> Human life span has risen steadily in the last hundred years or so. The world average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was 31. In 1950, it was 48. In 2014, it was 71.5. That's an increase of 40 years achieved in 114 years of medical advances.

That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality. Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.

> We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them.

First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and billionaires like Bill Gates.

Second, I doubt Bostrom is arguing against curing diseases such as malaria. It's just that malaria kills 450,000 people per year, while aging kills more than that every week. If we value lives equally, we should probably spend much more on anti-aging research than we spend on malaria research. Sadly, the opposite is the case. Billions are spent on malaria each year. The WHO alone spends over $60 million per year on malaria. A generous estimate of anti-aging research would be $10 million per year. So aging kills 100x more people than malaria, but the world spends 100x more on malaria than anti-aging research.

> We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.

That's also not true. On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing.[2] These improvements have come from a combination of government efforts and private companies. And if you're going to do an accounting of early deaths, governments will not come out ahead of private companies.

> This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.

Every new technology starts off expensive. The original iPhone was too expensive for most people, and it wasn't very good by today's standards. A decade later, smartphones have gotten cheap enough for people to afford in the developing world. The same thing has been happening with computers, cars, televisions, radios, air travel, and medicine.

I think it's a good thing that some parts of the world have eliminated malaria. I'm glad we didn't wait for a magical malaria-eliminating pill. Likewise, I think it would be a good thing if some parts of the world eliminated aging. The sooner that problem is solved in one place, the sooner it will be solved everywhere.

1. See table 6.4 in the WHO's World Malaria Report: http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/world-malaria-report...

2. https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality