Fred Hapgood sends out topic suggestions for the weekly meetings of the Nanotech Study Group to that group's mailing list. Recently, Fred's suggested topic was "Is there a nanotech perspective on the Schiavo case?." With Fred's kind permission, I'm quoting his topic here in its entirety, since it pertains to my interest in demographic shifts and their impact on society.
The pro-feeding tube commentators often sounded as if the issue was avoiding a 'slippery slope' with the insidious property of erasing the difference between life and death. Specifically, slip down it too far and the ethics of life and death would disappear into those of plugging and unplugging machines. The strategy for avoiding this outcome is, as the President himself has said often, "to err on the side of life".For many of us, a determination to err in that direction hits a reciprocal slippery slope, in which the ethics of plugging and plugging machines disappear into the logic of life and death. In that light, the Schiavo affair looks like the first of many cases that will be thrown up by the culture over the next few decades, cases that might embrace the rights of NPCs (non-player characters) in computer games, through AI and brain simulations, to domestic robots, machines engineered specifically to provoke feelings of individuality and personhood in their owners.
But all these pale beneath the prospect that the desire to 'err on the side of life' will end by warehousing millions and millions of people, Matrix-style, in life-extension cubicles. Today we can more or less define the end of life as that point at which you need machines to keep you going. That helpful character is surely going to go away: a decade or two from now most of us will have lots of machines running in our body from the age of 65 on, or possibly from much younger than that. This new infrastructure might keep the core physiological systems ticking over for years and years.
That will raise questions. For instance, the incidence of dementia goes up by an order of magnitude with each successive ten years of life. Current lifespans are such that one person in four dies in a demented state. If the long list of drugs and devices now in prospect deliver us just five more years of life expectancy, almost everyone kept alive thereby will be in a condition of radically reduced cognitive function. (Of course eventually some way will be found for fixing dementia, too, but it is probably a lot harder to reverse or prevent age-related pruning of the dendritic bush than muscular deterioration.)
Yet a demented person is still be alive by almost anyone's measure, let alone the measure of those who want to 'err on the side of life'. They won't be able to recognize their children but they'll be able to enjoy the sun and bob along to Jumping Jack Flash. They wouldn't be quite alive or quite dead. All we can say for sure is that there will be quite a few of them.