Billionaires are creating life-extending pills for the rich but CEO warns theyll lead to a planet of posh zombies

Billionaires are funding the creation of life-extending pills that will eventually hit the market for people to buy, according to a CEO — and he says it’ll turn the rich in to “posh, privileged zombies.”The chilling warning comes amid fears that AI and biotechnology are evolving at such a rapid pace that anti-aging tablets might only be a matter of years away.Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and ChatGPT’s Sam Altman are among the latest in a long line of American tycoons to throw their wealth behind regenerative medicine.Their aim is to increase life expectancy with drugs and other technologies that make the body’s cells stay younger and disease-free for longer.“At the rate technology is evolving, it will only be a matter of time before life-extending drugs become freely available to those who can afford them,” said Phil Cleary, the founder of The SmartWater Group.But Cleary said Silicon Valley moguls should “quit playing God” in their race to conquer death, calling the quest for the holy grail of medicine “ego-driven” and charging that it risks creating a planet of “posh, privileged zombies.”Instead, he said, they should use their huge fortunes to help the world’s poorest children survive at least into adulthood.Rather than prolonging the lives of the rich elite, their money would be better spent on the world’s 5 million children who die of hunger and from other preventable, treatable causes every year.“Silicon Valley’s dogged pursuit of the fountain of youth is a fear-led, ego-driven folly that comes at a terrible humanitarian cost to the planet and to its most vulnerable inhabitants,” said Cleary, the author of “Elixir,” a novel that explores the damaging consequences of life-extending drugs on society.“A pill that keeps people alive, even by a few decades, would create an unjust, inequitable world packed with posh, privileged zombies — predominately white, middle-class folk who could afford to ...