Much more likely than a hotfix for death is a world where there are very, very expensive treatments that allow wealthy people to extend their lives by some significant amount.
That's not going to be a fun world to live in, especially if the treatments requires biological raw materials that the destitute can sell.
Historically, expensive treatments for the rich have become universal treatments for everyone over time.
What makes you believe that life extension will be any different? Or, if you disagree that expensive treatments generally stay expensive, what are your examples?
I agree we could have a temporary awkward period in the middle, say 20 years, where it's not cheap yet. But on the scale of history that's a short period of time...I'll admit that's cold comfort to those who die in the meantime.
Quoth the article: "Facelifts have come a long way in the last 20 years, not only in terms of technique, but also in terms of accessibility to both women and men. In the 1970s and even into the 1980s, the facelift was a luxury reserved for the rich and famous."
This leads me to believe facelifts have greatly declined in cost over the past 30 years. The number of such surgeries has greatly increased as well ("Since 2000, overall procedures have risen 115 percent, but the types of procedures patients are choosing are changing." -- http://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/2016/new-statistics-refle... )
Do you have any other examples? Because the one you gave doesn't appear to support the argument that prices will remain high for long periods of time. Especially given that facelifts are a cosmetic surgery and thus there's relatively little drive to give them to everyone.
It's something that's not widely needed or desired, therefore a luxury product. Market forces can be funny like that.
My counter-counter example would be dentistry, or various forms of surgery in general. Especially the latter is expensive as hell, but most of the world managed to create systems that give access to it to pretty much everyone. Even the US somewhat manages that.
A facelift isn't all that useful in the grand scheme of things, even to the wealthy, and it requires a significant quantity of very highly skilled manual labor, which keeps the price high. Neither of the above would be true of a treatment that delays or reverses aging.
I interpreted the main claim to be "expensive life extending procedures..." I think if you drop the "life extending," then bringing up facelifts makes sense. Otherwise... it doesn't really seem to fit into the debate in a meaningful way.
It's a lot easier to go from "expensive treatment" to "inexpensive treatment" (and/or supporting funding) than to go from "no known solution" to "treatment" (however expensive).
Asking people for funding for a cure for mortality is hard, not least of which convincing them of the problem, and then convincing them that a solution is not only feasible but realistic. Asking people to help make an existing cure available to everyone is much easier, because you've already overcome the fundamental disbelief in the problem and the possibility of a solution.
Try "surgery" instead of "plastic surgery". Plastic surgery is a luxury product with little demand, but the life-saving kind of surgery is just as expensive (or even more) in labour and resources, but because there's a demand and a moral urgency, societies figured out how to finance it for ordinary people.
That's not going to be a fun world to live in, especially if the treatments requires biological raw materials that the destitute can sell.