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RomeoStevens comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong
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AFAIK nothing precludes extremely lethal bugs with long incubation periods. As for "nobody has any particular desire to", I hope you are right.
Except the fact they wouldn't be particularly lethal.
If 100% of humans had HIV, it would increase probably make most countries disregard patent laws on a few drugs, and human life spans would get shorter by like 5-10 years on average.
This should keep things in perspective.
My Google-fu seems to indicate a drop of about 20 years.
I bet the statistics are assuming nothing else changes. It's plausible to me that a society where people are generally sicker and shorter-lived will be poorer, and there will be a lot of additional deaths due to people being able to produce less stuff. It's also conceivable that the lower population will be an advantage because of less competition for natural resources and already-existing durable goods.
Probably both tendencies will be in play. This makes prediction difficult.
The thing is countries would not really be poorer. Properly treated HIV isn't much worse than smoking (I mean the part before lung cancer) or diabetes for most of people's lives. Countries differ a lot on these already, without any apparent drastic differences in economic outcomes.
By the time people are already very old they might live a few years less, but they're not really terribly productive at that point anyway.
That's already old data by standards of modern progress of medicine, and groups that tend to get HIV are highly non-random and are typically engaged in other risky activities like unprotected promiscuous sex and intravenous drug use, and are poorer and blacker than average, so their baseline life expectancy is already much lower than population average.
And remember, that's ~20 years with ~40% infection rates, not 100%.