The two concepts were often one in the same—a "magician" was simply any art that "we" considered to be not in keeping with "our" religious practices. The label was slung about freely for some thousand years.
There are some philosophers who attempted to divide miracles from magic. They tended to classify the latter as esoteric science confined entirely to the natural world with no supernatural elements, and the former as invoking the aid of some confirmed divine being. When one considers souls and demiurges to be part of the natural world, however, even this most imaginative delineation is an inherently blurry one.
Googlebot has been playing a multiple-choice flash card game on my site for months—the page picks a random question and gives you five options to choose from. Each URL contains all of the state of the last click: the option you chose, the correct answer, and the five buttons. Naturally, Google wants to crawl all the buttons, meaning the search tree has a branch factor of five and search space of about 5000^7 possible pages. Adding a robots.txt entry failed to fix this—now the page checks the user agent and tells Googlebot specifically to fuck off with a 403. Weeks later, I'm still seeing occasional hits. Worst of all it's pretty heavy-duty—the flash cards are for learning words, and the page generator sometimes sprinkles in items that look similar to the correct answer (i.e., they have a low edit distance.)
On the other hand there was a... thing crawling a search page on a separate site, but doing so in the most ass-brained way possible. Different IP addresses, all with fake user agents from real clients fetching search results for a database retrieval form with default options. (You really expect me to believe that someone on Symbian is fetching only page 6000 of all blog posts for the lowest user ID in the database?) The worst part about this one is that the URLs frequently had mangled query strings, like someone had tried to use substring functions to swap out the page number and gotten it wrong 30 times, resulting in Markov-like gibberish. The only way to get this foul customer to go away was to automatically ban any IP that used the search form incorrectly. So far I have banned 111,153 unique addresses.
robots.txt wasn't adequate to stop this madness, but I can't say I miss Ahrefs or DotBot trying to gather valuable SEO information about my constructed languages.
It sounds like the presumption that you would do this for money is the problem here—you don't have to "beg for scraps" if it's just a hobby done for fun.
...which is probably the most succinct way of describing where our dear Old Net has gone: swallowed up by the razor-thin margins of the professional creative economy.
There are plenty of textbook cases of enshittification that are covered by price increases—just look at Adobe and AutoCAD selling credits that are used just to launch the program. As long as it fits with the "claw back value from your customers and partners to feed your investors" pattern, ∂shit > 0.
Adobe has always been targetted at profressionals price wise. Making it SaaS made pirating harder and the high monthly price (and annoying dark patterns) excluded and alienated the general public which upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life. The problem there is mostly the lack of good competition in spaces like Lightroom but that's starting to change. The everyone-pirates-photoshop so don't bother trying to compete idea is now over.
They're alienating plenty of paying customers as well. Many people will not pay to rent software, and I expect that number will increase as the number of companies trying to collect rent on software increases. Because $10/month (let alone whatever adobe is trying to charge) never sounds like a lot, but multiply by the number of pieces of software (let alone some non-software flirting with the same gimmick) you regularly use and it quickly becomes absurd.
A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.
I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?
It’s not just software rental. Every online shop or service is turning towards revenue extraction by targeted pricing: Services that look at your IRS records or other public clues, and hop, you train travel, Amazon listing, car repairs are billed higher, exactly at your purchasing power.
Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.
In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.
> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
You never owned any Adobe product, you licensed it. And that license could be revoked at any time; while it is unlikely Adobe would go after an individual, the license that you agree to allows them to do so.
Adobe can say whatever they want in their EULA; whether it's legally enforceable in court is another matter.
Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."
> Tesla used to sell Model S vehicles with software-locked battery packs. This was a way to offer different range options without having to make production more complicated with different battery pack sizes.
> Later, Tesla started to offer owners of those software-locked vehicles the option to unlock the capacity for an additional cost. Tesla phased out the practice over the years, but the company still used software-locked battery packs when doing warranty replacements of battery packs of certain capacities that it doesn’t produce anymore.
Upgrading the head unit for a 2013 Model S triggered an error and reverted this old generation battery to software lock.
This clearly was a software bug and Tesla reverted it for all customers using these older batteries.
This has literally nothing to do with subscriptions (the word subscribe isn’t even in the article once). I don’t even think you read the article.
> Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range.
> He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.
> ...
> Tesla told him that he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the capability:
It's all in the article.
You can get all stuck-up about the word "subscription" but guy goes into Tesla for a non-battery related service and loses 2/3 thirds of the range the car claimed it had unless he forks over 5k.
Well the problem with Adobe is that some of the really crucial tools are essentialy abandoned.
InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.
Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.
That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.
You're right; unfortunately I can't edit my comment to remove Adobe from it. Though they are plenty guilty of 'adding value' in the worst possible ways.
I 'member Adobe's Creative Suite costing hundreds of dollars. Photoshop alone clocked in at 699$, the full CS6 was 2599$ [1]. Either you were a professional and paid dearly every odd year or you were a student and used a cracked/keygen'd CS6.
Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC.
One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them.
As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos.
You just successfully rationalized the exact tactic that Adobe sales team pitched to their leadership: That most users will pay the monthly subscription because the math “evens out.”
Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
> Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
I suspect that most, even a lot of professional users, could get along just fine with CS1 or CS2. The core functionality hasn’t changed all that much and in a lot of ways, CS/CC apps have gotten worse. The only reason these individuals aren't still using those old versions is because they aren’t well suited for modern machines.
I’d personally be elated if Adobe started selling a lightly modernized single-purchase Photoshop CS1, even if it cost what single purchase PS licenses used to. The lack of cruft and UI churn alone would be worth it before even getting into the savings compared to a subscription.
As a hobbyist, I owned CS4 (purchased on sale) and kept using it for ages. Turning it into a subscription might be fine for bleeding edge professionals who care about whatever new bells and whistles every year to finish a job 2% faster, but the ongoing costs cut out anybody who isn’t making money with it.
Thankfully there are better competitors like Affinity in that space now.
It's enshittification because most people don't need the 2 year upgrade cycle. For most individuals and small businesses, it was more like buy once and use forever.
A majority or at least large minority of Adobe users were/are on Macs.
The Mac version has lived through 68K MacOS pre and post System 7, PPC Mac pre and post OS X, x86 Macs pre and post Carbon support and now ARM Macs. After each transition , there was a limited amount of time that you could use the same version and even a smaller amount of time that you would have wanted to.
But the same argument applies that applies to Figma. It’s a professional tool that should help you generate income far greater than the cost
Severo-Kurilsk, an island town destroyed by a similar tsunami in 1956, lost its port again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severo-Kurilsk — the rest of the settlement was rebuilt on higher ground, leaving only the port vulnerable.
The settlement is notable as having belonged to the Japanese in late 19th and early 20th centuries, who once relocated islanders there. Russian Wikipedia says they were Ainu.
> No machine learning model was ever built using pure “human knowledge” — because then it wouldn’t be a learning model. It would be a hard coded algorithm.
I guess the author hasn't heard of expert systems? Systems like MYCIN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin) were heralded as incredible leaps forward at the time, and they indeed consisted of pure “human knowledge.”
I am disturbed whenever a thinkpiece is written by someone who obviously didn't do their research.
Exactly. The expert system era was the first victim of the Bitter Lesson, as it was blown away when backpropagation was figured out at the end of the eighties.
An author familiar with the history of AI would have mentioned this instead of glossing it over as "not a learning model"—dismissing a problem-solving technique because it doesn't use regression serves no constructive purpose.
Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble.
1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.
2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.
3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.
> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates.
Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure end relies on the bottom of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model where the model is known to be wrong. (LNT is useful for public policy - you should seek to minimize the exposure from any industrial processes and materials to zero - but it is bad for public health in telling people that any exposure increases their cancer risk.)
Sounds like you might know this but I'll add it for the public dialogue.
LNT is useful because you work with an abundance of caution when it comes to radiation. It's difficult to know what type of radiation someone received and where. Both of these can dramatically change the risk of exposure. It's not hard to measure in a lab, but an accident isn't a lab and you can't just go placing sensors all over every radiation worker's body (at least yet. Small sensors embedded in clothing would change this).
So what do you do? You purposefully over estimate. Because if your estimate is wrong, the human is much more likely to survive if you incorrectly assumed they received more than they actually did than if you error by assuming they got less than they actually did. Failure analysis is a critical part to any engineering or safety plan.
Why not over estimate as much when higher dosages are received? Well that's because it matters a lot less. As dosage increases all those nuances of where and what type matter less (they still matter).
It's still all highly complex and what I'll say is that if you haven't spent at least a year studying this stuff you're more under water than you think. It's great that there's a lot of educational material out there but unfortunately when it comes to complex topics like nuclear many of them do more harm than good. Pro nuclear armchair experts tend to be as uninformed as anti nuclear armchair experts. So like the LNT, it is always good to work with an abundance of caution. Especially when talking about complex subjects on the internet
I wonder how often people don't understand how radiation affects health- because nominal levels don't hit the news. but, oh boy, when a single Fukushima isotope decay is detected on the coast of California- its national news.
We're really good at detecting radiation. Like REALLY good. It's because we spent a lot of money during the Cold War trying to detect nuclear materials. This includes underground weapons testing, being able to detect underground nuclear signatures via satellites, and even very trace amounts on people's clothing because it can help detect spies. It then was found that these things could be used for tons of stuff, such as tracking not spies lol.
But seriously, we can detect levels thousands of times lower than what's dangerous. You can even get pretty good dosimiters for like $100 these days
In terms of your first point, I'm not sure I understand how the overall cancer rate being increased by dubious activities on the part of some people implies that efforts to cure cancer on the part of others are "not entirely noble". On the surface, this seems like a non-sequitur -- could you explain your reasoning further?
> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.
You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this
Radon, a perfectly natural source of radiation, cause more cancer than all the other nuclear sources combined. Stop it with the nuclear fear mongering!
Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.
Virtually every single advancement in science, engineering, and technology disproportionately benefits the wealthy, because they already own everything. That's a great reason to fight against the massive imbalance of wealth distribution, but a terrible reason to halt all human progress.
1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
3. Unlike other technological advantages, life extension is a _multiplier_ for inequality. The Undead pay no estate tax. The Undead never change their minds. The Undead never have to give up their bought-and-paid-for seats in Congress.
Wouldn't a treatment for Alzheimer's be more accessible to the wealthy than the poor, making it unethical by your definition? Isn't it good that evil rich people often lose their cognitive capabilities thus limiting the harm they can do?
Alzheimer's treatment levels the playing field by restoring to sufferers something of which they have been bereaved: normal mental function. Even if only a subset of the population has access to it, all they're gaining is normalcy. Moreover, it can plausibly be comped by health insurance, especially in countries with universal healthcare. In a healthy economy, the political class has an incentive to keep workers healthy and productive longer, and to reward them for their service with a comfortable and dignified retirement, by making such medicines available to them.
Conversely, pure life extension creates an exceptional state of existence—no one except those using them has a chance of living a thousand years. The wealthy have a clear-cut motivation not to let these drugs become readily accessible, as it is a competitive advantage that feeds directly into their pecuniary pursuits; they no longer need to worry about:
1. Dynastic management (heirs are unreliable—be your own);
2. Estate taxes (the government wants some of your money—hiding it adequately can be tiresome);
3. Religious threats of punishment after death (if such things matter to them—probably not); or
4. "You can't take it with you," which is perhaps the main reason why billionaire philanthropists exist.
As such, we aren't going to see lobbying efforts to democratize life extension cures—ever. There are real incentives for the rich and powerful to lobby against such a possibility.
Finally, we already know that many proponents of life extension research in the VC space have neo-reactionary sympathies or aspirations; our favorite whipping boy Peter Thiel has contributed directly to the "Dark Enlightenment" movement. These are people who are not hiding their desires to become feudal lords and absolute despots, and not taking them at their word in such matters is the sort of 5D mental gymnastics that belongs on 4chan.
It is much less of a problem if the playing field is level, which is an eventual outcome with conventional quality-of-life efforts like Alzheimer's research. While it is not out of the realm of science fiction possibility that all humanity could someday be blessed with the gift of immortality—as well as fix the planet and somehow keep our population at a replacement level—the nutjobs currently militating for it are about as trustworthy as a Ferengi handshake.
Oh no, not a CGP Grey video. And a parable, at that!
It's a shame the humans in the story still die of natural causes, otherwise it might actually be relevant to the discourse around the ethics of life extension. The dragon is a metaphor for normal preventative diseases and does not scale well to the demographic crises caused by functional immortality.
> It is a very specific, high-effort kind of ... whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
Yep. Welcome to like 99% of cutting-edge medicine, stretching back into prehistory.
> But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
There aren't many ailments that affect rich folks but don't affect any poor folks. I'd rather the rest of mankind wait twenty years for the treatments than to never have had them at all.
The ailments peculiar to the rich (gout notwithstanding) are largely ameliorated by functional immortality, but these ameliorations are greatly diminished by universal immortality. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment and then rethink again whether you want to give these people unlimited time to cosplay as Sauron.
"It's important that you must die, so that the rich can also die" -- you. Can you really not come up with better solutions to psychopaths having too much power than everyone must die?
One intuition pump that always works well in these discussions is to imagine that death is already solved, and all your worst nightmares are true. So we live in a world where a small number of humans own and control everything forever. What is your proposed solution? Kill everyone who is old? Really? That's the best you got? Literally just force everyone to die?
We already live in a world where most people's lives are made shit by the whims of a few rich psychopaths, it's just that right now the specific set of rich psychopaths randomly changes every so often. So? Why is that better? Why does it matter to me that the boots on my neck belong to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos instead of John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt?
That sounds similar the prevailing criticism of biotech companies: their primary concern is to develop treatments for the rich or, at a very minimum, common (and often trivial) conditions in first world nations. In other words, for people who can afford to pay. The only real difference in the latter case is that wealthy nations are pulling the strings.
Not to mention everyone would be better off if the money invested in these VCs was invested in clean energy, public transportation and whatnot. Many of us just have to live with the knowledge that we are handicapping our life expectancies just by living in a heavily polluted major city. Living in São Paulo I'm reminded by national news every year how many cigarettes I am "smoking" daily just by existing in this place
Aside from being an unpopular opinion, it's also a rather stupid one. I can think of no better way to say it. Virtually every technology currently used by the majority of human beings in the world to make their lives better in some way started as a privilege of the wealthy, but the tendency of a timespan between it going from that to something widely and affordably affordable has historically not only held ground but shortened.
To deny the possibility of breakthrough medical therapies that possibly save millions of families from the tragedy of prematurely losing loved ones just out of some half baked spite against the rich is grossly short-sighted at best. If anything is unethical, it's such a worldview itself.
Immortality is not just another technological advancement. It entrenches power permanently and creates a world of slaves who will never escape the grip of their masters. Democracy would permanently die and the rule of law would be whatever the overlords decide. Imagine an immortal Caligula. Do you want Elmo to be your permanent master, for example?
Dude, let's not jump the gun here. If a fear of an entrenched immortal oligarchy is your justification for the idea of forbidding billionaires from funding medical innovations that extend life and health-span, you're being a huge bit too optimistic, to the point of absurdity.
We'll be struggling, failing and incrementally advancing with medical advancements that merely stave off the vast hellscape of age-related and degenerative diseases for a moderately longer healthy life long, long before we discover a way to enable a reality of immortal billionaires.
That aside, even if we did, I have my massive doubts about the inevitability of all you predict. The vast range of technologies already available to billionaires today would make a medieval king or Roman emperor salivate at having them with dreams of total control, yet if anything, the technologies they do have (and which states have), have only increased the complexity and Swiss cheese nature of the modern world in the direction of also expanding basic freedoms and instabilities of power of all kinds for more people than ever, often directly at the cost of former power monopolies.
What's more, right now, both massively wealthy states and huge corporations administer much of what happens in the world, and both could arguably claim to have much more power, resources and even in a certain way near immortality than any hypothetical immortal billioniare oligarch as per your prediction, yet hysterics aside, I don't see either totally killing off democracy at all.
People still protect, governments still change and fall, big companies still go bankrupt or lose market share, and no one power center is nearly as in charge as some paint it to be. If it were, you wouldn't be predicting, you'd be speaking in the present tense perhaps.
Either way, the groundwork of you fear already exists in a fashion, and it's not creating quite the total boogeyman you're trying to depict.
Don't let sci fi guide your perception too much, reality is so much more complex and counterbalanced all over the place.
This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument.
I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time.
The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks...
It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal.
The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict.
There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?!
The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin:
> To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair
> The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress
> The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people
> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish
In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good.
...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.)
If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?
It might not be the mainstream on HN, but most popular polls I've seen show similar trends of a lesser proportion of people wanting to live longer, citing the same societal collapse concerns. In any case, whether something is espoused by the majority or the minority doesn't really add much weight.
I don't think there is an "anti-aging agenda". Not everything needs to be seen through the lens of an ideological movement. But I do think that there is an unhealthy persistent cynicism underneath the current popular culture. This cynicism makes people not want to be optimistic/idealistic in fear of being wrong or looking naive. I am not suggesting we should all tint our lenses rose colored, but I do think allowing people to expand their optimistic ceiling is warranted; especially when it is so easy to imagine a dystopic future currently.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed your sardonic reply.
The distance between a scientific revolution being accessible to the ultra-wealthy and the average consumer is measured in years, and shrinking rapidly.
I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
You’re not wrong, but still most people would want to live healthily longer regardless, and it’s kind of unavoidable that the progress that can be made will be made.
Also: The Future is not really looking very bright for anyone besides the already-wealthy. I don't know why you'd want to live in the future. If you're an average middle-class American, the peak best time to live ever (stretching out into the past and predicting into the future) is probably the 1990s or so. My standard of living is slightly worse than my (Boomer) parents', and my kid's standard of living is very likely going to be worse than my own, and I would bet that her future kid's standard of living will be further worse.
There are some philosophers who attempted to divide miracles from magic. They tended to classify the latter as esoteric science confined entirely to the natural world with no supernatural elements, and the former as invoking the aid of some confirmed divine being. When one considers souls and demiurges to be part of the natural world, however, even this most imaginative delineation is an inherently blurry one.