New interview with Aubrey de Grey on aging and inequality

[Thomas G]

Scientists are waging a war against human aging. But what happens next?

 

There is not a lot that is going to be new for people here. The interview is short so there isn't a whole lot of room to get into the meat of the questions, but I wish Aubrey wasn't so dismissive of even asking the questions. His attitude seems to be that if people haven't given much thought to these issues yet themselves, he doesn't want to be bothered by helping them start to think about these questions in new ways. Instead he pities them and is dismissive, he's thought a lot about it and has it all figured out. In the limited space that he has to answer these questions, the answers given are so unsatisfactory.

 

The overpopulation question isn't as troubling to me and I think he is basically right on that front. But the inequality question seems anything but simple and determined. It seems to me like there are many many different ways that this could play out, and that to a large degree it is up to us to make decisions together to determine what kind of a world we want to live in and we should start thinking about that now. Putting the science and technology on autopilot with the idea that the social and economic aspects of dramatically longer life will take care of themselves seems pretty naive.

 

This statement in particular seems to show that Aubrey really doesn't understand the basics of inequality:

 

The elderly themselves would still be in an able-bodied state and able to actually contribute wealth to society rather than just consuming wealth.

 

 

 

He presents this as if this is a good thing, but the picture he is painting is actually quite dystopian without some deep structural changes to our society. Able bodied workers contribute wealth to society, but that wealth is disproportionately captured by the people at the very top (the 0.01%). Most people hate their jobs and find them soul crushing and life sapping. To extend that kind of work shouldn't be seen as a benefit.

 

It is not to hard to imagine a world in which the 0.01% take the benefits of this new research and live to be 200 years or older, but that the lower classes are thought of as disposable, living lives that are brutal nasty and short to support the supercentenarians and are let to die to be replaced by younger, less expensive workers. Already lifespan correlates heavily to class. This research is likely to intensify that dramatically, although this is by no means inevitable.

 

I really like this "Four Futures" approach to a post-scarcity economy. Time is a limited resource, one that we might be on the cusp of radically extending. It seems like we could adopt this Four Futures model to think about longevity too. We could have a society that is long-lived an egalitarian. But we could also have a society that is highly unequal in which the length of your life is a big part of that inequality. Science fiction like In Time can help us imagine these questions.

 

 

I would like to find some other science fiction that help us imagine a more egalitarian outcome to longevity.

 

I also found his answer to the cost of these medical procedures themselves to be interesting:

 

Now compare that with the situation where the medicine actually does work, where the person actually stays healthy....But the thing is these people would be healthy, so we would not be spending the money on the medicine for the sick people that we have today.

 

I think this is basically right, but it assumes that we have a rational health care system which is designed to benefit everyone. As this last week has shown, our health care policy is hardly rational and is bent more by power than by the desire to maximize the most good for the most people.

[Thomas G]

I was really impressed with this approach for starting a process of public questioning about ground breaking scientific research. This scientist has spent an incredible amount of time thinking about these questions, but instead of pitying the people who are asking these questions for the first time, he helps them think through the implications of this research for themselves.

 

[Dean Pomerleau]

Thomas,

 

I would like to find some other science fiction that help us imagine a more egalitarian outcome to longevity.

 

Then don't read the new novel by Zachery Mason, Void Star. It's pretty dystopian, and perhaps not coincidentally looks more like the future we're headed for.

 

In this not-to-distant future, wealth inequality has gotten radically worse. Life extension technology exists, but it is very expensive. In fact, even the richest people have trouble affording it. Much of the main characters decisions are predicated on trying earning enough money for her yearly longevity treatment, which gets exponentially more expensive as one ages. If you skip one year of treatment because you can't afford it, past a certain age you fall off the 'longevity escape velocity' rocket and lose your chance at virtual immortality.

 

It gives a whole new meaning and urgency to the treadmill that many people already think modern society has us running on.

 

--Dean

[mccoy]

...Then don't read the new novel by Zachery Mason, Void Star. It's pretty dystopian, and perhaps not coincidentally looks more like the future we're headed for.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the suggestion, I was just looking for some interesting sci-fi reading, lately I've been focusing too much on nutrition books!

[Michael R]

Scientists are waging a war against human aging. But what happens next?

 

The interview is short so there isn't a whole lot of room to get into the meat of the questions, but I wish Aubrey wasn't so dismissive of even asking the questions. His attitude seems to be that if people haven't given much thought to these issues yet themselves, he doesn't want to be bothered by helping them start to think about these questions in new ways. Instead he pities them and is dismissive, he's thought a lot about it and has it all figured out. In the limited space that he has to answer these questions, the answers given are so unsatisfactory.

A couple of things here.

 

First, by definition, in a short interview one doesn't get a lot of space to lay out a long and complex argument, and as I know well, trying to do so can sometimes lead to cherry-picking on the part of journalists who trim your elaborately-constructed analysis down to a trivial- or offensive-sounding snippet.

 

Second, you have to remember that Aubrey has been being asked the same questions for some fifteen years now. He's gotten tired of answering them, as will any advocate for the medical conquest of aging. And most of them really do evince a serious lack of thought about the premise of the question and the actual alternatives under discussion.

 

This statement in particular seems to show that Aubrey really doesn't understand the basics of inequality:

 

The elderly themselves would still be in an able-bodied state and able to actually contribute wealth to society rather than just consuming wealth.

 

He presents this as if this is a good thing, but the picture he is painting is actually quite dystopian without some deep structural changes to our society. Able bodied workers contribute wealth to society, but that wealth is disproportionately captured by the people at the very top (the 0.01%). Most people hate their jobs and find them soul crushing and life sapping. To extend that kind of work shouldn't be seen as a benefit.

 ...

But think seriously about what the implications of what you're saying are. I'm not sure whether I'd agree that "Most people hate their jobs and find them soul crushing and life sapping" (I'd take that as likely hyperbole, but be inclined to agree that "Many, and at a global level most, people dislike their jobs and find them unengaging, only doing them to pay the bills"). But whatever you think on the question, remember to take seriously the premise of the discussion. The alternative to keeping people alive, able-bodied, and able to actually contribute wealth to society rather than just consuming it is to keep allowing the majority of human beings — and nearly everyone in developed societies — to suffer decades of ongoing, progressively-worsening, sliding into increasingly-severe age-related disease, disability, dependence, and despair, until they are claimed by the Reaper — and, in societies that can bear the cost of it, maintaining these people with pensions and medical care paid for by the rest of society, in a manner that is going to be unsustainable by mid-century in any realistic scenario.

 

Even now, as people suffer the progressive mental and physical declines that they do and embedded in our current economy, rising numbers of people choose to continue working past the traditional retirement age, for a mixture of economic and fulfillment purposes. To whatever extent some of them don't like their jobs, they prefer to work them rather than to commit suicide, even with their emergent age-related ill-health; none of them are looking forward to cancer, Alzheimer's, or severe musculoskeletal debility as an excuse to exit the labor market, nor age-related death to end their labors. How much less so after they have been made young and healthy again.

 

And, having so many people working and contributing to society doesn't just support their own upkeep and free up resources otherwise reallocated from society in keeping them housed, fed, and given some level of geriatric medical care (such as it is): it grows the size of the overall economic pie, the division of which we can then fight over further dividing ;) .

 

I would like to find some other science fiction that help us imagine a more egalitarian outcome to longevity.

 

Sure — but that's political "science," not biomedical. We're talking about a fucking cure for aging: don't demand that a medical miracle simultaneously solve all of society's ills.

 

I also found his answer to the cost of these medical procedures themselves to be interesting:

 

Now compare that with the situation where the medicine actually does work, where the person actually stays healthy....But the thing is these people would be healthy, so we would not be spending the money on the medicine for the sick people that we have today.

 

I think this is basically right, but it assumes that we have a rational health care system which is designed to benefit everyone. As this last week has shown, our health care policy is hardly rational and is bent more by power than by the desire to maximize the most good for the most people.

It actually doesn't have to assume that. First, remember that even in the United States, which has the least rational and just healthcare system of any developed nation, healthcare for the elderly is already funded by the public sector. And second, remember that this will actually transcend the effect on healthcare, but extend to making pensions and many other drains on a nation's economies redundant, and to (again) growing the pie rather than only trying to cut people a fair slice of a shrinking one.

[Gordo]

Most people immediately assume that if you cure aging, the world will be overrun with humans and destroy itself.  I think people will just stop having kids, this trend is already WELL underway in nearly all developed countries.  People will still die even without "aging" so there will be at least some offset to new additions.  Its not inconceivable that another world war may also wipe out a huge portion of the population.  Its possible that at some point we'd need to restrict reproduction, how exactly that could go down is interesting to think about but won't be an issue for a long time (perhaps every male gets a reversible sterilization sometime before the age of 5, and there is some lottery or massive tax to be paid in order to have it reversed).  

 

As far as capacity for an Earth based human population, I don't think we are anywhere close to it.  You could, for example, move every single family in the United States to a full acre of land in Texas and not only would there be room left in Texas, but the entire rest of the country would be free of humans.  We also have vast oceans (71% of the surface of our planet) which could be better utilized, so there is massive untapped capacity for both food production and habitat without destroying the environment including other species.

 

As for work - I don't know why more people can't see this, but we are heading toward a world where work is going to be optional, and the average person will be able to do whatever they want.  This is the great equalizer that will come from the rise of machines.  I am not even talking about intelligent machines.  There is so much room for massively improved mechanization of our world.  At some point all farming, transport of goods, manufacturing, building of homes and other structures, will be entirely mechanized. Many see this as a negative, but they are not thinking it through in my opinion. Having machines that provide everyone's needs is a good thing.  As for energy, we have almost unlimited, free energy from the sun, waves, and wind, its only a matter of time before everything is powered by these sources (or temporary storage derived from these sources). I've mentioned before but I already get all of my electric from solar and my array is not even that big, if I had a personal robot growing my food I'd be all set.  Imagine these on a large scale:

https://youtu.be/uNkADHZStDE

You don't even need soil!

https://youtu.be/-_tvJtUHnmU

A bit of free energy combined with smart technology and a mechanized grow/maintain/harvest/delivery system will help feed the world.  Going vertical means even more untapped capacity.