I can't help but feel the motivating factor here is not helping people live longer (invest in food storage, transportation, and production and help millions of people survive). Instead this seems to me more like wealthy folks beginning to fear the realization that someday they will grow old and die like the rest of us.
Imagine being in a situation where doing anything that benefits both yourself and others is used as evidence of your selfishness because it will benefit you.
When did win/win become a bad thing? Would you rather these rich people were building bigger mansions instead?
Yeah but your way of thinking isn't good for getting karma on HN. Pretty much any HN thread on a big company doing something good is dominated by cynics who cannot fathom the possibility of people out there wanting to make money and benefit the world at the same time.
Speaking as an advocate for the cause, I can assure you that isn't it. Wealth doesn't grant vision. Most wealthy people have exactly the same biases and preconceptions about aging as everyone else.
If it was otherwise, it wouldn't be at all hard to raise funds for initiatives like the SENS Research Foundation's program aimed at medical control of aging. As it is, the number of the ultra-wealthy who have supported this cause is well below 1%, and those have been fairly cautious investments in the grand scheme of things, e.g. those by Peter Thiel.
What is happening at the moment is an initial tipping point of sorts across the entire population in the realization that, hey, treating aging as a medical condition is plausible. Researchers have been saying this for a decade, with increasing volume following the pro-longevity faction winning the cultural battles within the scientific community, but it takes time to bootstrap a movement and get to the point at which Prudential puts up posters suggesting that people should think about living to 150. We may not even be at the main 10% support tipping point yet in the broader population.
A recent Pew study suggests that the majority of people continue to believe that the current state of things is the best state of things, and they don't want live longer because people don't live longer. People want to be slightly better than their peers. Live to 90, because that's a little more than what other people have on average. Be more healthy as you decay into death, because that's a little more than other people have. Stasis is the default opinion, which has always struck me as crazed given the tangible, obvious pace of progress in technology that we are living through.
In the end this is no different than any other field of human endeavor. It takes unreasonable visionaries to force beneficial progress down everyone else's throats, and once done everyone else agrees that it was self-evident and obvious.
Your statement sounds like everything is going well and that this new Alphabet company is just making the situation ever better.
I do not agree: the situation is getting worse: all rates of diseases are growing rapidly. The USA spends the most money on health care and dropped to place 43 on the list of countries with best health. The USA dropped below Cuba!
So it is time to step back and evaluate the situation.
Lets look at cancer. Around 2003 there was a study publisged in the Journal of Oncology stating that 97% of the patients who had radiation or chemo died within 5 years. There is no followup study but since there are no new treatments, the number is most likely the same.
I like a quote of Einstein: repeating the same experiment and expecting a different outcome is insane. So I am against more investments in cancer research since it proves for over 50 years that it does not work.
So what to do?
I suggest to look at the works of the "alternative" doctors who get results.
The medicince that they practise is "functional medicine" and has great results, but there is no double-blind research to their methods. It is time that this changes. Do the research for the various anti-cancer treatments and find out what works best.
There are many other diseases where functional medicine has far better results than allopathic medicine but they are ignored most of the time. The recent online summit by Dr Mark Hyman (the fat summit) had 120,000 viewers so things are changing for the better but there is a long road to go.
I think you might want to take a closer look at the developments in cancer over the past five years. Ipilimumab alone reduced the risk of death in metastatic melanoma patients by 32% - scientists used to not even want to touch the disease because it was such a death sentence. For all its faults, medical research does make progress.
Cynically, I feel the motivating factor is separating old wealthy people from their wealth before their heirs get ahold of it, and who, being much younger, will not spend it on health care.
Clearly this is a cynical move by a company that knows that healthy people are more likely to buy their services than dead ones. It all goes straight to Google's bottom line.
Clearly, the endgame for Google is robots maintaining warehouses full of elderly people, all being forced to watch ads 24x7. (This is also their plan for saving Google+)
