Excerpt
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): ..... we take a very different look at a future -- the future for human health and longevity.
Paul Solman, the NewsHour's economics correspondent, has been exploring the profound social and economic changes brought on by rapidly changing technology.
Tonight, he checks in with an inventor and futurist who takes the concept of advances in the medical field even further. It's part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.
PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): Earlier this year, we did several stories at a conference run by the futuristic California think tank Singularity University.
The stories were about-high tech's prodigious promise for the future, dirt-cheap energy, sky-high crop yields, labor-free machinery. Tonight comes the kicker, far longer, far healthier, conceivably even eternal life.
Why would immortality be an economics rather than a science story? Because the basic aim of economics is to maximize well-being, the greatest good for the greatest number. And a longer, healthier life is the most unambiguous good there is, says Singularity's co- founder, Ray Kurzweil, skeptics notwithstanding.
ALSO
PAUL SOLMAN: In the end, though, if Ray Kurzweil is correct, a key question. Should the dead eventually disappear, how would the world cope with an impossibly large number of the living? By colonizing space is one common high-tech answer.
And we will be covering that, if the NewsHour would want yet another story about the future, with one proviso. To paraphrase my beloved grandmother, we should live so long.
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