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Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

I thought this post was good news?

Yeah, the research itself sounds excellent and this is indeed good news. The fact the biotech firm is a subsidiary of possibly the premier proprietor of surveillance capitalism is fairly concerning to me. I don't personally want a supercorp that sees dystopian sci-fi as an instruction manual to be developing medical treatments.

I’d be concerned about the ethics they apply to health products given the changes that have happened over the years with search, email, and android.

It's absurd to complain about this when they are one of the few institutions working on fighting aging, arguably the most important problem humanity has ever faced.

Yeah, it sounds great now. There's no way I want a multinational corp with unprecedented vision into our private lives also researching and producing medical treatments.

Why would that be a problem? If they can user their ad-money to help cure people how is that a bad thing?

I think the incremental ROI they would need to involve themselves in a new area would be pretty high. They aren’t going to dedicate a 9-10 digit sum to anything without expecting a much higher sum in return.

Google started a lot of "moonshot" projects, expensive things that are very unlikely to produce any returns. This is one of those. If Google didn't fund this then this work wouldn't get done. Now it might look promising, but this is a 8 year old part of Google, they have been working for a while now.

This kind of armchair criticism is really frustrating to see. Here, you have a company tackling arguably the most important and devastating problem humanity has ever faced. At least they are doing something that helps humanity solve aging, where almost no one else is.

Who cares if it's capitalist-driven? It's not like governments don't, or never, had the opportunity to attempt to tackle the same problem - they simply never took it, focusing on the trivial day-to-day issues, while overwhelmed with bureaucratic tape. And it's not like nonprofits attempting to solve the same problem don't exist either (https://www.sens.org/, https://www.lifespan.io/), with limited success. A massive financial juggernaut backing this initiative is exactly what it needs.

What other solution do you propose?

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