Tag: Daniel Callahan

What Has Longer Lifespan Done For Us Lately?

For obvious reasons, there is considerable interest in extending human lifespan — few of us, even those who believe in any of the numerous varieties of life-after-death, would voluntarily choose to depart our existence provided we are in good mental and physical health. Of course humans are from Mars and bioethicists are from Venus, so inevitably there is a small cottage industry of ethicists who, in fact, are not so sure extending human lifespan is such a good idea.

MSNBC covered this debate in a May article titled, appropriately enough, Longer life could have a downside.

On the one hand are bioethicistis like Daniel Callahan who laments that longer lifespans probably won’t solve all our social ills,

We have war, poverty, all sorts of issues around, and I don’t think any of them would be at all helped by having people live longer. The question is, ‘What will we get as a society?’ I suspect it won’t be a better society.

Hmm. Lets think about that for a moment. In 1900, the average lifespan in the United States was just 49 years. In 2002, the average lifespan in the United States was 77.3 years.

In just over a century, life expectancy in this country increased by almost 58 percent. But was our society 58 percent better? Were we 58 percent happier? Assume the answer is no — does that mean the huge increase in life expectancy was pointless because it didn’t necessarily result in a better society? Anyone want to give back those 28.3 years?

But Callahan and others have another objection — increases in human lifespan might have dramatic social changes. Callahan tells MSNBC,

If you have people staying in their jobs for 100 years, that is going to make it really tough for young people to move in and get ahead. If people like the idea of delayed gratification, this is going to be a wonderful chance to experience it.

That’s just plain silly — really, Callahan should take an economics course or even an economic history class. Just look at the past 100 years in the United States. That 58 percent increase in lifespan has not been accompanied by an attendant handicap on the young. In fact, just the opposite — the economy is ruthless in not caring about age or experience either at the individual or company level. Callahan’s concern might be valid if we lived in a country with highly rigid regulations and significant attempt by the state to plan the economy (Japan comes to mind as the closest capitalist economy where Callahan’s concerns might have a grain of truth), but not in a relatively open economy like the United States that reward entrepreneurship.

But Callahan is all about planning. MSNBC concludes his story by quoting Callahan as saying,

If this could ever happen, then we’d better ask what kind of society we want to get. We had better not go anywhere near it until we have figured those problems out.

Please, the last thing we should do is hold back medical progress while Callahan and others meticulously plan things. The most pervasive, society-changing medical advance in the last 100 years is easily oral contraception. The existence of oral contraception is largely due to the efforts of Margaret Sanger and Katherine McCormick who underwrote and pushed forward efforts by Gregory Pincus to create the birth control pill that was eventually released by Searle in 1960.

Sanger, McCormick, Pincus and Searle didn’t wait for some sort of society-wide consensus about the impact of convenient, effective birth control to emerge — in fact they were going against stringent anti-contraception laws that existed in many states.

And the birth control pill has brought tremendous changes to our society, most of them positive, but certainly some negative as well. Rather than have some master plan in place about how to handle those changes, as Callahan would want for a similar medical revolution in life expectancy, the United States coped as human beings have for thousands of years with constant changes in their physical and social environment. As a species, it turns out we’re actually pretty good at dealing with even fundamental social changes.

If, and when, medical technology exists to double current life spans, somehow we’ll cope with that change without bioethicist micromanagement. It’s what we do.

Source:

Longer life could have a downside. Ker Than, MSNBC, May 22, 2006.

Individualist Technology vs. the Hive Mind

In the 1950s and 1960s the
predominant anti-technology argument, aided by dystopian fiction such
as Brave New World, was that technology would allow the state and/or
corporations to expand their control over individuals. In fact the opposite
happened — the advent of the personal computer, changes in communication,
and other technological advances have generally empowered the individual
against centralized power.

So, of course, it shoudl come
as no surprise that the anti-technology argument that now predominates
is that technology is dangerous because it gives individuals too much
control over their lives.

Reporting on the Extended Life/Eternal
Life conferce at the University of Pennsylvania, Ronald Bailey noted that
a couple ethicists slammed the idea of allowing people to extend their
lives. Leon Kass, from the University of Chicago, and Daniel Callahan,
from teh Hastings Center, both spoke out about leaving things like life
span up to individuals.

“The worst possible way to
resolve this issue [of extending human life] is to leave it up to individual
choice,” Callahan said. “There is no known social good coming from the
conquest of death.”

According to Bailey’s report
on the conference, Callahan argued that other technologies such as the
automobile, the telphone, and the personal computer had been “imposed” on scoiety without its permission and that it was important that life
extension technologies not be “imposed” without society’s permission.

Shortly after the end of the
Pennsylvania conference, Sun Microsystems engineer Bill Joy made a very
public splash with a Unabomber-inspired article for Wired laying out the
need to prevent individuals from having access to coming technological
innovations.

Joy’s argument is that in the
past potentially destructive technologies have always been controlled
and restricted by nation states, largely because they were the only ones
who could afford such technologies. The cost of assembling a private nuclear
arsenal, for example, would be prohibitive.

But the next round of technology
that is beginning to emerge — robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology
— is both potentially destructive and well within the reach of private
hands within a few decades. Some of it is trivial today. A teenager recently
won a $100,000 Intel science contest by describing a method to encrypt
messages by storing them in DNA sequences and then creating jsut such
an encrypted DNA. If a bright high school student can perform this sort
of experiment, the floodgates are already open.

To Joy, this is an unmitigated horror:

“We are being propelled into this new cnetury with no plan,
no control, no brakes. Have we already gone too far donw the path to alter
course? I don’t believe so, but we aren’t trying yet, and the last chance
to assert control — the fail safe point — is rapidly approaching.”

The solution, of course, is
one the Unabomber also proposed — man was just not meant to know certain
things and should leave well enough alone.

“The only realistic alternative
I see,” Joy wrote in Wired, “is relinquihsment: to limit development of
the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain
kinds of knowledge.”

Ignorance is bliss.

Of course, Joy never considers
that the blocking off of certain types of knoweldge will also cause a
disaster. Genetic engineering has already created treatments for human
diseases and will likely bring medical technologies unimagined. But for
Joy, letting young people die from cystic fibrosis is perhaps a small
price to pay for making sure that the world doesn’t spin out of control.

Nathan Myrhvold, chief technology
officer for Microsoft, summed up the case againt Joy’s apocalytism, Callahan
and other naysayers. In an e-mail interview with the BBC, Myrhvold said,
“People have made apocalyptic predictions about technology for as long
as there has been technology. I think it is because change frightens them.
What is more the most common form these dire predictions take is ‘this
next generation of stuff — wow! That is really different and really scary.”

And thankfully, so far society
has ignored the apocalyptics to all of our benefit.