[alpineidyll3]

People love to have opinions about how technologies should develop, but time and again, market realities are what guide their development. People easily get emotional about life extension, and it grabs a lot of attention because of that, but all those feelings don't measure up to the impossible to extrapolate tertiary effects of any technology which transforms lives, life extension definitely being one.

I'd argue that it's pretty clear that lipitor is partially to blame for our present gerontocracy muddle, but the issue there is that lipitor transfers mortality from the heart to many other conditions, some of which impair thinking. Life extension isn't a monolith, nor are the mechanisms of cellular age in animals. It's a blanket for 1000s of possible technologies. Productive conversations about it would be nuanced, and related to details about a particular technology, which these conversations never seem to rise to the level of. Definitely not this piece or fukuyama's either.

I come to HN for nuance.