Gia Bao Huynh

When I consider the condition of democratic peoples as they advance through the early decades of this century, I am arrested not by the turbulence of their politics — those visible contests over office and revenue which have occupied the attention of statesmen in every age — but by a movement of deeper character, proceeding quietly beneath the surface of events, which threatens to dissolve the one equality that no democratic agitation has previously been required to demand, because no power has previously possessed the means to disturb it: the equality of biological time. This inquiry proceeds from three premises of extraordinary ordinariness, each of which one could state at a dinner table and expect no disagreement. Artificial intelligence is improving itself at an accelerating pace. Human beings love their families and do not want them to die. When something scarce and valuable exists, the wealthy obtain access to it first. From these three premises, followed with patience through a chain of logic each step of which submits to examination, grounded in empirical anchors and historical mechanism rather than extrapolation, this work derives the conclusion that human civilization is approaching a structural threshold for which no institution in its recorded history was designed — not because of conspiracy, not because of evil intention at any point in the chain, not because of capitalism — the Soviet nomenklatura accessed medical interventions unavailable to workers; the mechanism requires only scarcity and the desire to protect those one loves, and every system human beings have constructed has had both — but because people are doing the most normal things human beings do, and those things are now, for the first time in recorded history, converging in a configuration that produces an outcome none of them intended. The asymmetry this convergence generates differs categorically from every inequality that democratic philosophy has previously been called upon to address. Properties can be taxed. Opportunities can be legislated. Social barriers have yielded, in every democracy, to the accumulated pressure of opinion and law. Conflicts of interest can be solved by blind trusts. But when the duration of one's existence becomes a function of one's position in the social order, the resulting hierarchy is not an inequality in having more. It is an asymmetry in existing longer. The framework is explicitly non-deterministic. The window — preemptive international governance — has not yet closed. But every corridor has been walked, every door tested, and each exit, examined from within, is locked by the logic of the very forces that constructed it. With the most ordinary and irreproachable human intentions, this inquiry has found the most terrible thing. Not the villains, of whom there are none. But love.