In defense of Transhuman development
A certain quite strong meme seems to be going around these days, and has been doing that for a while. You've probably heard it before - "all starvation, extreme poverty and poverty-related disease and suffering could be cured today, if only people gave enough money and devoted enough resources to it". This might be true (though it has also been disputed), and has no doubt helped countless of relief organizations raise funds for their good work. That's great, and the meme should be commended for it (if intangible things like memes can be commended for anything). However, recently it has becoming increasingly clear that the meme is also being abused for purposes most nefarious.
It is slowly becoming more and more clear that we are approaching a revolution just as great as the Industrial Revolution once was, and maybe even more so - the Aging Revolution. As medicine and science keeps advancing, we are approaching an era where we'll have the technology to obsolete aging and age-related death. In short, medicine will be able to make us live as young and healthy for a lot longer, perhaps even forever. The view that we'll be able to achieve an eternal youth during our own lifetimes is endorsed by the SENS project, and even many of its vocal critics think that the healthy lifespan could be increased, though they don't think aging could be entirely prevented. In any case the general direction does seem to be clear - given sufficient funding, the ability to drastically increase our lifespan will soon be upon us.
I have often talked about this issue and promoted it in various circles. There's usually much debate about the desirability of an eternal life, with some criticism being more valid than the rest. However, one argument - one that sounds like it'd make perfect sense if you didn't stop to think about it too closely - pops up every now and then. "We could cure malaria and extreme poverty and [insert disease here] whenever we wanted to - isn't it more important to concentrate on that?"
On the surface, this sounds like a good argument, and on a certain level, it is. We'd already have the technology to help a huge numbers of people, to lift Africa out of poverty (unless we can't, of course), to provide hundreds of millions with clean drinking water. No further research is needed - just money. Isn't it then madness to pour billions into technologies that are still under development, and would only help those who are going to live long lives anyway? Wouldn't it be better to help those that we can help already, cheaply and easily?
Yes and no. This abuse of this meme begins to fall apart when you consider that for one, it has been going around for several decades now. People have been saying that "we could cure malaria any day now" for many years, but regardless of that, malaria still hasn't been cured. Nobody in the life extension crowd is saying that foreign aid should be cut, and it shouldn't, but it must also be recognized that if we really could cure malaria (or extreme poverty, or whatever) that easily, it would've been done already. People talking about radical life extension are often told to "get real" and "concentrate on the problems at hand", but it's not the life extension advocates who are out of this world. The folks basing their criticism on this meme are.
Mankind's ability or inability to do something is based on far more than the simplistic vision that this meme suggests. Pure technological ability isn't the only component - the political will is just as important. If we'd have the technological ability to collectively do thing X, but thing X requires Y billion dollars and we don't care enough to collectively contribute that Y billion dollars, then we do not have the ability to do it, no matter what our technology.
Life extension, on the other hand, is something that will benefit from far greater political will once that meme starts properly spreading. Very few people want to die, and fewer still want to suffer from all the problems and ailments that old age brings. Once the word truly starts spreading that radical life extension is getting close, billions upon billions of dollars will be invested to it. The unfortunate fact is that in the current world, it is very difficult to actually eradicate extreme poverty, despite the fact that we'd have the means to it. Compared to that, developing life extension is going to be insanely easy, despite the fact that we do not yet have the full technology at hand. That is realism, and that is what anybody should point out when told to "get real". Note that this is saying nothing about the desirability of the current way of things - were it up to me, sure, we could take the moment to eradicate malaria before continuing on with aging research. That sort of vision is, however, not very realistic.
Not to mention that the entire "shouldn't we do more important things first" question is a false dilemma. There are plenty of things that we can take money out of to benefit life extension, and there's nothing to say that foreign aid or AIDS research or whatever should suffer. In fact, it is entirely possible that the money for life extension will come from money that's currently spent on things like cosmetics and movies (not to attack movies as a form of culture, but surely we can all agree that saving lives is more important than making moving pictures). Right now, the life extension project MPrize is funded by private donors, who presumably are unable to spend the money they gift to personal comforts afterwards - a major, serious life extension project would no doubt benefit from huge private contributions from people who wouldn't give a penny to foreign aid but would very much want to live forever. And if that doesn't satisfy you, then yes, admittedly a large amount of the funding would probably come out of government budgets. But that still doesn't mean the money would have to be taken from healthcare and foreign aid - how about cutting military expenses instead? Or culture funding? (again, not to denounce culture as unimportant, but surely it must be considered second to healthcare) Or anything else but the things that help save lives?
So far, this entire essay has been based on the assumption that curing malaria (or whatever) first would be a more important goal in principle, if only it were possible. Let's stop for a moment to question that assumption. Assume that we can save, say, 500 million people from dying and extend their lifespans by, say, sixty years. Then assume that we can alternatively save six billion, minus those 500 million people we chose to sacrifice, from dying and extend their lifespans by a thousand years (this is assuming that they don't die of other causes first, but hey, that's what the first scenario assumes too). If the six billion number sounds too high for you, then let's cut it down to two billion (to represent the technology probably benefitting those in the industrialized countries first, the rest only later on). Still the difference in magnitude is enormous. Which one would you choose? The needs of the many outweigh those of the few. (And before anyone chimes in with "but we could do good thing X with a fraction of the funds life extension requires", then let's indeed do that good thing X while researching life extension - after all, if it's such a small amount required, then it should be trivial to raise it, no?)
It must also be noted that this entire "but we should do thing X first" issue is also often applied to other fields of transhumanistic research as well - or research in general. While "solving the world's problems first" does sound like a good idea on surface, it also ignores the way how research also has the potential to make solving of the world's problems easier. Right now, countless of people suffer and die needlessly, simply because the political will to end their misery is lacking. But maybe increased research to life extension will also uncover new revelations in basic medicine, helping us cure more people at a much cheaper price. Maybe increased research into artifical intelligence will help us figure out the economic laws keeping so many people in poverty and solve it.
The issue of life extension also has other problems not touched on in this essay - given unlimited lifespans, overpopulation would have the potential to become an a huge problem (though even this probably isn't as serious as people think). It might be difficult to guarantee that the technology will properly disseminate through the entire population, both to the rich and to the poor. Those are issues that, while meriting further discussion, will not be covered here. But hopefully this will have shown that the "we could and should solve these problems first" criticism is entirely without foundation - despite anything people say, those problems are not yet truly solvable as we lack the will for that. That should not deter us from trying to solve them anyway, and at the same time continue research directed to life extension and other transhumanistic fields. Hopefully, one day that research will pay off by both making disease eradication and an unlimited lifespan possible.
And then we'll truly be able to eradicate malaria. Eradicate it and live our lives until the stars of the universe die out and we go with them, finally finding the end of our existence in the death of the universe.
For brief piece discussing the same issue from a slightly different light, see Michael Anissimov's Why Utilitarians Should Focus on Technology.
This work is by Kaj Sotala and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.