely due to the pandemic, but that plateau was also the beginning of decline in some places.

> This is definitely a problem but I don't think the only one.

Certainly. Planned obsolescence and devices being impossible (or illegal) to repair is another. If a device costs 20% less but lasts only half a long, buyers are losing money because the profits go to the rich more often.

Food has ingredients and an expiration date on the packaging as required by law. Expected lifespan should be required for petty much everything.

You only get paid because someone pays you. More outputs do not mean you will get paid more if everyone does so

Exactly. The amount of cost savings produced does not determine their value if everyone can perform them.

So why is compensation zero-sum when the economy is positive-sum and to whom does the difference, the extra value produced, go?

Because it certainly does not go to the people doing actual work producing it.

There are tons of companies researching methods to increase life expectancy and rejuvenation. There is not much controversial about it yet.

It is not that it is hard because it is a controversial subject. It is hard because it is not one problem. To develop rejuvenation you would need to tackle hundreds of very difficult problems, both physiological and neurological, which individually, would represent solutions to critical conditions today (diabetes, dementia, ataxia, arthritis, many types of cancers etc etc).

Get disdainin’!:

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/adding-years-to-life-...

Ha! Sweet! That's very much a (lot of) step(s) in the right direction.

> keep people younger for longer.

Is a lot easier than "rejuvenation", and a lot more attainable. And also something we do throw R&D money at.

>Invent rejuvenation

I definitely don't think we have succeeded in "invented" this, but it surely has happened slowly over time. People in theirs 60s today are surely sharper than they used to be, with less chronic physical ailments.

But the end results is people living longer, and the solution still ends up being pushing back the retirement age.

The obvious solution that also worked in the past is rising productivity and participation on the created wealth.

That's because it has no guaranteed outcomes and it's just a big bet. It's not a "solution" until it's proven to work. If you bet on some unproven tech to save you in the future and that never materialises then as a country you're fucked. So the disdain and contempt would be 100% earned towards towards anyone who would seriously suggest betting the future of society on some unproven technology. Only techbros would ever suggest something so profoundly out of touch with reality.

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