But the idea that it's more acceptable to torture nearly every human on earth because "you live, you die" - that sounds like, at best, a local maxima. And even if there were insurmountable resource issues, we should still not hand wave things, but any explicitly admit our policy is to permanently destroy people, look them in the eye when we free their resources. Like a real world OOM killer.
You know, spouting transhumanism would be far more socially acceptable if you didn't answer the legitimate questions spawned by mild transhumanism with severe, world-dominating transhumanism.
For instance, words like "world run by single intelligent entity" carry an extremely high prior chance of denoting an incredibly terrible idea. At the very least, you've taken something that was already an argument, statements that already required justification, and "fixed it" by appealing to statements that require far more justification. Basically, you've answered "Won't the elimination of aging cause a population boom?" with a combination of "Not if we do it in the way that most easily allows Malthusian population booms!" and "Not if someone I approve of is made Dictator of the World."
And, of course, your next line is that your planned Dictator isn't even a human being in the first place. While I fully know where you're coming from on this point, it still requires far more justification and explanation than either of us can give in an HN comment, and should a priori be considered a bloody terrible idea.
It's my guess that anti aging will happen slowly, and hopefully we can also slowly make policy changes over that time too. I just don't see the default answer of "don't worry, we have a process to go around killing people" to be acceptable.
But if the point was to say that major changes in the world could have major negative consequences, yeah, sure. Maybe they aren't solvable. But just don't pretend that Natural Death is OK because it's slightly alleviating one problem.
Imagine, for a moment, that we have come up with a way to prevent aging and death tomorrow. How do you support the sudden 50% increase in population growth? Babies aren't going to stop being born. Old folks aren't going to stop consuming resources. Are you willing to give up your food to help feed the 56 million extra people alive every year? Are you willing to give up the right to have children so someone 100+ years old can continue to live and eat?
There's a lot wrong with the Torchwood "Miracle Day" miniseries, but it's worth watching the first five episodes to see one writer's interpretation of how we would handle it. It's perhaps a tad bit cynical, but it's also not unreasonable.
Until we have the ability to support exponential population growth (through the ability to populate the universe, or social controls on when or if you can have children), death is going to be a required part of life. You live, you die, you make space on this earth for the generations which follow. What's so vile about that?