TWC Session 6

At first as it gets, it is now mid-terms, 1.5months have passed since life in SMU began. This is how fast all of us are aging, although I am still 20 going 21. Technology and World Change has made me realise that Technology itself has revealed humans being the weakest link of all changes surrounding us.

We have attempted to use technology to reach the holy grail of life, longetivity, although we are still far from it, if we look back, the improvement is sufficiently significant. The ability to handle illness has been brought about with healthcare revolution. We have established a more streamlined system in exchanging information. For example, the setup of World Health Organisation has allowed a common platform in the gathering and exchanging of world health status. When met with and disease epidemic outbreak, the team of professionals will be able to narrow down the search of patient zero, the source of disease. The efficient flow of information with technology has also allowed the medical resources to be distributed to those in need more efficiently.

Nonethelss, in hopes of longetivity, scientist such as Aubrey de Grey has came up with Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), a proposal to research regenerative medical procedures to periodically repair all the age-related damage in the human body, thereby maintaining a youthful state indefinitely. He believes that aging process is really a buildup of side effects of being alive in the first place. As he progressed with his research, he faced with many criticisms similar to those of the days when people believe that the Earth was flat and continued to believe until it was proven round. Then again, we ask ourselves, whats the point of spending a large amount of resources on people who are at the last stage of their lives, just to extend their mortality by 1 or 2 years?

However, even with better technology, the very innate character of self before others have caused humans ourselves to hinder the progress of mankind. Moral hazards a situation in which one party in a transaction has more information than another. In particular, moral hazard may occur if a party that is insulated from risk has more information about its actions and intentions than the party paying for the negative consequences of the risk. More broadly, moral hazard occurs when the party with with more information about its actions or intentions has a tendency or incentive to behave inappropriately from the perspective of the party with less information. For example, escalating cost unnecessairly. Its always a question of life saving versus monetary benefits where ethics and questioned and we as patients are at the mercy of the professionals.

Similarly, moral hazard also arises in a principal-agent problem, where one party, called an agent, acts on behalf of another party, called the principal. The agent usually has more information about his or her actions or intentions than the principal does, because the principal usually cannot completely monitor the agent. The agent may have an incentive to act inappropriately (from the viewpoint of the principal) if the interests of the agent and the principal are not aligned.

Makes me wonder, if humans ourselves will cause our own extinction like the dinosaurs.