John K Davis
I’ve written a philosophy book about life extension, but this blog essay isn’t drawn from my book, nor is it philosophical in content. This is a political and policy piece. However, if you’re interested, my book is titled New Methuselahs: The Ethics of Life Extension. It was published by MIT Press in 2018, and you can order a copy from MIT Press or Amazon.
We’ve been talking to the wrong people
If you’ve ever advocated for developing life extension, there’s a good chance you’ve focused on the wrong audience. Many of us are exasperated and baffled by those who say life extension is a bad thing, or they just don’t want it for themselves, because death is a blessing, death gives our lives meaning and purpose, extended life would be boring, and so on.
Two observations about the death-is-a-blessing crowd. First, if opinion surveys and my personal experience are any guide, this group takes in no more than about 40% of the population. They grow as the population grows, but they do not seem to be converting anyone to their point of view who isn’t naturally disposed to see things their way. They can’t really do much to impede life extension research and development. Second, you cannot change their minds, and it’s a waste of time to try. No factual or philosophical arguments will budge them, and believe me, I’ve tried. Their viewpoint is not an intellectual or empirical position, it’s deeply grounded in their temperament.
Get ready to talk to the outraged; soon we’ll have to
We need to focus on a very different group instead. Imagine that, a few years from now, obviously and immediately effective methods of life extension are developed, but only the rich can afford them. When that happens (and eventually it will), a large part of the population will want life extension but won’t be able to afford it. Many of them will be upset, angry, resentful, and worse because they cannot get it.
I call this access outrage.
What might the outraged do? They might demand laws that halt access to life extension until everyone can afford it. They might demand an end to any government funding for life extension research. They might propagate sour grapes arguments that extended life isn’t worth having anyway, adding new voices to the death-is-a-blessing crowd. They might demand that the FDA not approve life extension treatments until they’ve been tested for many years, and oppose any early access.
A few of them might even turn to violence against life extension researchers, company personnel, and people who have had access to life extension, or whom they falsely believe have had it. (It could be dangerous to look too young for your age. Biohackers beware.) Remember, someone has assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare over insurance coverage, and two guys presumably upset about AI fired a gun at Sam Altman’s house, while another threw a Molotov cocktail at it.
We need to start working out, right now, what we’re going to say to these people, so that we have our talking points and policy proposals ready when access outrage first rears its head.
What to say to the outraged
The sorts of arguments that are often made about access to life extension will have to be set aside, for on a political and rhetorical level, they will do more harm than good. (I’ve made these arguments in my philosophical writings about life extension, but I don’t recommend them for this purpose.) It will not do to argue that we don’t ban heart transplants just because not everyone can get one, or that allowing the rich to get life extension will speed up research and development and lower the cost of life extension that much sooner. These things are true, but saying them to the outraged will only piss them off.
Nor will it do to offer a promissory note, and argue that life extension will eventually be available to everyone. I believe it will, but many or most people may not live long enough to cash that note, and they will know it.
Here’s what we need to do instead. We need to borrow a page from AI company CEOs like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, who offer suggestions for dealing with massive unemployment related to AI. Typically they suggest some version of paying universal basic incomes to everyone, perhaps funded by giving people shares in AI companies. (Sometimes they argue that superabundance is coming and we’ll all be unemployed but rich, but this is another promissory note.) These suggestions are mere sketches and not quite practical, but they point in the right direction.
We should do something similar for access to life extension, and do it better. Like the AI CEOs, we need to be ready to describe and advocate for policies that will make life extension available for everyone. Let me open the conversation with my own list:
Ways to subsidize life-extension for all:
- Government-guaranteed loans: Similar to student loans or mortgages for veterans (these loans already exceed six figures in many cases). The government would make loans available for getting life extension. After all, those who are youthful longer will have more time to repay the loans. As an alternative, firms that sell life extension treatments could guarantee such loans.
- Personalized taxes: This is a variant of the loan idea. We could increase the tax rate for each person who receives subsidized life-extension, such that their social security number would be assessed an additional 10% of their taxable income until the loan or subsidy has been paid back with interest. That way we guarantee repayment as long as the borrower is working (again, they will be youthful enough to work a lot longer). We could also secure these obligations with liens on real estate and everything else the borrower owns.
- Sliding scale: We could tax life-extension treatments to make them available on a sliding scale, so that the Haves pay more than the actual cost of the treatments in an amount sufficient to subsidize the Have-nots who wish to receive those treatments. We could also pass a law requiring life extension clinics to offer this, and prohibit their doing business if they refuse.
- Early access to experimental life extension therapies: Drug regulatory agencies often take too long to approve new drugs, and sometimes this consigns people to an avoidable death. In the U.S. this would require a change in FDA human subjects research policy. This was done with drugs for AIDS.
- Accelerate the development of life extension to bring down the cost as soon as possible. We must call for more funding. This combines well with getting the FDA to allow early access.
- A lottery, or some other way of selecting some lucky Have-nots for life extension. This isn’t my favorite suggestion, but I’ll leave it on the table as an option.
- Compensating all Have-nots by equally distributing something other than life extension, perhaps funded by a tax on life extension for the Haves. I’m not crazy about this one either, but let’s not censor any ideas at this stage.
A couple of observations here. First, some of these suggestions offer a way to spread the responsibility around: we can point to Congress and the President, or to the FDA, or to government in general, and argue that we’re on board with doing something, and that we need help from the outraged to kick the system into doing something now. We could make the same kind of argument about life extension companies and clinics: “Let’s all put pressure on the life extension private sector; they must be part of the solution.” In short, we need to be ready to say something like this to the outraged:
“You have every right to feel as you do! This is an outrageous situation; no one should have to die an avoidable death for lack of access to life extension. We hear you, we see your pain, we agree with you. Here [and have some policy ideas ready] are some ways we can make life extension available to you soon enough for you to live younger and longer. Let’s work together to get government, the FDA, and life extension companies and clinics to implement some of these policies as soon as possible. We need your help.”
This kind of reply is like a principle of martial arts: Don’t fight your opponent’s force, work with their momentum. Absorb it. Use it. Besides, the outraged are not opponents, they are potential allies.
But first, we need to get our talking points together well before the outrage begins. Let’s start brainstorming.