The most important work of "How to Build the Future" is political work - reforming our property relations, for example, so that we aren't organizing our economic lives around feudal holdovers like land titles. Who gives a shit if Elon Musk can connect his brain to the Internet and live forever as a sentient AI, while the rest of humanity drinks ditch water and lives small, dull lives?
And with that in place, thousands of other smaller problems evaporate along with it.
That's not going to be a fun world to live in, especially if the treatments requires biological raw materials that the destitute can sell.
Why doesn't everyone have potable drinking water or electricity yet?
And I'm not saying we should do something drastic, Iraq certainly taught us that - however, we certainly don't deserve the blame for any of the aforementioned examples when we are trying our best but prevented by local warmongers (e.g. Africa) and such.
If everyone refused to better yourself because someone else has it worse, nothing would ever get better.
It's a really hard problem, it could cause a lot of large scale problems(where usually the poor/weak will suffer).
And i wouldn't be surprised if you asked most poor/regular people if they see this as an important problem for them, the answer would be no.
Asking people for funding for a cure for mortality is hard, not least of which convincing them of the problem, and then convincing them that a solution is not only feasible but realistic. Asking people to help make an existing cure available to everyone is much easier, because you've already overcome the fundamental disbelief in the problem and the possibility of a solution.
What makes you believe that life extension will be any different? Or, if you disagree that expensive treatments generally stay expensive, what are your examples?
I agree we could have a temporary awkward period in the middle, say 20 years, where it's not cheap yet. But on the scale of history that's a short period of time...I'll admit that's cold comfort to those who die in the meantime.
(See: antibiotics, insulin, appendectomies, lasik, ...)
Solving the first 80% of world hunger was cheap, solving the last 20% is expensive.
My counter-counter example would be dentistry, or various forms of surgery in general. Especially the latter is expensive as hell, but most of the world managed to create systems that give access to it to pretty much everyone. Even the US somewhat manages that.
I wasn't going to get into this subject to prevent a long debate, but I'm always amazed on how these things go. We have all the money in the world to fix it for good, but for some unknown reason we just can't do it.
There was a time that I thought that if someone as powerful and "rich" as Musk ran for president for some big and important country (like the US) they could fix everything.
But for some reason that is unknown to me this will never happen. And when something close to it (in the power and money sense), like Trump running for president, does happen we know that we are not going to get this "magic fix".
It seems that at the moment that the possible fixer gets to a position where he can fix things, he no longer wants do it.
Another stupid idea, or parallel, is Pablo Escobar. At some point in his life the guy spent 2k+/day just for money rubbers. At first he wanted to be good and do good for Colombian people, but when he got to a position where he could do it, he no longer wanted to do that.
I guess we will never fix anything and the world will be as screwed as it is today. Or worse.
> But for some reason that is unknown to me this will never happen. And when something close to it (in the power and money sense), like Trump running for president, does happen we know that we are not going to get this "magic fix".
I don't understand why do people still care about presidents? They can't do crap. Even the decisions they sign off are not really made by them. You don't even get to be a candidate if you aren't already up to ears in the usual political mud of deals and backstabbing. Democracies we know, as they mature, become very efficient at filtering out people who are too dangerous to status quo as they go up.
That's why if Elon even run for the office, I'd know it's the end of the good he can do for anyone.
My point was that if someone with enough pull (pull being money, power or anything else that "drives" the world) wanted to make it good, they could. But it seems that they can't. It's simply not possible.
What matters is the collective and although there are companies with the size of small countries we still can't fix even small countries like we can in a company.
I guess that at the end we are doomed to coexist with poverty, hunger, illnesses and all of the bad things that could be easily destroyed if we really wanted to, but looks like that despite the fact that we all say we want to get rid of these things we really don't want to.
Yes and no. Captains (of ships) can be very effective. So can many leaders, and CEOs of companies that didn't go public or take too much VC money. It gets easier when people are expected to listen to you and you don't have to worry about reelection.
> I guess that at the end we are doomed to coexist with poverty, hunger, illnesses and all of the bad things that could be easily destroyed if we really wanted to, but looks like that despite the fact that we all say we want to get rid of these things we really don't want to.
As humans we really suck at coordinating ourselves together. It's a large an interesting topic. That's why I think technological solutions are so alluring. As undemocratic as it is, you can get much more done if you sidestep the need to first get everyone on board. So I guess we will be doomed to coexist with relative poverty as long as there's anything - status, power, wealth - people want to have more of than their neighbours. But absolute poverty? People going hungry? This, I believe, can be solved, and with enough technology can be solved without asking everyone for opinion. If food gets dirt cheap everywhere (and I mean "dirt cheap", not "pretty cheap thanks to economies of scale but not cheap enough for those actually making that food"), even the poorest person on Earth will have access to it, because there'll be zero reason for everyone to expend energy on preventing that access.
Quoth the article: "Facelifts have come a long way in the last 20 years, not only in terms of technique, but also in terms of accessibility to both women and men. In the 1970s and even into the 1980s, the facelift was a luxury reserved for the rich and famous."
This leads me to believe facelifts have greatly declined in cost over the past 30 years. The number of such surgeries has greatly increased as well ("Since 2000, overall procedures have risen 115 percent, but the types of procedures patients are choosing are changing." -- http://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/2016/new-statistics-refle... )
Do you have any other examples? Because the one you gave doesn't appear to support the argument that prices will remain high for long periods of time. Especially given that facelifts are a cosmetic surgery and thus there's relatively little drive to give them to everyone.