I think for me when we talk about something like ending aging it’s really hard for me to figure out what metric we’d use to say it wouldn’t be a good thing. What if instead we ended cancer? That would increase our average life expectancy, probably by a lot. Basically I think people dying less is good, whether it’s because we don’t age, because we don’t get cancer, we don’t have heart attacks, we don’t starve, we don’t get shot.
But I think your point about what would be better is a very important one. First there’s the raw amount of less-death it produces. I don’t have a lot of confidence that ending aging would increase life expectancy more than 10-15 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if ending cancer actually generated more person years of life.
Ending aging would also be a very unequal way to making people live longer/die less. Even if it was free for everyone, some people would still die at 10, some at 20, some at 30, and on and on, but there would be that one person who lived to 250 for no real reason other than dumb luck. Ending cancer would be a much more equally distributed increase in life expectancy. Ending poverty would be, in my mind, a much, much more equitable way to reduce suffering/increase not-dying. While it’s different, I think that we’ve seen that inequality itself is a cause of a lot of problems when it comes to wealth, I imagine it would create problems with age too.
And of course anti-aging benefits those who are most likely to live the longest to begin with. Wealthier people.
I think that money spent on stopping aging is probably extremely disproportionate to the amount of good it will do: a consequence of the fact that it’s of more benefit to people who decide how money is spent.
