However, I'm concerned about implications of potentially high-price anti-aging treatments. Till now, death has been the great equalizer. Life is inherently unfair. If you are born in poverty there is high chances you'll stay there, but at least you always count on everyone dying at the end.
With high-price anti-aging treatments people who have wealth can live longer (maybe one day indefinitely) and accumulate more wealth and those without money will just dye twice or three times as fast with no way out of the cycle. You can argue historically we always had this type of divides, for example in early stages of invention of antibiotics or vaccines or ability to buy them in black market in areas where they were scarce. However, we're moving from preventing premature deaths to extending life beyond its natural extension and that brings a whole new set of issues.
Will there be enough retirement funds? If we do democratize anti-aging treatments, lets say increasing the average life span to 100 or 120. Will there be enough funding? As is, the social security is feeling the pressures of increased average life-span. So if we are able to make a 60 year olds be 20 (in some aspects of aging) or 90 year old to 30 and as the article alluded to, decrease the risk of cancers (perhaps). Then, who will pay to cover the retirement funding gap?
We're heading toward a world were you can choose to live longer and have the wealth to support your life for extended time, and those who will only live 1/2 or 1/3 as much just because they were born in a different household.
Among all the technological breakthroughs, anti-aging will probably have the biggest social impact and as a society we're not even thinking about it or are even preparing for it yet. But then again, if you have the money, why should you care.