[extropy-chat] Transhumanists' Needs

[The Avantguardian]

Transhumanists need more time.

I think it is important that we instill in society a
realization of the fundamental value of subjective
time. It is a cliche that time is money. However, in
my own experience I find that money is but a crude and
paltry approximation of time. When you spend a dollar,
you can always make that dollar back. But when you
spend an hour of your life, you never get that hour
back.

One can easily convert time into money. That is what a
job and investments are for, but one cannot easily buy
more time for money. Sure one can for example hire
someone to do time consuming tasks for one, or buy
some technology, which may free up your time to do
something that you rather do, but it still costs some
of your time to coordinate this. Moreover your overall
allotment of time is still diminished such that at the
end of one's life all the gold one has hoarded will
lose its luster in one's eyes.

Thus converting one's time into money is far more an
efficient process than the reverse. Furthermore this
efficiency becomes worse as one ages such that while
the elderly may have more money than the young in
general, they also have to spend a lot more of it to
get more time. Prescription drugs, doctor's visits,
coronary bypasses. All in the desperate hope of buying
themselves more time.

In many respects that is what life-extension
technology is about and that is making the conversion
of money into time more efficient. I think in general
there are many aspects of society which need to shift
to in order to bring this about. For one thing, it is
important, most especially in Western cultures, that
the accumulated wisdom and experience of a life time
actually attain some value. 

Instead of being embarrassed by our elderly and hiding
them away in retirement homes until they expire, we
should try to obtain actual economic value from them.
In this respect, SENS would be good for the economy as
a strong, healthy, vital, acute, octagenerian would be
a very knowledgable skilled individual. Their people
skills alone honed from so many years of experience
dealing with people would make them great for
management positions. (Yeah I am sure some would
object to this with some cranky old coot in mind, but
ask yourself if this individual wasn't TREATED like a
crazy old coot, would he act as one?)

Speaking of time, I am out of it so I will cut it off
here. I will try to follow up with more later.
      

The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." - Woody Allen

"Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope" - Robert G. Ingersoll


		
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