Mortality: Symmetric, Fairness, and the Arrival of Longevity Biotechnology

Certain assumptions are built so deeply into human institutions that they are rarely stated outright. One of them is this: however unequal two people's lives have been in wealth, power, or opportunity, the difference in how long those lives lasted has been a matter of years rather than generations, and has arisen from causes too numerous and diffuse for anyone to purchase around. This essay traces that assumption through a wedding custom, an ancient epic, a religious parable, a genre of European religious art, and a modern theory of justice, and argues that each rests on a version of the same premise: that mortality has been the one dimension of a life that wealth could not simply buy its way out of. It then turns to what changes once that premise stops holding. Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to search biological data at a scale no earlier research effort could match, and the resulting interventions are, for the first time, being aimed at the mechanisms of aging itself rather than at any single disease. Because aging underlies nearly everything that eventually causes death, an intervention that slows it directly does not face the ceiling that limited every earlier medical advance. Drawing on historical mortality records, the economics of medical innovation, and present-day income-based gaps in life expectancy, the essay argues that this is a different kind of inequality than the ones existing institutions were built to manage, and asks what is actually being asked of a society in which dying on roughly the same schedule as everyone else stops being something everybody does.