[LINK] Larry = Harry sans magic? Google vs. Death

I haven't read the HN comments, nor do I intend to, but it doesn't seem particularly mind-boggling to me that many people are more concerned by the size of the advantage-gulf between them and more powerful humans than they are by the absolute level of advantage they enjoy.

After all, for most of our lives more powerful humans have been the biggest threat we have to worry about, and the magnitude of the threat they pose has been proportional to the size of that advantage-gulf.

I'm not saying it's a rational response given the specifics of this situation, merely that it's an understandable habit of thought.

"It will be only for the rich" is a valid concern. Not one that should make us discard antideathism, but one that is worth being addressed fully and seriously, not discarded as "it boggles the mind". The prospect of having a few rich people living forever while most still know old age and death is a real potential failure mode. And it's not like the world isn't full of places without universal healthcare in which people who don't have the money are left dying while they could be saved.

commenters are angry this thing that we don't even have yet and didn't even dream of a few hours earlier will be 'only for the rich'. It really does boggle the mind

This fits Robin Hanson's model of inequality talk being about grabbing.

The saddest thing about the reaction on HN is that so many commenters are angry this thing that we don't even have yet and didn't even dream of a few hours earlier will be 'only for the rich'.

I agree. These commenters seem to be ignorant of both the history of technological progress and modern socioeconomic reality. In case after case - cars, flight, computers, cell phones, electricity, indoor plumbing - a technology started out very expensive and rapidly became inexpensive and widely available as it became popular (in some sense, the most important factor determining the price of a technology is not its innate sophistication, but its popularity - the more popular it becomes, the less expensive; and anti-aging technology will be very popular). Furthermore, there are very few health-improvement technologies that are both 1) highly effective and 2) available only to the wealthy - expensive medical treatments are usually experimental. Also, one of the big problems with our current system is that it spends millions of dollars on the homeless.

Yay! was my first thought too.

I work at Google and have given it some serious thought. Without going into to much detail, the timing is not yet correct. However, steps are being taken in that direction.

Making other people miserable seems like defection.

Looking at the individual level, most of us had close friends who had lost 30 years of potential life.

Suppose you could either extend the life of one close friend by 30 years, or the lives of all of your friends by 10 years. (Hopefully you have more than three friends.) Page is pointing out that the second could possibly be on the table, but it wouldn't be obvious because we're so used to treating rare serious diseases instead of making everyone a bit healthier or live a bit longer on the margins.

Anyway, the only reason that we lose "only 3 years" to cancer is that something else is going to kill us not long after if cancer doesn't. However, if we were able to prevent all other forms of death, cancer would still kill all of us eventually.

I tend to think of curing cancer as not just "adding 3 years of life", but as a small but vital part of developing extreme medical (that is, organic) longevity.

SENS has been making good progress in anti-aging area with only a few million dollars of donations per year.

The aims are completely different, though. What portion of this budget is dedicated to solving "the challenge of aging"?

That is not encouraging for challenging aging.

This post, based on this model suggests that mortality rate is doubling every 8 years or so (I think it was discussed on LW and written up on gwern.net before), possibly due to the linear decline in the immune system function with age. Thus finding a way to keep the immune system ship-shape could make a drastic difference in life expectancy.

This is a good sign not because money-throwing is sufficient, but because it's necessary.

Google have processing power backed by trained engineers, which might be important too. Google can do things like "Folding@home" on their own.

Anti-aging researchers talk a lot about how they could do so much more with proper funding. I mean, they would say that, but that doesn't mean it isn't true - after all, the odds that the optimal amount of funding was that small is ... small.

Also, Google bring credibility and, perhaps, greater competence/strategy at approaching moonshots.