Estimate the Cost of Immortality

We all know that human pregnancy doesn't scale. We all know that some other problems do scale. So I really don't understand those 18 points to the comment. One can always think up many different analogies leading to different conclusions. Even if we ignore scaling issue, sigma of duration of pregnancy is smth like a week perhaps. However other processes like creative thinking or inventing new ideas might have sigma comparable to mean.

Now you speak like an IT manager. :D

I would estimate approximately

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Is it permissible to write III^^^III ?

I do want anti-aging research to work. It's just that even a 2% chance that there's a sufficiently difficult short-term roadblock to engineering anti-aging tech would guarantee that no amount of resources could spur us to engineer biological immortality for that many people with 99% confidence in the next 20 years.

I don't think that all of the increased lifespan is due to healthcare spending. Various enviromental regulation likely increased lifespan. Our current paradigm of drug development unfortunately get's exponentially more expensive via Eroom's law. I doubt that simply spending more money in the same way produces linear progress.

I think the problem of the mythical man month also exists in research. You can't simply throw in more money. Given researchers money can often make them spend money on fancy equipment instead of thinking hard about what to do.

As far as hopes for the future of biology goes, I hope that Theranos will introduce something like Moore's law into blood testing prices. If it succeeds with that mission it's not simply because there a lot of money thrown into blood testing but because Theranos focus on producing cheap blood testing while currently the companies in the market have no incentives to test cheaply.

YCombinators turn to fund biotech companies also fills me with hope. Bikanta Nanodiamond technology that allows very high resultion imaging of anything that you can hit with an antibody fills me with hope. The promise 100X more precise cancer imaging but if their technology really works and the can do it cheap, it has application beyond just cancer because being able to image anything at high resolution will allow us to learn to tag a lot of different things with antibodies. You could tag drugs with the nanodiamonds to see where in the body the drug travels.

The fact that nanodiamonds are a solution also suggests that simply moving all research dollars to biology would be bad because nanodiamonds needed a lot of physics research to become viable. Better signal processing algorithms and AI might also further increase the precision of their imaging.

Another great biotech company founded by YCombinator is uBiome. Thanks to relatively cheap DNA sequencing they track bacteria population on skin/mouth/gut/nose and penis/vagina. At present sequencing prices their technology isn't mass market compatible but if sequencing prices continue to drop at rates of Moore's law or faster than Moore's law we will have a new area of medicine. In 20 years we might all consciously repopulate our bacteria populations.

Money (AKA the free market economy) is a way of allocating resources efficiency. The alternative - a command economy - is where some central agent decides how resources should be allocated.

By using money and buying and selling goods and services, we are already pooling our resources. The money thing is a way to decide what we should do with them, where decisions are made by people choosing to spend money on one thing rather than another.

Lumifer is a bit heavy-handed with his name-calling, but I think his objection is basically the right one.

The market is an information processing machine that solves problems too complex to be solved by any other means we have yet tried. Our entire experience with non-money economies is a stupefying lack of efficiency. But the OP asks about getting rid of ownership, not money, and that hasn't been tried.

So I have a refrigerator with some food in it and I'm set for the next day or two eating-wise. If I don't own the food in the refrigerator, by any reasonable definition of ownership I can think of this means I am NOT set for then next day or two as anybody who can reasonably predict that at least a few people have food in refrigerators can believe that THEY are set for at least the next few hours because they can walk up to those refrigerators and take the food. Without ownership how is that avoided? And don't tell me by "politeness" or "convention," the politeness and convention you would be appealing to is that you don't take other people's stuff, i.e., you have let ownership seep back in to your system.

And beyond the food, I don't even own the refrigerator! And the good folks at the power company may conspire to make 99.99% reliable electricity for the refrigerator, but currently they do that because it pays well, so in this other system, do we have a mechanism to suggest that this will still happen?

Considering the difference in productivity between market economies and non-market economies, empirically you'd have to estimate that the market system is about as important to production as are lungs to the metabolism of land based mammals. Sure, without lungs, there'd be some way of getting some oxygen to the cells, but probably 1e-3 o 1e-6 as much or some such crazy reduction.

If you want to get rid of money, but you don't want mass starvation, pollution, diseases, dehydration, and all the other things that would occur with a cratering of production and distribution, you need to propose a system that will take its place. It is not the job of people "accepting your counterfactual" to assume that there is a reasonable one in the wings. And if people don't argue against your counterfactual proposal to replace money, they are probably just uneducated in economics.

About the only counterfactual I can guess is that humans get taken care of by a different intelligence. Whether that is machine AI, or Aliens, or cyborg slave chimpanzees and apes, I would bet dollars to donuts that our caretakers providing us with all the stuff we currently get and then some, will have something which is informationally equivalent to money in their system. No matter how smart you are, there are just a whole class of decisions which when distributed cause a system to be more efficient than when those decisions are centralized.

Another version of the starvation objection to this hypothetical is this:

Such a system would rather quickly result in large groups of people inventing ownership and protecting it by force, by threat of violence. Maybe not the first time the half-ripe tomato you don't own but which you planted is eaten by someone else before you eat it you will not sign on to this alternative. But if you manage to stay alive long enough, you will soon be trading your labor for food and be incredibly grateful that the same system which is LETTING you trade your labor for food is also setting up powerful violent incentives for others to leave you in peace with "your" food.

This is a version of my own "objection" to anarchism. Anarchy is unstable to the formation of what is, effectively, government, and the essence of government is a system that tells you what is NOT yours, what is yours, and provides powerful and violent responses to those who "disagree" with their characterization. If you are lucky, you get the American constitution, if you are half-lucky you get the Mafia in 19th and 20th century Sicily, and if your luck is lousy you get roving militias in Toyota pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in the back.

I await your counterfactual proposal on how to prevent the formation of a government or a militia.

So far not mentioned in replies to this is that there are many examples of productive organizations that do not organize around money. Two leap to mind:

• Military. Rarely do the various units and platoons trade with the other components of the military for their supplies, nor do they bid on missions. To the extent trade occurs it is usually barter and usually outside official accepted ways of doing things.

• Business units. Large businesses may use separate calculations of returns to determine some very macro choices between business units.

But there is essentially always some size of organization below which the subunits or individuals are not trading using money to get things done. Marketers don't bid to engineers to get the products they think they can sell. Engineers don't bid on the projects they want to work on within the organization.

Indeed the fact that firms form to avoid a whole bunch of bilateral trading is analyzed by one of the most respected economists ever Ronald Coase on the Nature of the Firm.

So another version of the answer to the OP would be that the reason EVERYONE on the planet doesn't do it is because the coordination problem without money and trade is too hard (meaning you will get a vastly suboptimal result) to do on a global scale, but it works on smaller scales. So whatever it is you want to achieve, form an organization to solve it, give them a pile of money to trade with the rest of the world, and do not require them to organize internally on a trade/money basis. If you make the organization too big, it will either organize internally using trade or it will be very ineffectual.

Assuming everybody does what they are doing now, the situation will remain the same as it is now. In other words, people will still go to their jobs and do their work, the stores will give them stuff, and so on.

In practice everything would collapse, for the reasons implied by gjm in his comments. Namely, since the people in the store don't ask me if I have been going to my job, just as they don't do that now, that means I can get away with going to the store and getting stuff, but not going to my job. Or, even if I do go to my job, I can take a lot more stuff from the stores than I'm actually contributing by my work.

I was thinking about this a bit more. In my first answer, I was talking about what would actually happen if you got rid of money. But the question implies that people are suddenly altruistic ("pool our collective resources"). The problem with this is how you decide who should do what. And it might turn out that the situation posited ("without worrying about who owes whom?") is impossible in principle. Even to keep things going as they are now, someone needs to decide what needs to be done and by whom. Someone needs to decide who should give you the things you need to survive, and how much to give you. All of that implies that someone is saying "A should give X to B" and this is just a way of worrying about who owes whom what.

Would someone be able to enlighten me on what the cons of a hypothetical situation in which everyone on the planet decides to temporarily get rid of the concept of money or currency, and pool our collective resources and ideas without worrying about who owes who?

This is called "communism". Go read Karl Marx.

Free shops and online equivalents like Freecycle work for people getting rid of stuff they don't want, but not for much beyond that. For people to create complex and valuable things, such as pencils, what institutions would you have instead of self-interest, security of property, contract law, and a medium of exchange?

That is not to say that those institutions are the only possible ones, but I don't know of any others that do the job. Communes don't scale, or last. Central direction only scales up into a disaster.

Free riding

I think that under your example, there are by definition no drawbacks.

If Ed is annoyed that everyone else has gone commie, then by definition we are not talking about your hypothetical (We didn't get 'everyone on the planet'). So we can't suppose drawbacks that involve 'someone not liking it'.

Generally speaking, a situation in which everyone freely decides to work together has no downside (except in odd cases like everyone deciding to work together to burn down all the plants on Earth).

If I were to look for a realistic problem -- other than probability, human nature, and logistics -- it would be the word "temporarily". I don't imagine that coming out of the universal accord would go smoothly.