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Comment by MagicMoonlight | Hacker News Reader

I’m starting to realise we don’t really want a cure to aging.

Imagine a world where people like Stalin never die. People like bill gates never have to pretend to be a nice person…

If there’s no chance of death, there will never be any progress in society. People in power would just establish a tighter and tighter grip. All the boomers would be immune to death and disease, but the treatment would be banned for the young because they haven’t done enough to earn it.

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You'll enjoy "Altered Carbon", which focuses (partially) on this topic: if we get rid of death, then the worst of the aristocracy never dies.

+1000 - altered carbon season 1 is amazing. IMHO commit to watching it 3x to get everything going on - after the first watching, everyone's like "that was amazing but I'm not sure what I just watched." It's just so rich - if The Matrix is 136 mins vs 570 mins with that much more depth.

Also Greg Egan's Permutation City covers these topics in a different way.

Dictators die all the time and most often not of old age. As we get older our flexibility to adapt to change also starts to diminish. You will eventually be outperformed. We can’t account for what we don’t know.

Perhaps, but the power conferred by the miracle of compound interest does not require performance.

Reminds me of the film 'In Time' where the rich can be immortal.

It does seem that nature has it 'programmed in' that we are to die due to telomere shortening and for natural selection to take place. Our modern and constantly changing society likely means that any kind of evolutionary adaptation doesn't have long enough to prove itself.

Interestingly how people would handle immortality could change that.

...and Altered Carbon (primarily the book but also the TV series), which does things a lot better than "In Time".

90% will say this until they are faced with death and then they just want 1 more minute.

You need both sides of the coin. Yes your Emperor is forever young but so are the heroes among us. Eisenhower turns 135, Hitler 136.

If your thesis was correct, we would presumably not treat children for cancer. Since that’s evidently not the case, I’m not sure how you’re coming to this conclusion

People like Einstein would find a solution.

>"I’m starting to realise we don’t really want a cure to aging."

YOU realize that WE do not need. How convenient of you to tell me what I need. I think this is how Stalin's of the world start.

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