If you're curious and have time, I'd suggest the following excellent exploration of the idea of extinguishing natural death by CGP Grey. He uses an interesting analogy to help challenge the ingrained belief that natural death is just https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY?si=oCqVGD5RX9Q0Cnrk
There is a difference between living longer/forever and giving a child with terminal cancer a normal full life
Saving extending the lives of more children is unfortunately, a statistics change for our current world. Unlimited life means all models of economics, morality generally, class, etc will be affected.
Everyone dies man.
That's also going to happen with automation — and I don't just mean AI, as it has been happening continuously since the power loom led to Karl Marx inventing Communism, or possibly even earlier with the social and technological changes of Adam Smith's era and the end of feudalism.
I am not in any way saying that people should be euthanized or disease not treated or that people not live out their natural lives. But artificial extension of life will only result in those who can afford it staying in power forever.
Much of medical science is "artificial" extension of life. Natural would be you dying of Smallpox at a young age. Instead you've artificially extended your life with a vaccine.
We can all do better than pedantically pointing out logical fallacies, as no argument outside of mathematics is completely logical.
The idea isn't that poor people will get life extension, it's that families of billionaires will get it. And no it won't "trickle down" life expectancy is actually decreasing in USA despite tech gains.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/25/1164819...
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/whats-beh...
Sure there is a correlation between deaths of despair and poverty. However, the argument here was that healthcare advances won't tickle down with the evidence being declining life expectancy. That's a totally different claim. As of 2021 over 90% of Americans had health insurance coverage and AFAIK the vast majority of proven, legitimate treatments are available to those insured people. (sauce: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...).
>pushed by the wealthy to remain static What class war, conspiracy nonsense is this? Do you think "the rich" get together once a year, smoke cigars and discuss what policies to convince everyone of in order to keep the poors down because they are idiots who believe the world is a zero-sum-game?
If some groups have outsized resources to play that game, it wouldn't be surprising if they found themselves playing it. There doesn't have to be any conspiracy. Unless they take steps to interrupt the process, people's behavior naturally aligns with whatever is best for the group they feel they're part of.
It's how we got racism and lots of other toxic garbage. To pretend it doesn't exist is to give it a place to hide.
Sort of. No cigars though, just "how can we solve the poors without giving up what we have?" Notice no public policy or tax increases to actually solve the problems.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna30851839
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/politics/republican-do...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/bilderberg-group-me...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/30/18203911/davos-...
That the USA has a seriously messed up healthcare system and declining life expectancy is a problem for the USA, and part of the reason I didn't move there.
Because the rest of the world does not matter?
If there is a working longevity treatment, do you think that other nations will tolerate it being used for US billionaires and no one else?
Literally everyone ages. 8 billion potential patients on the planet, with the population still growing. If you sell the cure for USD 100 to half of them, you make a lot more money (real money, not just market value) than Elon Musk.
As for stagnation, sure earth itself is quite overpopulated, but there is nothing technologically stopping humanity from colonizing the solar system.
If humanity gets it shit together and becomes slightly more organized, those experiments in society will just happen in geographically different places.
The “red mars, blue mars, green mars” trilogy explores this quite well, even if the science is a bit dated, the politics aspects of the books are quite interesting, tackling future colonization and longevity’s political pressures and opportunities.
Depends how you look at it; from a "how much food can we grow" perspective, it's possible to put up hydroponics etc. everywhere (with enough effort) and feed a trillion.
Conversely, if you want to "solve" climate change with a reduced population (rather than rolling out new tech) the maximum sustainable number of humans is about 8 million at today's per-capita average emissions level.
"Maximum" is all about the tech and what it can let us do.
It used to be if you had some kids, it was a huuge investment, but you got a lot out of the deal after about 13 years.
But right now, children are still a huge investment, but the parents hardly get any economic incentive for it, the country has “captured” that for its own end.
If governments took this into account and “repaid” this back to the parents, I’m sure people will have way more children.
If societies were structured in such a way that children made economic sense to their parents, I’m sure shrinking population would not be a thing.
Now if something like this has moral problems in and off itself is a different question. I just want to point out that “developed countries are have fewer children” shouldn’t be taken as an absolute truth. It just developed countries as currently structured do not incentivize parents enough. Just look at Israel for example.
There’s been a lot of research on this because the effect is so pronounced.
> In decreasing order of strength, fertility (TFR) correlates negatively with education, [contraceptive prevalence], and GDP per capita, and positively with religiosity. [2]
If you’re educated, rich, non-religious and can bone with impunity you have somewhere between 1 and 2 kids on average, well below the replacement rate of 2.1
It is absolutely a fantastic deal to have kids in Finland where you get months and months of mat and pat leave, etc, and their birth rate is 1.37
Israel is only high because they’re a religious ethnostate and religiosity as the studies show is positively correlated with fertility.
Respectfully I do think the data shows we should take this for granted.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
[2] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...