The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
Human life span has risen steadily in the last hundred years or so. The
world average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was 31. In 1950, it was 48. In
2014, it was 71.5. That&#x27;s an increase of 40 years achieved in 114 years of
medical advances.<p>In other words, far from the dragon of ageing getting bigger and bigger and
ever more hungry, humanity has been winning fight after fight after bloody
fight against this evil beast.<p>I cannot believe the chutzpah in Bostrom&#x27;s allegory, that sweeps this
remarkable achievement aside as insignificant and misguided, with his
description of &quot;the king&quot; sending &quot;his army&quot; to fight minor, incompetent
battles against the lesser evils of &quot;tigers and snakes&quot; - presumably that&#x27;s
governments funding medical research into such minor threats as HIV and
malaria, that claim mere millions of people every year.<p>What&#x27;s worse, he actually advocates that we set aside this actually,
currently, life-extending research and instead focus on finding ways to defeat
ageing: <i>&quot;Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging,
we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching
individual diseases.&quot;</i><p>We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people
in the developing world, who die of such &quot;individual diseases&quot; that are
treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don&#x27;t provide those treatments
to the people who need them, because they can&#x27;t afford them. We value the
profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on
the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western
medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.<p>This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the
world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the
other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick
Bostrom&#x27;s magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to
really-really everyone once we find it.