Thursday 27 June 2019

Who Wants To Live Forever?

For the first time in 100 years, Britons are dying earlier. The UK now has the worst health trends in western Europe and doctors and experts believe that the impact of austerity is a major factor
Statisticians first noticed in 2013, just after the austerity cuts were introduced, that rises in life expectancy in the UK had begun to slow down and then gradually, the graph flattened out until a few years ago when it started to decline.
Obviously, as it was the Conservative Government who placed gave us austerity, they claim that 'Life expectancy cannot be expected to increase forever' but the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries said it now expects men aged 65 to die at 86.9 years, down from 87.4 years, while women are likely to die at 89.2 years, down from 89.7 years.
According to a study by New Scientist, one in five adults say, if possible, they would definitely want to live forever and companies are developing the means of merging the human brain with artificial intelligence to achieve so-called 'cybernetic immortality' which involves uploading their thoughts and consciousness into a machine and living forever as a type of computer hologram.
Another possibility of achieving immortality is through advances in genetic studies where the cells linked with the ageing process are effectively switched off.
The moral issue is that even if we could live forever, should we? Overpopulation is the obvious problem which lead to mass food poverty, and rapidly speed up the damaging environmental problems we already face today.
If achieved, it would be the biggest scientific breakthrough in the history of mankind but while nobody wants to die, or at the very least not die before they are due, would you want to live forever it is an intriguing question, despite the Governments best efforts to make sure we don't even reach our allotted time on the Earth at all.

3 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

wont be a population problem. only the 1% and leftist leaders will be able to afford to live forever...

Falling on a bruise said...

Universal Basic Income will be looked at again i guess.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

yes UBI will come back. I think it is near certain to happen unless our world becomes unrecognizable - like some dystopian movies/books. i think AI will force the issue. not sure when, suspect 2035 to 2050 (should have general purpose AI by then, and AI based robotics).

people will always find a way to gain power (always economic) as it is human nature (sorry leftists you can't change this, you can only repress it with a fascist government). so even with UBI there will be "rich" and "poor".

i don't know how people will gain power in a world where a machine (electronic or analog w/electronics) can do things faster, better, and cheaper than human labor including the "creative" tasks like art and innovation. can probably look at some deep futures and identify a few possibilities. But, there will be people with more power (wealth) and people with less power (poor).

i do expect that, as happened with capitalism, living in "poverty" on UBI will become a much better life in 2050 than it is today (poverty in America is not bad - hence the massive non-stop migration to America).