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

The distinction between hardware and wetware is going to really start to blur in the coming years:

Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, has built a robot that is guided by the brain and eyes of a moth. Higgins told Computerworld that he basically straps a hawk moth to the robot and then puts electrodes in neurons that deal with sight in the moth’s brain. Then the robot responds to what the moth is seeing — when something approaches the moth, the robot moves out of the way.

Higgins explained that he had been trying to build a computer chip that would do what brains do when processing visual images. He found that a chip that can function nearly like the human brain would cost about $60,000.

“At that price, I thought I was getting lower quality than if I was just accessing the brain of an insect which costs, well, considerably less,” he said. “If you have a living system, it has sensory systems that are far beyond what we can build. It’s doable, but we’re having to push the limits of current technology to do it.”

There are going to be some humdinger ethics issues to deal with along this road.

Here are this guy’s opinion of the top ten for 2007. And by “technology” he means IT.

An anti-aging drug is about to go into human trials, even if its makers won’t admit that it has this effect.