As long as I’m included in the ‘they’ part, I’m good with that…
-XT
If you’re not already it’s unlikely that you will be. Such technology should be available by mid-century. The wealthiest will be the first to market on such technology. Those providing the technology will likely be the wealthiest.
Though I sort of imagine Ray Kurzweil as the first creepy old scientist to be little more than a husk plugged into a machine that keeps his brain alive.
I’m a bit more optimistic. I think the first serious aging treatments will be available in the next 20 years, and they will become fairly wide spread and widely available just as soon as they can be passed through things like the FDA. There is simply too much money to be made for it to be kept a secret…and I think we are VERY close to unlocking this potential even today.
YMMV, but I intend to be around for a couple centuries, minimum. 
-XT
How do you know he doesn’t?
At least you would get national healthcare.
Do you know of any technology (other than maybe nuclear reactors or something of that nature) that hasn’t become cheaper and more accessible over time?
As for the “mind control” stuff, I guess I’m of two minds about the subject (no pun intended :D). On the one hand, what you describe is a bit left-wing paranoid. Secret organizations and whatnot conspiring to create a nation of drug-addled zombies with their mind control rays.
OTOH, to a certain extent we are there already. We have a society of people medicating themselves with drugs, legal and illegal, prescribed and self-medicated, in order to get through life. Not because of any conspiracy or power-hungry dictators. But maybe because of a constant cognative dissonance between the way their lives are and what they are told their lives should be by the magic idiot box (really more of an idiot panel these days).
It’s not paranoid because there is no central organized conspiracy.
So should we bring George W back?
At best we’re only taking about a difference of a few degrees. It’s doubtful that neuroscience will find something better than sex and fear to manipulate humans, which have been in use for thousands of years.
People have always ‘medicated’ themselves…it seems to be central to human life. It’s just that, these days, they have a lot more choices in ‘medication’ than simple alcohol or a few choice bits of local botany…
-XT
Sure I intend to shoot for immortality as well. I think that anti-aging therapy will quickly bankrupt the coffers of insurance companies and governments worldwide if everyone feels they are entitled to it.
How much have you looked into it? It’s not like it’s going to be a pill. We’re talking about either organ or cell replacement. Cell replacement therapy is going to be hellishly expensive at first.
Which would be bankrupt in about a week if they offered life extension technology to all.
Over time sure. But what is cheap to you is out of reach to many people. When my desktop broke, I took out my laptop. Some people cannot afford either.
Heh, it’s bipartisan paranoia. Go to the right-wing conspiracy boards, they’re the same. But with projects like MKUltra it’s worth thinking about. I find it interesting how programmed we are to reject anything that can be tacked with the word, ‘conspiracy’, as though we can just dismiss something because it’s a conspiracy theory. That was a handy little nam shub. MKUltra is proven as fact, and yet people ignore it completely even when you bring it up. Why? Because it’s the purview of conspiracy theorists of course, even though it was really real, documented and everything.
Yes, precisely. Like in Brave New World with Soma. Talking to many of the anti-natalists and pro-Transgender people on this board, I can certainly see a society where having intimate relationships with a single person would be considered anti-social and weird.
It doesn’t need to be central. But there are thousands of organized conspiracies. Conspiracy is the implementation of politics by normal means.
Lets not and say we didn’t.
Ok, so they find ways to get you to feel varying degrees of orgasm and paranoia depending on what they want you to do. Just remember UHC means DEATH PANELS!!!
This is kind of missing the point. People have always medicated themselves largely in ignorance of what they are injesting. It’s not that medicating oneself is new, it’s that we will know how to do it on a much more fine-tuned degree.
Define ‘everyone’…and ‘entitled’. Myself, I think that people will PAY for the treatment, even if it turns out to be relatively expensive. Let’s say the treatment costs $10,000 US (I doubt it will be that much, to be honest, but just as a thought experiment). Were I to speculate, I’d say that a VERY large percentage of American’s (and Europeans, Japanese, South Koreans, etc etc) would go for the treatment at that price.
My guess is it will be substantially lower.
I’ve looked into it fairly extensively, in a Science Channel sort of way, and there is no way to know whether or not it will entail a pill (or a series of them), gene therapy, cell replacement or anything else at this point. As to the expense, much of that is being incurred right now, in the research dollars being expended searching. To be sure, initially it will be expensive…drug companies will want to recoup their research dollars after all.
However, like the personal computer (something that a lot of people have, but not ‘everyone’ and not ‘entitled’ too), the real money is in the mass market, not in expensive toys or treatment for a select few. Soon enough the prices will come down so that most people (defined as ‘most people who live in rich countries and have a high standard of living’) will be able to afford it.
I think it’s you who are missing the point. People medicated themselves because it seems to be something endemic to our species. They knew EXACTLY what they were doing and why, even if they didn’t have the rather exotic ways of doing it that we do today (and that’s not actually true either, since many of the botanical compounds we use today have been used for quite a long time…opium springs to mind)
I don’t believe we are more ‘fine-tuned’ these days either…in fact, I’d say that, by and large, as a total population and taking into account regional differences (like, say, Russia :p), people are LESS medicated today, over all, than in the past.
-XT
John Boehner and Dennis Kucinich are not the same person.
Both parties are (at the end of the day) plutocratic, however they are not the same party. I don’t believe that both parties are in collusion per se, I haven’t seen evidence of this. I think both parties are incapable of acting on legislation unless the plutocratic elite give them to go ahead (health care reform and financial reform which aren’t able to actually restrict the behavior and profits of wealthy companies are good examples of this), but I don’t think they are the same party. They are different parties that are both under the thumb of the plutocrats. The GOP is just more blatant and happy about it. The dems are plutocratic, but that is more because the conservative dems in the house and senate won’t support legislation unless it makes the plutocrats happy. The progressive caucus in the house (if it were a stand alone body) would be happy to support anti-plutocratic measures.
I also don’t know many people who want our binary option, a more multi-party parliamentary system with runoff voting would be ideal.
LOL, I like your optimism that it will cost 10,000. What radical therapy costs only 10,000 today? Hell it costs that much to birth a baby with no complications. I’d say it’s more likely to cost millions initially.
No way.
Heh. The most promising tech I have read about is cell replacement where they replace your old telomere depleted cells with new cells with lots of telomeres.
Yeah, well. We’ll see how quickly the price drops. You’re much more optimistic than I am. The rich pay for further development. The PC would have gone nowhere without the wealthy hobbyists propelling it.
Yes, they medicate themselves. Not all medication is the same. And they didn’t know exactly what they were doing and still don’t. People self-medicate erroneously and a lot of traditional cures are total bunk.
This doesn’t make any sense at all.
I didn’t say they were the same people, I just said that we’ve been programmed to think we have to choose between McDonald’s and Starbucks. Both parties are insufficient to represent us. The fact that we pick political ideology from a Prix Fixe menu with two options is fucking insane. What does abortion have to do with fiscal policy?
sigh
Perhaps initially, but even there I have my doubts. Name a treatment today that costs, initially, a million dollars. My $10,000 wasn’t the initial costs btw, it was the first MASS MARKET cost…and even there I think that’s high. I was just giving a WAG for instance type thingy.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see, ehe?
The most promising I’ve seen basically shut off the mechanism that causes cells to age. They have already tested some of that stuff on mice and other lab animals and have been able to get some fairly significant results.
Mind, I’m talking about slowing down or even stopping the aging process…you seem to be talking about reversing it.
I must be obtuse tonight. I’m talking about ALCOHOL here man…people in the past used to drink themselves silly on a regular basis. It was endemic to all levels and stations of society. Hell, it was EPIDEMIC for that matter.
Does the above clarify it now? People of all station and all age groups drank VERY heavily in the past. Thus my reference to ‘regional differences’, like in Russia, where they still have quite an alcohol problem even today. Nothing like it was, say, 100 years ago, mind, but still bad by today’s standards.
-XT
I don’t know why you think that anti-aging therapy will be cheaper than pretty much anything you can get today. Even Lasik costs over a grand if you go to Dr. McCheapy. Hell it costs me 250 to get my teeth cleaned. So I really don't understand why in a world where surgeries cost in the range of 50,000 for one localized thing, it would be cheaper to give therapy that removes bone spurs, replaces telomeres, rejuvenates neurons, that basically touches on every single aspect of the entire body would be cheaper than giving birth in a maternity ward.
Yes, I think it will be much more realistic to expect it to reflect what medicine actually costs.
Yes, that’s how cancer works too. And I bet in those mice, they weren’t just giving them one pill that stopped the entire aging process, because that would instantly turn the entire body into a tumor. Pre-programmed cell death is an important part of living. Replacing old cells with fresh young, healthy cells makes more sense. But either way you have to do it at the cellular level and give a different therapy for each kind of cell.
Well yes. For you and I, that’s what will be necessary. You plan on being 70 for eternity? That’d suck.
Yes, because getting hammered is the same as gene therapy.
Yes, but what people’s penchant to get wasted throughout history has to do with what the OP was talking about such as severing the Dorsal Rostrum, I don’t really know.
IMHO The world system is based on the pyramid, it does not matter what aspect, fame, power, political, religious, etc. It’s based on pyramids, where one is lifted up and held up by those beneath them. The people at the bottom are held in place and not allowed to advance unless it is beneficial to the pyramid. This type of structure gets to the point that the people at the bottom, who bear the whole weight, cry out to God, God removed them from the structure and it collapses, then the cycle is repeated, and is the pattern of human history, empires rising and falling. Scripture goes through many accounts of the Israelite commonly falling to the lowest level, that of slaves and captives, and God rescuing them, and they fall victim (buy into) to the world system again and again they find themselves at the bottom…
The system is self correcting, though for the people at the bottom life really sucks.
Decaying infrastructure, immanent ecological collapse, dislocated food supplies, & declining petroleum resources, corporate corruption/short-term thinking, all coupled with very inferior/shortsided leadership on a Global scale.
So…basically how things have been since the beginning of civilization?
You could also say that about immanent dystopian oligarchy.
But it always falls apart.
Conversely you can say it always advances.
The fundamental flaw, in my view, with the OP’s argument is that capital and power can be held relatively indefinitely for any reason whatsoever. At various times, people have suggested that there is some new, potent reason that those in power will suddenly have it forever; the flipside of this is that there are also relatively trivial ways to ensure that they don’t (estate taxes, for example). It reads like a comic book: the villian almost won, but the hero averted disaster in a nick of time by cutting a single thread that wove the whole dastardly plan together.
I have no doubt there are real villians, and no doubt that there are people not unlike real heroes that foil their plans, but almost by definition these are exceptional cases. Most of the time, aristocrats get beheaded, farmers revolt, people start lying to the boss and his plans are based on a distorted view of the facts and therefore cannot succeed, and people generally manage to fail spectacularly in any number of ways.
Here are two thoughts that come to my mind when I hear of masterminds controlling the population.
First, there must be a means of controlling people. While fictional stories have been known to concoct a few devilish scenarios, some thought would show that it would require a level of knowledge far, far greater than we have now. Truth be told, we don’t really even understand depression, and depression medication more or less treats symptoms. (Listen to the very carefully worded ads some time.) We barely even understand the blood-brain barrier. Some superdrug that will placate the masses is so far out of reach that we cannot even suggest something like that is possible at all.
Secondly, the leader or leaders must have a level of foresight capable of solving a game like go without breaking a sweat. The combinatorial explosion of controlling so many variables in any society, nevermind modern society, is so mind-bogglingly huge that anyone capable of doing it must render problems like solving common board games, with a small number of well-defined variables, trivial. In fact, this is pretty much the ultimate litmus test for any conspiracy theory. Go has approximately three rules (bit of a common expression, but it is slightly more complicated than this–though not much, and the simplification is fair), two pieces on (in the modern tradition) a 19x19 board, and is totally out of reach of computation. (Chess is even simpler, but sounds more complicated because of the number of pieces.) Last I read, 7x7 go was thought to be solved. If anyone hands you any theory of masterminded control that is more complicated than go, they are almost certainly wrong.
erislover I don’t think the concern is about controlling the entire population. Just controlling a portion of it. For instance in history Eunuchs guarded harems. That sort of thing. Maybe you can have lobotomized soldiers who cannot integrate the horror of an evil act with the perception of the evil act.
Or for instance, you could have remote controlled robot airplanes that drop 500lb bombs on foreign civilian populations.