Does life matter?

Philosophical, ethical and religious considerations have prevented humans from defining the value of life. Short sighted financial analysis that defined the value of life as the NPV of the future utility stream, is faulty. Additionally, there is a distinct difference between personal utility and societal utility that do not coincide. The more important deficiency in the approach is that it does not account for uncertainty in future possibilities and the flexibility held by the individual in altering future decisions. And in a regime of accelerating technologies that could substantially change the expected life horizon, the value of life is increasing every day, provided expected aggregate personal or societal utility is non-negative.

The present value of human life is an important metric for policy. It is certainly not infinite and there is a distinct trade-off between the cost of sustenance and expected future benefits, both to the individual and society. A natural end to life, a random and catastrophic outcome that is imposed by exogenous factors, is highly unlikely to be optimal. The individual has the most information to assess the trade-off between the cost of sustenance and future benefits. If one is able to ignore the excited technologists, attempting to cure death by Silicon, data and an abundance of ignorance, one could find that there is a subtle and gentle slope upward for the human’s ability to perpetuate her badly designed infrastructure. The cost of sustenance of the human body, regardless of the expanding time-span of use, is not trivial. One complication in this trade-off decision is that the individual may perceive personal (and possibly societal) utility, higher than what is true.  Society, prevented from the forceful termination of the individual on philosophical grounds, yields the decision to the individual, who may not be adept enough to do so.

Humans are entering a tricky transition period. It is conceivable that creative manipulation of genes may allow them to sustain copies of themselves for a time-span, perhaps higher by a factor of 10 in less than 100 years. However, in transition, they will struggle, trying to bridge the status-quo with what is possible. This is an optimization problem that may have to expand beyond the individual, if humanity were to perpetuate itself. On the other hand, there appears to be no compelling reasons to do so.