Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause: A Model of the Impact of the Clinical Trials of Simple Interventions
Abstract: The effective altruism movement aims to save lives in the most cost-effective ways. In the future, technology will allow radical life extension, and anyone who survives until that time will gain potentially indefinite life extension. Fighting aging now increases the number of people who will survive until radical life extension becomes possible. We suggest a simple model, where radical life extension is achieved in 2100, the human population is 10 billion, and life expectancy is increased by simple geroprotectors like metformin by three more years on average, so an additional 250 million people survive until “immortality”. The cost of clinical trials to prove that metformin is a real geroprotector is $60 million. In this simplified case, the price of a life saved is around 24 cents, 10 000 times cheaper than saving a life from malaria by providing bed nets. However, fighting aging should not be done in place of fighting existential risks, as they are complementary causes.
Highlights:
● Aging and death are the main causes of human suffering now.
● Simple interventions could extend human lives until aging is defeated.
● These interventions need to be clinically tested before FDA approval.
● A trial of the life extension drug metformin is delayed by lack of funds.
● Starting trials now will save 250 million people from death, at a cost of $0.24 for each life saved.
Please comment on the preprint of the article here: https://goo.gl/WaEYt5
I updated the section about unborn people and I am going to read and add more links on the topic. Currently it is:
2) Life extension will take resources and fewer new people will be born, thus unborn people will lose the opportunity to be alive. It is not easy to measure value of unborn people without some ethical axioms. If this value is very high, we may try to increase population as much as possible, which seems absurd as in would decrease the quality of life.
While life extension seems to mean fewer new people born each century, the total number of new people is still infinitely large in the situation of constant space exploration (Bostrom, 2003b). Also, fewer newborn people in the 21 cnetury could be compensated by much more people which will be born in the next centuries in the much better world with higher quality of medicine.
If the explorable universe is infinite, the total number of newborn people will not change, but these people will move to later epochs, where they will live even better lives. Tipler (Tipler, 1997) suggested that at the end all possible people will be created by enormous superintelligence in Omega point, and thus all possible people will get chance to be alive. However, we can’t count on such remote events.
But we could compare potential 21th and 22th centuries from our model. In 21th century, fewer people will be born because of life extension, but after superintelligent AI or other power technology will appear, supposedly at 2100, much more new people could live on Earth on much better conditions.
Also, it is not obvious that life extension will affect reproduction negatively because of the “grandmother effect”: the decision about reproduction people typically take in early life, but if they have available grandparents which could help them with babysitting this would increase the willingness to have children as also less strain economy outside the family