John Tierney has an interesting piece on the current state of the art.

I don’t really look forward to this particular future–I like driving (though I have to confess that having a computer replace most of the other lousy drivers out there appeals to me greatly).

But my biggest concern, that I never see addressed, is reliability. Not just of the smarts in the car, but in the car itself. What happens if cars are barreling along at ninety miles an hour ten feet apart, and a tire blows? Or the brakes fail? Or the engine dies?

There simply won’t be the margin to avoid a collision, as we (generally, but not always) have at current spacing. You can make the cars as smart as you want, but physics will remain physics.

A long but very worthwhile essay by Aubrey De Grey on the societal resistance to ending aging–“old people are people, too“:

Geronto-apologists simultaneously hold, and alternately express, the following two positions:

* They refuse to consider seriously whether defeating aging is feasible, because they are sure it would not be desirable;
* They refuse to consider seriously whether defeating aging is desirable, because they are sure it is not feasible.

Like a child hiding in a double-doored wardrobe, they cower behind one door when the other is opened, then dash to the other when it is closed and before the first is opened. Only when both doors are flung open in unison is their hiding-place revealed. They are both well and truly open now, and the time when this sleight of hand was effective has passed.

There is no question that indefinite lifespan will cause a host of new problems to be solved. But that doesn’t mean that they’re insoluble, or that they’d be so bad as to want to continue the current holocaust that has been going on since the dawn of humanity, in which everyone is sentenced to death after only a century or so. In any event, it’s probably inevitable, barring some societal catastrophe in the next few decades, so we’d better start thinking about how to solve them.

[Update a few minutes later]

A comment I just made in the comments section made me think about this flawed argument that De Grey pointed out:

The litany of obfuscation begins by exploiting the terminological ambiguity of the word