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I have no problem with free market capitalism, if it's fair. But some think that companies like Genetech exploit the rules around patents and intellectual property at the expense of people's lives and receive preferential status.

There's a difference between making your money back to cover the cost of research and development while making a profit, and plain old greed. A 20 year lifetime on a patent with a 3-7 year window of exclusivity means you might be dead before you can afford treatment. That's one of the ethical issues that we will hopefully address in a sane and logical way as we move forward. How much money should one be able to make if they are adding days to your life?

I do agree that this type of thing may be helpful to humanity. I just cast a skeptical eye knowing how the drug industry has worked in the past.

Bear in mind I consider everything you just said to themselves be failures to allow for a free market. Patents are government monopolies, not creations of a free market.

(To which the natural next slur is "Oh, you want no regulation then?" No, I strongly believe a free market requires some basic maintenance to harness properly, and I'm a particular fan of internalizing externalities via government action. However, virtually by definition, if patents are being "abused", that is not maintenance; that's sand in the gears.)

I consider the idea that we live in some sort of anarchic free market wonderland today to be nothing more than propaganda, used by those who want to use government to take even more control over your life. There's very few free segments of the modern market that are even remotely free; they simply aren't as centrally managed and regulated as they could be.

> I have no problem with free market capitalism, if it's fair.

Free market capitalism isn't fair. All the dynamics and mechanics of capitalism have nothing to do with fairness.

I should have qualified that statement more. What I meant was I am against rigging the system and cronyism. "Free market" was the wrong term. I prefer a market that is overlooked by society, with the authority given to government. It's a balance that is still unfair in a lot of aspects of course, because with a winner there is a loser. But the fairness comes in the fact that anyone can be a winner. We're still working on that obviously.

Overseen also. Overlooked? Well.. that already happens.

But what about generation warfare?

Imagine having to live in a world where all the positions of power are permanently occupied by people from the generation of your great-grandparents.

You mean, that there might be a war between the 150 year olds and the 250 year olds? Sign me up! I don't even care for which side!

The base state of the world that we live in is that everybody dies. Your hypotheticals about how horrible it might be to live in a world where people might not die have to be pretty horrible to compete with what is already true.

(Mind you, this is not an unleapable bar, in my opinion, but it's much higher than you just leapt.)

If no one dies, what do we do with all those replacement people we keep making at the rate of about 300K per day?

We can stack them like cordwood for a while, but that gets messy, inconvenient and after a while, a bit smelly.

Dying isn't horrible at all. It's a part of the lifecycle.

Of course it's horrible. Life is all there is. When you die, from your perspective, that is the end of all things. That's pretty horrible. Just because it's natural doesn't make it good.

I remember discussing this in both of my philosophy courses, Intro and MetaEthics. In the intro course, the question was "Why should you fear death? When you're dead, by definition, you're not around to fear it, so why should you care?"

In meta-ethics, the question was "What does it mean for something to be horrible in the first place? How do you decide something is good or bad in the first place? If you fear your own nonexistence, why do you not fear the nonexistence of, say, unicorns?"

I never took an evolutionary psych course, but I read a bunch of their textbooks. I'd imagine the answer they'd give is "Of course you believe death is horrible. If your ancestors didn't, they wouldn't have an aversion to death, and so they would never have been around to reproduce, and so you wouldn't have been born. Therefore, we select for animals that fear death, because all animals that do not fear death never come into existence." There's something comforting about that perspective, knowing that our fears are nothing but evolutionary chance at work, but it's interesting to think that our fear of nonexistence is a consequence of our existence.

There was a book on that a little while ago by Shelly Kagan (decent excerpt at [1]). I think the evolutionary perspective is clearly "correct," but it doesn't quite answer the big questions for me. It establishes that "death is bad" is an axiom of our ethical system (and not a theorem of it,) but it has nothing to say when we ask whether we should attempt to adjust our morality.

1: http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Death-Bad-for-You-/131818/

> Life is all there is. When you die, from your perspective, that is the end of all things.

So? Why does that matter? From my perspective, before I was born and after I die are equivalent on account of me not being able to have a perspective. 13.8 billion years of the universe where I didn't exist wasn't horrible before so I don't see why it will be so horrible in 60 or 80 more years when I don't exist again.

It's weird how people get very philosophical and accepting about death form old age, but are horrified by murder, suicide, deadly airplane crashes, gas explosions, and so on. You get just as dead either way, but somehow death from old age is considered to be just a natural part of the Plan.

There's a pretty substantial body of opinion that dying of untreated cancer is, in fact, kind of horrible.

I was referring to the act of turning the lights off...the big empty. No doubt some things that precede and result in death are nasty, but those aren't death.

For example, if death was embraced and voluntary euthanasia was allowed, people could just opt-out as the nastiness started (I'm not suggesting we do that, though).

Anyway, the point is that we shouldn't fear the ending. It's the things that precede it that we should rightfully fear and combat. In other words, focus less on extending life (after a point) and more on decreasing the ratio of painful-years/lifespan.

Why aren't you suggesting voluntary euthenasia once the horrible dying process has begun? You've said that death isn't horrible at all, but the process of dying is, so if you truly believe those things, why wouldn't you want to cut the awfulness short? You don't seem terribly interested in the length of life, as such, so cutting it a little bit shorter should seem like no great loss.

If it's unavoidable, then acceptance is the right path.

If it's avoidable, then all else being equal acceptance of death strikes me as incredibly foolish. I want to live until tomorrow, and I imagine that tomorrow I'll say the same.

If we could effectively control aging and death, perhaps that would make human reproduction unnecessary or undesirable even. Perhaps that will stop all the nonsense in the name of "oh won't you think of the children?"

i wouldn't be surprised if you asked people and it turned out that the dying part was the thing they feared most about death.

> It's a part of the lifecycle.

Because something is natural (part of the lifecycle) doesn't make it good or bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

You're welcome to accept it - as long as you don't require me to die or hamper me from living as long as I like.

This is the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is that way does not mean that it should be that way.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/

My aunt - who died slowly and painfully, wasting away from the cervical cancer that was eating away at her body - might disagree with you were she still here.

I think this refers to death as distinct from the process of dying.

Generational warfare would definitely be something to consider. Imagine if immortality had been discovered 400 years ago. Are the ethics and morality of the leaders from 400 years ago something you, a person born in the late 20th century, would want to live under?

Generations eventually dying off keeps the human race moving forward in many ways.

Imagine if we grew up in a world like the one you posit, where humanity advances only slowly because it's held back by the ideals held by people 400 years old.

You propose that the best solution to this is kill everyone over 80.

That would make you a psychopath.

Or, imagine that you didn't like the dominant views among the 50-60 year olds in power when you were in your twenties, and you offered up the idea that we should just withold medical treatment from people over 30 so that we could increase the speed of social progress.

> That would make you a psychopath.

If we could have just figured this out 2500 years ago, then we 'd be Spartans instead of PsychoPaths.

that would only happen if you have a world that no longer creates new value, but simply redistributes ever diminishing existing size of the pie. I doubt that sort of dystopian society ala Cloud Atlas will ever come to pass, so there will always be room for young people to disrupt existing order

I'd rather live in a world where my great-grandparents are in charge than not live at all.

It's worth considering that extended lifespans could have very well result in you not living at all - the Earth can only sustain a limited number of people, and extended lifespans would result in a necessary decrease in new lives brought into this world.

Any action of anyone could prevent somebody from being conceived. Or inaction. Simply refusing to have as much unprotected sex as you could physically have results in new lives not being brought into this world...

I don't think we need to maximize amount of new people for the sake of it.

Old generation owes to the new generation to not screw them up by using up resources/making world worse than they got it, etc. But they have absolutely no obligations to actually _make_ a new generation.

I disagree with that thought, actually. I believe current models of consumption ignore human innovation, something we're quite good at doing when survival is on the line.

Even considering human innovation, the laws of thermodynamics will eventually limit growth, not to mention the sheer lack of space.

I don't believe the laws of thermodynamics will ever come into play when talking about the expansion of the human race, at least insofar as we don't start talking about humanity as a universal mainstay for the remainder of the existence of... existence.

That would be no wose than living in a world where all the positions of power are permanently occupied by people from my generation.

Your comment is the epitome of ageism.

I wonder if inertia would mean so much in a world of such grotesque abundance.

Normally I agree, but the implications of anti-aging treatment need to be considered.

Yes, the rich will get it first. But then think about what will happen: they will start living longer, and as a result, accumulate even more wealth over their lifetimes. While the poor will have 30-35 years of productive work-life, the rich will have much longer. Combined with the already large difference in their earning power, this will lead to a world where the rich not only life much higher quality lives, but also longer lives.

And the only other choice is that nobody gets it ever. There's no third choice. There's no magic wand solution where everyone just magically gets it.

Don't cut off your nose to spite your face.

There are many issues for which I agree with you, that the trickle-down is a legitimately good process. But this, no. The concentration of power even more than currently is enough that I would rather forego it than encourage it just for that group of controlling interests.

I would rather no one have it than institute a system of even more perpetual control. We have already signed most of our existence over to the rich and the only equalization is that they die, too. It isn't cutting my nose off to spite my face to not want to live 70-80 years under the continually-strengthening ownership of those who will live to 200. (And, similarly, me living to 200 so I can work all those years for those who'll live 400 doesn't strike me as particularly awesome either.)

Most people in history have lived under various degrees of oppression, and most have found it preferable to not living at all.

Do you know the suicide and depression rates throughout history?

There's no magic wand solution where everyone just magically gets it.

Universal health care is a thing, outside America.

I do not think that we would have the same economic system once everyone is immortal or living for hundreds of years.

Once the market has chewed on it and made it as cheap as possible, consider subsidizing it or something

Your argument hinges on a hoary anti-Marxist critique. As one example alternative approach, the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars handed out to financial institutions and/or forgiven in legal penalties could have been used to reimburse companies for creating successful health technologies and treatments. It's a matter of policies and priorities, some of which are broken and some that aren't (Sturgeon's Law), and the market structures of medicine operate in the way that it does for specific reasons not necessarily aligned with benefits for those who are dying or sick.

tl;dr: TIMTOWTDI

Sorry, but no. Transhuman-level stuff is not safe or even morally allowable for our current society. No. Just freaking no.

I was born in a world where two things in life got to everyone: death, and taxes. They've already "relieved" the elite of taxes, and now they're looking to do the same for death.

No. We are not their cattle, and they are not our shepherds.

You want immortality, robots, and post-scarcity awesomeness? Great. Make it for everyone.

Don't develop The Future just so the capitalist elite can exploit even harder.

You can't "make it for everyone" before you figure out how to make it in the first place.

Then fund a nonprofit research agency rather than a for-profit productizing company. Lots of countries have public healthcare systems who could administer life-extension treatments universally if they're not locked down and treated as proprietary, for-profit products!

Just like the internet, right? A great philantropic endeavour planned for all. Get real, real research doesn't happen in a vacuum, it happens for profit or some advantage. And then it trickles down not because the research funders pass it on, but because market dynamics eventually make it inevitable. So you'd rather the internet hadn't happened? The industrial revolution too? Well let's just head right back to stone age where everyone gets a chance at cracking each other's skull, that's where it's at.

Sorry if I'm being harsh, but seriously, "make it for everyone"? Who is that even directed at, god? It's not like post-scarcity and immortality will be the work of Larry Page or anyone in isolation who could take it upon themselves to do it altruistically.

Just like the internet, right? A great philantropic endeavour planned for all.

You mean a government-funded research program that took place in academia and released its results under open licensing, thus allowing a hacker-ethic of free contribution and usage?

Because that's how the internet happened, actually. Do remember that the Mosaic web browser was invented by Tim Burners-Lee at CERN while on public payroll, it was released under free licensing, and the whole infrastructure spread precisely because it was decentralized and open.

The internet versus the App Store is an excellent example of why we want publicly-funded, open-access research initiatives, not private profit-mongering.

Sorry if I'm being harsh, but seriously, "make it for everyone"? Who is that even directed at, god? It's not like post-scarcity and immortality will be the work of Larry Page or anyone in isolation who could take it upon themselves to do it altruistically.

Well, if God is listening, I'd certainly like Him to consider that He should come down and issue a few ethical guidelines before we start stomping all over His Creation trying to overpower Him!

It is pretty weird that it's not a non-profit, I'll give you that.

Why? What is the functional difference? Non-profits just funnel profits back to execs, instead of shareholders. Non-profit != lower prices.

Prices? You want medical treatment to have a price?

Have you thought this through? Doctors have to be compensated, unless you want to enslave them. Even a single-payer system has prices.

On a side note, healthcare costs are high in the US due to artificially limited supply and failed central planning of future demand: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-03-02-doctor...

I for myself am a little let-down by how many HNers would prefer to live indefinitely as potential economic slaves under a gerontocracy only because everyone is so afraid of dying. The only thing that actually comforts me is that I think aging is really an insolvable problem, the same as strong AI is an insolvable problem.

Thank god people like you weren't around when vaccines were being developed.

45,000 people die each year in the USA for lack of medical insurance, and these guys want to offer radical anti-aging treatments to those who can afford it.

And you say they're the ones serving Life?

It's a moral imperative to destroy capitalism before we gain transhuman power over Nature!

The hard-left argument that this will empower an elite is a silly and pointless one - life extension technology will be developed by China in the unlikely event that Western Luddites manage to throw a spanner in the works in their affluent countries.