They won't.
Nor will anyone.
The sun will explode and turn the planet to space-ash and, if that doesn't quite do it, there's always heat-death at the end of the universe.
Krugman, class warrior.
Some writers of speculative fiction at least imagined something like what eventually happened.
Richard K. Morgan’s 2003 novel “Altered Carbon,” made into a TV series in 2018, envisioned a society in which wealthy “meths” (for Methuselah) could transfer their consciousness into newly grown clones.
That’s not how the actual technology works, and Morgan’s term never caught on; most of us prefer the portmanteau “evergarchs,” for oligarchs who seemingly go on forever.
But Morgan’s vision of a society utterly corrupted by near-immortal privilege turned out to be all too accurate.
. . . .
But nothing is forever, even in an era of life extension.
Public rage against the evergarchs has been building for decades, and it may now have reached boiling point.
So what should be done?
Some are proposing that we simply try to diminish the evergarchs’ influence with steep taxes on huge fortunes, which is a good idea in any case.
But there were real concerns about tax evasion even when oligarchs were merely mortal; imagine how good people can get at hiding their assets when they can spend decades, even generations, building their tax shelters.
No, life extension for a privileged few is, by its nature, a socially destructive technology, and the time has come to ban it.
Take the evergarchs off their treatments, so that they start aging like everyone else, and don’t let anyone else get started.
Prosecute anyone who tries to evade the ban, which shouldn’t be hard to determine: Billionaires may sometimes manage to hide their assets, but they can’t hide failure to age.
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