Billionaires Shouldn’t Live Forever - The New York Times

It would be one thing if life-extension technology were relatively cheap and could be made widely available. Even that would have created huge problems. As it turns out, however, the technology is obscenely expensive, deep into the range of “If you have to ask what it costs, you can’t afford it.” So the technology is directly affecting only a handful of incredibly rich people. But the indirect effects of life extension for a privileged few have been huge and, dare I say it, sinister.

Some writers of speculative fiction at least imagined something like what eventually happened. Richard K. Morgan’s 2003 novel “Altered Carbon,” made into a TV series in 2018, envisioned a society in which wealthy “meths” (for Methuselah) could transfer their consciousness into newly grown clones.

That’s not how the actual technology works, and Morgan’s term never caught on; most of us prefer the portmanteau “evergarchs,” for oligarchs who seemingly go on forever. But Morgan’s vision of a society utterly corrupted by near-immortal privilege turned out to be all too accurate.

Indeed, until recently it looked as if the political dominance of the evergarchs would extend indefinitely into the future. After all, the wealthy have always had vast influence, and we’re talking about people who were generally power hungry to start with — that’s how they got where they are — and they’ve had an unnaturally long time to build connections and buy influence.

But nothing is forever, even in an era of life extension. Public rage against the evergarchs has been building for decades, and it may now have reached boiling point.

So what should be done? Some are proposing that we simply try to diminish the evergarchs’ influence with steep taxes on huge fortunes, which is a good idea in any case. But there were real concerns about tax evasion even when oligarchs were merely mortal; imagine how good people can get at hiding their assets when they can spend decades, even generations, building their tax shelters.

Source: The New York Times

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