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by roughly 911 days ago
I don’t know if this is supposed to be a dunk or something, but - yes, my grandma lived to 93 because of modern medicine. I was happy she did. That’s the tension: things that are good for me personally can be bad for the world at large (I mean, not my grandma’s longevity specifically - she was a lovely woman), and a big part of emotional and intellectual maturity is recognizing that indeed the world is full of tradeoffs and I can’t have everything I want.

Specific to:

> all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.

No, that’s not all it really means, not in our society, not in our time. As Ted Chiang put it, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us,” and that’s also the case here: the outcome of this technology isn’t that my grandma lives to 150, it’s that Vladimir Putin lives to 150. If my grandma needs to die at 90 so we don’t have immortal god-emperors - if I have to die at 90 - then so be it. Some day we may live in a world where longevity technology is an unalloyed good, but until that day, we don’t get to just put the good stuff on the ledger and ignore the bad stuff.