But it's in their best interest to assume it wont happen.
If I correctly predict, as an actuary, the demise of the industry, I don't win anything. If I can calculate a superprecise premium for my insurance product based on this being true, I have an expensive product that underperforms the competition, and management is not happy. Whereas if I ignore superlong trends, I get to earn my salary, probably until I retire - you know, it probably won't happen. I value a product competetively. And if we miss, it won't be my only problem. So even if I can do the right thing, I will be punished for the event.
If actuaries can collectively predict the future, then term life insurance premiums should show a strong trend down as we approach the point where longevity increases significantly (adjusting for income, inflation, etc). From a few seconds of googling, they seem to be flat or increasing. It might be good to look back in 100 years and see if they got it right.
Predicting the future of lifespan based on the last 100 years is reasonable. That sensible system can't predict a black swan or revolutionary idea; suppose wereduce the chance of heart attacks by 90% by treating your blood chemistry. That's not impossible, also not possible today. But that would expand life expectancy.
Life expectancy has been increasing by ever smaller amounts in the past decades. I am hopefully that a lot of new technologies could help buck that trend, but so far the trends don't support the author's hypothesis.
Most people - at least most people here - know that a lot of those publicized numbers are due to infant mortality, but ...
Post-childhood life expectancy has gone up in smaller amounts as the parent comment says. The grand numbers ("life expectancy was just 60 in 1900!") obviously reflect infant and childhood mortality, but we've increased the average lifespan in the United States by 2-3 years in the last few decades alone.
Here's a graph that shows life expectancy at various ages in the UK - you can see this is not all due to childhood mortality:
Avoiding childhood death improved life expectancy at birth most dramatically on a global scale. But if you look from other points (say life expectancy at age 20), or scope it for locality and gender, the ability to intervene for many formerly mortal events pushed the needle up significantly. Examples: heart attacks, diabetes, cancer.
The differences aren't as dramatic -- saving someone from a heart attack at 50 may move the needle 5 years. But they are real.
I don't mean to be a pessimist but this entire article boils down to describing Moore's law, and saying that medical research will advance quickly because it uses computers as well.
Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment… if actuaries did agree they wouldn't publicise it as an increased expectation of health is would benefit them financially. If actuaries expected people to live less time they'd be keen to increase rates and advertise it. If they seriously expected people to stop dying then the estimated value of life insurance policies would drop to zero.
Personally, I think it's more than a little unlikely that we're the last generation to know death.
> If they seriously expected people to stop dying then the estimated value of life insurance policies would drop to zero.
I think it's (not im)possible that rates would go up! Here's why:
The most risky (largest) life insurance policies aren't taken out by people who fully expect to reach old age; rather, they are taken out by people in their prime with young families or other dependents. So you have people taking out large policies from ages 25 - 50 or so, and then going back to small policies or no policy at all. The risk pool is now very different -- lots of very pofitable policies, but also a lot of risk. The existential risk to the insurance company might actually increase in that case, and rates would have to be increased to accomodate this risk.
Probably not, and IANAA, but it'd be interesting if an actual actuary familiar with life insurance could chime in.
The worst case scenario is that people manage to fend off death but not old age and infirmity. This leads to the collapse not of the insurance industry but the much larger pensions industry, as there is no longer any amount of money that you can accumulate during a 50-year working life that will guarantee you a non-working life forever.
If this kind of simple-minded extrapolation worked, we would all be flying personal vehicles that could break the sound barrier right now, and would take vacations on the moon.
I'd like to believe you, but what kills people is not their age, today it's mostly cancer and heart disease. While I'd hope we'll make progress, I doubt those 2 will be just gone in 30 years.
What makes you think we won't cure them? Cancer I think will definitely be cured in 30 years. I haven't been following heart disease so much but chances are we will have huge health breakthroughs by 30 years. I would put my money on there being new/different diseases that kill us in 30 years.
In theory, couldn't a lot of heart disease (if not more general cardiovascular diseases) be addressed by figuring out how to affordably grow new hearts from tissue? I understand that's not something we're capable of doing right now but from my (largely ignorant) perspective, it seems like the issue is "hearts break down over time". The heart is essentially a mechanical part, and unlike neurological systems, there's no qualitative difference between one heart and another aside from how well it pumps blood. When you have a mechanical part that wears out, you replace it. Artificial hearts have issues stemming from the fact that they aren't 1:1 replacements for human hearts but if you could grow a new heart from a person's cells and get to a point where doing so is relatively affordable, could you not swap out an old heart the way you'd swap out a fuel pump that's wearing out?
Compared to stuff like cancer, I feel like replacing hearts is more an issue of cost and engineering rather than developing entire new forms of treatment.
Well, today hearts are replaced by perfectly healthy hearts of other people and yet life expectancy after such a procedure is not great and patients have to take meds for as long as they live. Also cardiovascular performance is much reduced. So as long as this is not working really well, i guess growing hearts and replacing them is still a long way off.
Also there are other kinds of common cardiovascular disease like coronary heart disease which can't be fixed by replacing the heart.
If I recall correctly China has reached the escape velocity at some point in the sixties, gaining more than one year of life expectancy every passing year. The even harder part is to sustain this for long period of times.
"The latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it is defined as The Maes-Garreau Point. The period equals to n-1 of the person’s life expectancy.
This suggests a law:
Maes-Garreau Law: Most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point."
"Trust but verify" is a good way to lead one's life. Ideally, we'd never take anyone's word for anything, and have the time and means to dig up supporting evidence for any position or statement that we encounter. But who has the time for that? We have to organize our busy lives around blocks of selective ignorance, portions of human knowledge and culture wherein we choose to take statements at face value, or follow the consensus viewpoint without doing the necessary groundwork to validate it. Books can and have been written on how to best go about this: acquiring and processing information costs time, and time is the most valuable resource most us of possess.
There exist a growing number of people propagating various forms of the viewpoint that we middle-aged folk in developed countries may (or might, or certainly will) live to see the development and widespread availability of radical life extension therapies. Which is to say medical technologies capable of greatly extending healthy human life span, probably introduced in stages, each stage effective enough to grant additional healthy years in which to await the next breakthrough. You might think of Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, both of whom have written good books to encapsulate their messages, and so forth.
Some people take the view of radical life extension within our lifetimes at face value, whilst others dismiss it out of hand. Both of these are rational approaches to selective ignorance in the face of all science-based predictions. It usually doesn't much matter what your opinion is on one article of science or another, and taking the time to validate science-based statements usually adds no economic value to your immediate future. It required several years of following research and investigating the background for me to feel comfortable reaching my own conclusions on the matter of engineered longevity, for example. Clearly some science-based predictions are enormously valuable and transformative, but you would lose a lifetime wading through the swamp of uselessness and irrelevance to find the few gemstones hidden therein.
As a further incentive to avoid swamp-wading, it is generally well known that futurist predictions of any sort have a horrible track record. Ignoring all futurism isn't a bad attention management strategy for someone who is largely removed from any activity (such as issuing insurance) that depends on being right in predicting trends and events. You might be familiar with the Maes-Garreau Law, which notes one of the incentives operating on futurists: 'The Maes-Garreau Law is the statement that "most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point", defined as "the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it".'
If you want to be a popular futurist, telling people what they want to hear is a good start. "You're not going to be alive to see this, but..." isn't a compelling opening line in any pitch. You'll also be more convincing if your yourself have good reason to believe in your message. Needless to say, these two items have no necessary relationship to a good prediction, accuracy in materials used to support the prediction, or whether what is predicted actually comes to pass. These incentives do not make cranks of all futurists - but they are something one has to be aware of. Equally, we have to be aware of our own desire to hear what we want to hear. That is especially true in the case of predictions for future biotechnology and enhanced human longevity; we'd all like to find out that the mighty white-coated scientists will in fact rescue us from aging to death. But the laws of physics, the progression of human societies, and advance of technological prowess don't care about what we want to hear, nor what the futurists say.
I put value on what Kurzweil and de Grey have to say about the potential future of increased human longevity - ...
You say you've spent a ton of time reading about this, but don't actually say what your conclusions are. I know it's sort of counter to your point, but I would be interested in hearing your opinions on how soon we will start seeing significant increases in longevity.
Probably off by a factor of 10. Very few people work in science doing research. The economy doesn't support enough people doing research to think we're going to make that kind of breakthrough within 30 years.
I'd be curious to know how old the author is, since the selection of 30 years to me points to biased analysis. As one likely knows that's spent any time researching the topic, and as others have committed, there's no evidence to support the author's claims. Historically speaking most people have been able to live as long as they do now on average. To my knowledge infant mortality was the big outliner historical speaking when it came to average life expectancy and points to why average life expectancy is a pour measure. Truth is that if there was a major leap, there's zero reason the general public would ever get wind of it; basic economic both in terms of it as a product and the impact it'd have on populations.
This article seems inherently flawed in its assumption that a. the exponential growth of computing power will keep up, despite the numerous technical and physical boundaries imposed upon them, b. computational power will solve many of the unknown inner workings of the human body, and c. that being aware of, and understanding those inner workings allows us to modify the human body in such a way that we can 'rejuvinate' the system.
While I do feel that life expectancy of everyone below 40 is probably going to massively higher than historical life expecancies (disregarding systemic failures of society and outside influences), I don't foresee a future where everyone gets to live forever.
Moore's law has not been an exponential increase in technological capability in general. It has only been an exponential increase in one particular technology - more of the same. I see no evidence that the development of novel technology in general has sped up in any way.
As someone who turned 50 this year - immortality being available in 30 years sounds pretty good to me!
However, I seem to remember a similar argument being made in a book I read at high school, which obviously wasn't yesterday. The Mighty Micro, published in 1979, talked about the imminent creation of UIM's (Ultra-Intelligent Machines) by the 1990s and that these would, naturally, lead to such rapid advancements in healthcare as to give effective immortality.
[NB Mind you that book did make me rather interested in AI and I did do a CS degree and go on to do post-grad AI research for 6 years up to 1994 where I encountered a far better technology for enhancing intelligence. I can't really be too critical of someone getting this excited, after all I did, eventually somebody is going to do it...].
Yeah, I'm almost your age. When I was in high school, I had naive confidence that medical science would advance quickly enough to prevent my getting "old". I even remember a speech from a principal when I was in middle school, claiming that most of us in my class would live to well over 100 years. I believed him.
Despite that optimism and my very healthy diet and exercise regimen, I deal with increasingly deteriorating knee cartilage, loss of muscle mass, an impinged disc in my neck, decrease in reaction times, typical age-related memory degradation, increase in hair loss, yearly removal of pre-cancerous skin anomalies, failing reading vision, mild hearing loss, etc... you know, I'm getting old. This crap is building up and modern medicine offers no magic bullets to even the most minor of my age-related symptoms.
If I do make it another 30 years and if I'm still mentally with it, I'm sure that I'll be poo-pooing some claim that "in just another 30 years, you may live forever".
I don't doubt that eventually humans will figure out aging and be able to stop it -- but by that time, society will look a lot more like Star Trek with ubiquitous ability to manipulate our biology at an atomic level. Star Trek is at least hundreds of years away, not 30.
I seem to find that playing online games does wonders for this...
Only thing that really annoys me at the moment is my eyesight - I'm quite shortsighted and wear contacts to do things like skiing. Trying to navigate a new ski area (just back from the vast Portes de Soleil) with a map is now getting quite tricky as I can't read stuff up close with my contacts in....
Also I seemed to develop the rare blue/black colour blindness which my wife wasn't happy about.
I have a feeling we'll have to go through a period of global catastrophe before humanity resumes making progress at a quick pace. The momentum of the previous age of intellect[1] is coming to an end, and we're well into the age of decadence. The strong pillars of duty in Western society have gradually, in the past two hundred years, been swapped out piece by piece with some kind of weak inflammable material of decadence. These days single terrorist groups conquer entire nations before being slowed down, and our inefficient & corrupt governments whose hands and feet act independently are hardly able to stop them even with funding of billions. Millions of migrants from wars encouraged by the West's governments threaten the unity of the EU. The enormous sovereign debt burden carried by the likes of Japan and U.S. creates economic instability which threatens the social fabric, leading to a situation where the choice of leaders is between an egomaniac (Trump) and a megalomaniac (Clinton). The supposed saviour of the world economy and driver of global growth, China, suffers from enormous mal-investments and is burdened with even more debt than the U.S.
(d) The stages of the rise and fall of great nations seem to be:
The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
The Age of Conquests
The Age of Commerce
The Age of Affluence
The Age of Intellect
The Age of Decadence.
(e) Decadence is marked by:
Defensiveness
Pessimism
Materialism
Frivolity
An influx of foreigners
The Welfare State
A weakening of religion.
(f) Decadence is due to:
Too long a period of wealth and power Selfishness
Love of money
The loss of a sense of duty.
The very decadence that corrodes an empire's institutions, rendering its governments unable to effectively thwart the rise of bandits who conquer vast swarths of territory, creates the conditions necessary for a new cycle with a new empire. Even if they can deal with one, or two, or three, each new group of bandits will become harder and harder for a decadent declining empire to deal with. Taliban, Shia militias, ISIS....
Biologists hate him!
This programmer discovered Philosopher's stone with this one weird trick!
Anyway:
Yes, we will do great advances in health care, but will we _cheat_ death? Will those advancements be available? Is this something we _should_ do as a society? Technological determinism/solutionism (as presented in the article) is a really shoddy idea. It ignores so many things and assumes that progress is an arrow always flying forward…
My father is a clinical oncologist/researche who is approaching "voluntary" retirement age. He's incredibly depressed about it given the sudden boom in successful research in the field. I believe the reason of the trend isn't just sudden interest, but quantity of production as well.
You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity.
Also, usually, the longer someone lives, the more their ideology defines them. Could be a problem too
He's saying that the older someone is the more their ideology defines them, which is itself probably inaccurate. And he says that that "could be a problem."
That's not it. The problem is that individuals have cognitive biases. People rarely change their minds. As a society, this is offset by a slow, regular replacement of its members.
If you end that cycle of renewal, the rate at which our society reacts to change and adopts new ideas would significantly slow.
That's a problem regardless of how well the society aligns with my ideals.
People's brains change as they age. There are definite differences between the way older people and younger people think. This isn't a generalization about old people having bad politics, but rather a comment on the tendency of people's minds to be harder to change over time.
Personally, I think one of the biggest challenges to transitioning to a low-birthrate, ultra-long-lived society is that a constant influx of young blood seems to be a necessary engine for new ideas and progress. There's a combination of not knowing better[1] and not having as much to lose that makes young people more willing to take big risks and push for more egalitarian societies over time. Left to their own devices, accumulation of wealth and status tend to ossify people's belief systems and reduce their incentives to throw everything out and start over.
[1] by this I mean not having the same accumulated beliefs about what is best. Sometimes those beliefs turn out to be unfounded, and you discover that by challenging them.
Limited resources will always keep population in check. When population growth outstrips available resources, war (or some other catastrophic event that reduces population, eg. famine, drought, disease, etc.) is inevitable.
That refers more to individual behavior. What I mean is that, simply, if the world runs out of food, people will die until the population reaches a level that can be supported by the available resources. I don't see how any other outcome is possible. This happens on a smaller scale in areas where food distribution is problematic.
The only way around this is advances in technology that improve food production/distribution, but if this were to occur, then population would no longer outstrip resources and a new balance would be reached.
Why would it? People always seem to assume that with extremely long lifetimes, humans would still reproduce at roughly the same age as they do now. I just don't believe that would be the case.
So many things change with lifetimes that long and it seems more likely to me that the human timeline would adjust to the new lifetime. Physically maturing into an adult may take the same amount of time, but now it's a tiny fraction of your overall life. You may spend 50 or 100 years in secondary education, then another 200 in a career at which point you should have enough money put away to live on the interest.
And it's at this point, when you're 300+ years old that you start having children. On this timescale, you'd still see more generational overlap than we have today, but no so much that overpopulation is a concern.
In the case of men, sperm quality declines with age, so a man is more or less fertile his entire life, but that may not hold true in the case of extreme longevity. If this decline in sperm-quality is due to age damage, then an age treatment may also improve sperm quality. But this is not guaranteed and may require its own specific treatment.
Women produce all the eggs they will ever produce before they are born. Menopause occurs when a woman runs out of eggs. So in the case of females, an anti-aging treatment is unlikely to extend her reproductive years beyond the current age of menopause (although it may make pregnancy safer and more viable during the latter half of her reproductive years). Like sperm, a woman's egg quality also declines with age, creating further difficulty.
So the idea that women will put off having children for a couple centuries seems to be a nonstarter lacking other advances as well, but it may be a possibility for men.
Aside from the economics of all this I'd suggest that on the basis of what we know about most humans, we'd end up with an appallingly ossified society. The Maos, Stalins, Kim Il Sungs[ list the dictators ] etc., in their 21st century forms will be ruling the roost for ever and a day. The last figure I saw on 'freedom of expression' across the world was (2016) 14%.
For example: "Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest and placing greater demands on the private sector to take down offending content. "
No technology has ever extended life. The so-called gains in life expectancy have only come about by reducing the causes of early mortality and slowing down the diseases of ageing.
I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but maybe they meant that we've only reduced early causes of death like disease etc, but not done anything to affect our internal biological processes that cause aging. As an example, reducing skin cancer by staying out of the sun keeps you from prematurely aging, but it doesn't stop your hair from turning white and your wrinkles from forming.
Drugs that change our metabolism can affect how much damage something does to your body, and you die because your body systems fail or degrade. So fixing some causes and symptoms should be able to increase your possible lifespan. Just like we can increase the lifespan of some simple animals, we could increase our lifespan through physical means. There's no magic spirit inside you that can only last 120 years, as far as anyone knows.
The original paper in which the idea of actuarial escape velocity was proposed by Aubrey de Grey is open access, and worth reading for a full treatment of the concept.
The thing to take away here is that this is inevitable, but not necessarily for us, unless we dig in and get the job done right now. The development of the necessary technologies is very thinly funded, meaning that timelines are very uncertain. Senescent cell clearance may be under development in two US startups right now, a part of allotopic expression of mitochondrial DNA in clinical trials in France, clearance of one type of amyloid has had a successful trial in the UK, and clearance of glucosepane cross-links a couple of years away from a drug candidate, but other areas of biological repair needed for SENS-style rejuvenation of the old are still years away from getting to even this nascent stage. It is a miserable state of affairs given that the cost of progress towards prototypes in mice is a few hundred million, less than a single drug's development funding. Funding and advocacy make a huge difference at this point in the bootstrapping of rejuvenation therapies.
----
Escape Velocity: Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now
The escape velocity cusp is closer than you might guess. Since we are already so long lived, even a 30% increase in healthy life span will give the first beneficiaries of rejuvenation therapies another 20 years—an eternity in science—to benefit from second-generation therapies that would give another 30%, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, if first-generation rejuvenation therapies were universally available and this progress in developing rejuvenation therapy could be indefinitely maintained, these advances would put us beyond AEV. Universal availability might be thought economically and sociopolitically implausible (though that conclusion may be premature, as I will summarise below), so it's worth considering the same question in terms of life-span potential (the life span of the luckiest people). Those who get first-generation therapies only just in time will in fact be unlikely to live more than 20–30 years more than their parents, because they will spend many frail years with a short remaining life expectancy (i.e., a high risk of imminent death), whereas those only a little younger will never get that frail and will spend rather few years even in biological middle age. Quantitatively, what this means is that if a 10% per year decline of mortality rates at all ages is achieved and sustained indefinitely, then the first 1000-year-old is probably only 5–10 years younger than the first 150-year-old.
There is a huge difference between life expectancy and life span and this article [1] covers it pretty well.
Life expectancy is skewed by infant mortality rates:
> Our conclusion is that there is a characteristic life span for our species, in which mortality decreases sharply from infancy through childhood, followed by a period in which mortality rates remain essentially constant to about age 40 years, after which mortality rises steadily in Gompertz fashion. The modal age of adult death is about seven decades, before which time humans remain vigorous producers, and after which senescence rapidly
occurs and people die.
Infant mortality for births beyond 24 weeks gestation in the developed world is well below one half of one percent[0], some below one quarter of one percent. It's not that big of an effect anymore.
> So if you've made it to 150, you're "over the hump" (a long time ago), and then there's simply no limit to how long you can live.
Even if we accept that life-extending and rejuvenating technologies will progress as described, and that all diseases will eventually be either curable or eradicated, there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder).
In England and Wales in 2010, about 0.025% of the population died from accidental or malicious (but not self-inflicted) injury or poisoning. If we take that as a typical annual risk of death, then over a thousand years you have a 22% chance of dying from one of those causes. At about 3000 years, it becomes more likely than not: at about 9000 years, overwhelmingly more likely (~90% chance of death); at about 50000, a practical certainty (> 99.999%).
Of course, the above assumes that risk of death from injury won't drop as medical technologies improve, which is wrong, but as long as it's non-zero, there is still going to be a statistical limit on the length of life. No hanging around till the heat death of the universe for you.
On a lighter note, I can imagine that the size of the ego which accompanies the type of person that lives to 9,000 years old would more than likely encourage someone to poison or strangle them.
You gotta play the game theory out. An 8,500-year-old strangling a 9,000-year-old needs to be asking hard questions about the sort of incentive structure they're producing for the 8,000-year-olds.
The world where life span runs on like that is deeply, profoundly weird, and thinking about it is hard because it's so unlike where we live. You can't just imagine one 9,000-year-old and try to imagine what the world is like, because they will not be alone.
I imagine absurdly conservative politics and a completely ossified power structure. How are you supposed to advance if your boss has 500 years more experience and will be in that position for another 8000 years?
I mean in the current world rich assholes do eventually die and sometimes their replacements are better (or worse, but in a way that destroys their power base). Do you really want to live in a world where the Bilderberg Group is immortal?
Obviously this could go either full dystopia, full utopia, or somewhere in between. I personally believe that "in between" is an unstable equilibrium and that a fall in one of the directions is inevitable.
But there's a reason we use the word "singularity" to describe that kind of future- it really is impossible to envision with any greater accuracy or confidence than elizabethans could imagine the world of 2016.
Still not creative enough. If everybody realizes there's no way to advance because of the old people, everyone will react to that fact. Something will happen. Actually, lots of somethings, with varying levels of success and failure. But there certainly will not be 99.9% of the long-lived human race just sort of sitting around for centuries at a time going "Oh well, guess I'm going to be a loser for the next thousand years."
At that point the crystal ball becomes too fuzzy for me to guess exactly how they will react, except to point out that "go kill all the old people" is a really uncreative solution to the problem, and you've got a lot of people who will be highly incentivized to find another solution, since they plan on being the old people at some point.
>Still not creative enough. If everybody realizes there's no way to advance because of the old people, everyone will react to that fact.
Except everyone (the majority) could be old people too.
If you can live for 5000 years for example, you don't need as many reproduction going on (besides the huge overpopulation that would already be going on).
A lot of people in the world know that the Kim family is strangling North Korea, but you don't see people rising up to overthrow them. Imagine a world where Kim Il-sung was effectively immortal. Imagine a world where the monarchies of the middle ages could last a thousand years or more. Without something to shake up the status quo every once in awhile the situation tends to stagnate, even if it is a bad situation.
It is possible that human mentality would change if we had to start thinking about longer timescales like this, but that seems optimistic.
Beyond the reduced risk of death from injury, you also have to account for a change in behavior. I posit that we would all act very differently if we knew our life expectancy to be a few thousand years. I'd venture a guess that we would be a lot more risk-averse. Society would look drastically different.
Why wouldn't we be more risky if we knew we would live for 3000 years. Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years.
There no pressure to get your stuff together if you know you can mess around for a couple of centuries and still have time to get your life in order.
> Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years.
You're putting too much faith in the judgment of centuries-old "teenagers". My guess is that they would squeeze 100-200 years of drinking and partying into 5-10 years :)
And then after a millenium your great grandchildren will be relatively as old as you are (Say 900 to 1000, at that point how does aging affect someone?)
Also, how would your memory hold up? Would you even be able to really remember anything that happened over a century or two ago?
Probably not without some sort of memory enhancement. I'm not sure if that would even be preferable, maybe it would be better to let the past fade out.
Let's take binge-drinking, for example. Let's suppose that each binge-drinking episode has a .0001% chance of causing a fatality. That is trivially low.
However, in order to consider the trade-offs involved, you have to think about the expected value of your life in either scenario. So you must compare E(life | no drink) with E(life | drink).
These are practically the same, but where they differ is that in the drink scenario, your expected value is broken down into two scenarios -- one if you die as a result of the binge drink, and one if you don't. So you can break E(life | drink) into
99.999(E(life + d)) + .001d, where d is the added enjoyment you get from that one night of binge drinking.
The comparison, then, is ultimately whether E(life) >=< 99.999(E(life + d) + .001d
You can tell from this that what really matters is the ratio of d to E(life), the enjoyment you get from drinking that one night, compared to your overall enjoyment of your ENTIRE subsequent life. As we extend your life expectancy, as long as we assume that life is a good thing, we make the value of your subsequent life higher and higher. This, in turn, should make any rational actor be less willing to take on risks that would cut it short.
I couldn't follow your math, but the english conclusion seems illogical. Even if it is, assuming humans to be rational actors isn't a terribly good assumption.
Not really. Only the wealthy would have access to this technology, the poor would still have normal life expectancy. Society would look the way it does now (stratified), just more so.
Over 100 years most 'rich' only tech ended up getting cheap. (computers, cars, air travel).
So, you might have ultra rich at 850, rich at 800, and the masses at 750. But, having access to 100 years of refinement the 750 year old's ongoing treatment is likely far cheaper.
Though IMO, this is all wishful thinking. 1,000 years ago people thought they where close to unlocking immortality, and we are likely just as wrong.
I don't see why that would be the case, extreme longevity has arrisen in some organisms by natural selection, so it would appear to be a software problem. You need the tools to change a genome to be affordable (they already are to some extent) and you need the software to be written (it isn't).
raises an interesting philosophical question: If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro?
e.g. Assuming not everyone could afford the technology and you have a 30 yro killer who lacks the funds to rejuvinate committing murder on somebody much older. Would that even be a crime or could it be argued that a 2nd class citizen has only tried to revenge or to set right to what they perceive an unjust society.
Playing god is scary. I think we can only do it if we are really thick enough and full of our selves to believe that certain individuals are better than the rest. (... of course all under the usual disguise of democracy and with a system that ensures the majority of those living under it, that what they do is right and for the greater good).
No we don't. Most legal system have some concept of aggravating circumstances if the victim of a particular offense is a certain age, a certain profession, etc
We punish on both victim type and perpetrator type.
On the perpetrator side, the punishments themselves are in the context of current lifespan. If the life expectancy jumps to 150, is 36 the new 18?
On the victim side:
"A Denver Post analysis of five years of state sentencing data found that those convicted of child abuse resulting in death between 2007 and 2011 got prison sentences 25 percent shorter than those who killed adults and were sentenced for the comparable felony charge of second-degree murder."
It might be more of a crime. Before, you removed the remaining 50 year potential. Now you removed the 500 year potential. One could say the damages increased x10.
"there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder)."
Yes, everyone already knows that. I wouldn't worry about living for 1000 years if you're alive in 30 years, the human races spends much more time discussing the inane. Someone yells the equivalent of "squirrel" and down the rabbit hole we go...
If they can get you to 150 and stop your aging, it implies a mastery over the physiological context that means you can stop worrying about the age of the body as we might have previously. The aging would get repaired one way or another.
Some of the treatments are expected to also reverse the effects of aging, so you wouldn't live for 1000 years in the body of a 150 year old. Although I suspect it won't be neat and clean. So if you're born into a world with aging treatments, you might live for 1000 years in the body of a 25 year old, but if you age and then get the treatments, even though you might have the body of a 25 year old, you might have some scarring or other effects left over (like an obese person who loses weight very quickly and has extra skin).
Why would you think that you'd have to tolerate scarring in a world that could fix DNA and implant it as easily as we run shell scripts to change our UNIX environments?
Why would you think that the effects of aging would all automatically disappear? Eventually, sure, you might be indistinguishable from someone born a hundred years after aging treatments, but that may take a specialized (or more advanced) treatment.
Just as one example, I think it is far more likely that an anti-age treatment would prevent the formation of wrinkles than that it would remove existing wrinkles.
Because your comment was regarding our having the technology needed to allow someone to live 1000+ years. In order to allow that, we'll need to have mastered manipulation of literally every cell in the body.
By the time we can go in and reinvigorate teeth, bones, all the internal organs, all the cells in the brain... restoring patches of skin will likely be trivial.
Solving the problem of aging generally means solving an avalanche of specific problems - one of which is the rejuvenation of skin.
> Because your comment was regarding our having the technology needed to allow someone to live 1000+ years. In order to allow that, we'll need to have mastered manipulation of literally every cell in the body.
This is not correct. The core concept is that we will develop individual solutions which solve pieces of the longevity problem. Living to 150 may only require solving one of them. Living to 1000+ may require what you propose (although that is not clear either) but in the intervening time period between the initial solution and the ultimate solution you cannot assume all other physical aspects of an aged individual will simply vanish.
you might live for 1000 years in the body of a 25 year old, but if you age and then get the treatments, even though you might have the body of a 25 year old, you might have some scarring or other effects left over
I feel that you're moving the goalposts on me by talking about the initial stages when some might make it to 150. My comments were regarding what you originally said above, not what you might have meant and tried to clarify in later comments.
I agree with you that at first we might solve some problems that extend life some years here and there but still be left with other semi-debilitating issues.
But once you're talking about all of the issues needed to be solved to reach 1,000 years, the technology will have to be far far far beyond the ability to repair some scarred skin.
I was responding to a commenter who suggested that you'd spend 850 years in the body of a 150-year-old. I was objecting to that idea, but conceding that there might be some unpleasantness left over. I only clarified the timeline of that unpleasantness when you objected.
To be clear, I wasn't only talking about scarred skin, but any consequence of aging. I was using excess skin due to rapid weight loss as an example of this type of comorbidity, in which one problem must be dealt with separately from another problem. It may be true that extending lifespans to 1000+ years will require technologies which will also resolve all other age-related issues. It may even be likely. But there is no principle that says it must be so.
If each year your chance of dying is 0.025%, and there's no relationship between subsequent years, wouldn't the chance remain 0.025% even after thousands of years?
(since what we're talking about is the probability of independent events.)
If you were just born, then you will probably die by age 4000. But if you are 3999 then you will almost certainly live to age 4000. Your probability of reaching a certain age is always contingent on your current age.
For this reason I'd predict a society of immortal conservatives. No risk is worth taking. Speed limits drop precipitously. Traffic infractions become federal offenses. Interest rates drop to nil.
Everyone would just have too much at risk, to allow anything dicey.
There are a great number of books that explore this subject. Robert A. Heinlein's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah%27s_Children is an early treatment. As you say at least one society (I'm sorry I don't remember the book) became increasingly risk-averse and added to an ever-growing list of death penalty crimes to feed the organ banks. Rather than utopia my fear is that would be closer to the truth.
I don't see death penalty happening in a society where a lifetime could be thousands of years. Its just too harsh, with so much to lose. Perhaps sentencing would grow to centuries.
Yes! The ultimate crime, surpassing even Treason. Perhaps death would be too easy for a Murderer. They would have to face perpetual imprisonment, thousands of years of confinement, to sufficiently punish them.
Go read a few Philip K. Dick novels and see if you change your mind. Take current examples of selfish actors with essentially unlimited funds (billionaries, big business, whatever gets your goat) and envision the world after 1,000 years of uninterrupted influence. It's easy to envision a dystopia where caste returns and you're born into a wage slave job at <large retailer of your choice>.
Perhaps we have already solved death and the world we currently live in is a virtual reality in which death is simply a reboot cycle where memory is wiped and new attributes are assigned.
Then we have the rich not only figuratively starving out the poor by hoarding wealth, land, and production; but, also literally starving them out by simply refusing to die while excessively consuming resources into eternity.
> Of course, the above assumes that risk of death from injury won't drop as medical technologies improve, which is wrong, but as long as it's non-zero, there is still going to be a statistical limit on the length of life. No hanging around till the heat death of the universe for you.
Technically, this is not correct.
If your chance of dying drops exponentially (perhaps not very realistic, hence 'technically'), your probability of survival converges to something greater than 0.
I consider myself a transhumanist, though even I can't help but notice that these advances always seem just close enough so the author might manage to benefit from them shortly before he expects to die. Kurzweil did the same thing.
I used to do yearly blog posts on the current state of whole brain emulation, and we are very very far away from any breakthrough there. So far away in fact that some prominent neuro scientists like Dennett believe this can't be done even in principle (I disagree with them, but it shows how far we have to go still).
In any case, I'll probably not be around in 30 years, and many HNers won't be either.
The part where you think we're very far away, may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs. Rather than a small increment, it'll be a substantial leap (even if it's not recognized at that moment). On the order of the transistor.
I'd be very skeptical that it will be noticed that it's possible, around the time that leap forward is about to occur. History indicates the exact opposite is most common when it comes to great technological leaps forward. Instead, what will occur is an ecosystem of supporting technology will prime the ground. Among the very few people that recognize the time as being ready, will be the person that actually invents said leap technology. And it may even be by accident, the ground was primed and an inventor in a garage put the pieces together (ala the inbound virtual reality revolution, it was all skepticism skepticism skepticism for decades, until the ground was primed to leap forward, while most weren't even looking at it).
> may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs
Not in this case, no. I realize your argument is mostly generic, too. Everybody understands that some problems are expected to have these kinds of revolutionary solutions or no solution at all. However, reading a mind into the computer and then executing it is not a matter of figuring just one missing thing out.
A workable solution requires us to be able to decipher and efficiently digitize the fine structure of the brain. Acquiring missing pieces of technique or technology is a necessary but not sufficient piece of this specific puzzle's solution. There is no sudden eureka moment where it all falls into place, it's just a near endless chain of painstaking detective work in biochemistry.
That's basically what he was arguing. "Instead, what will occur is an ecosystem of supporting technology will prime the ground."
Those problems you're talking about will be figured out bit by bit, and only once all those things are figured out, will someone realize "Oh shit, we're at the point where this is possible now!" while everyone around them isn't paying attention and still thinking "It's impossible. It's impossible."
A breakthrough may not be of any use to those already around. Likely a genetic manipulation would allow newborns to have a longer lifespan (many mammals have different lifespans already; it may be programmable). Adults may have changed in ways that make it ineffective. So we'd grow old among a rising generation of immortals.
You totally had me until you mentioned VR which is totally trivial compared to emulating a human brain. I think there was never the question if VR would be possible because we had forms of it 2 decades ago. It was more a question about the market actually existing and technology become faster and smaller to make it financially viable for mainstream consumers.
229 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadIf I correctly predict, as an actuary, the demise of the industry, I don't win anything. If I can calculate a superprecise premium for my insurance product based on this being true, I have an expensive product that underperforms the competition, and management is not happy. Whereas if I ignore superlong trends, I get to earn my salary, probably until I retire - you know, it probably won't happen. I value a product competetively. And if we miss, it won't be my only problem. So even if I can do the right thing, I will be punished for the event.
Post-childhood life expectancy has gone up in smaller amounts as the parent comment says. The grand numbers ("life expectancy was just 60 in 1900!") obviously reflect infant and childhood mortality, but we've increased the average lifespan in the United States by 2-3 years in the last few decades alone.
Here's a graph that shows life expectancy at various ages in the UK - you can see this is not all due to childhood mortality:
http://www.maxroser.com/gains-for-all-life-expectancy-by-age...
Avoiding childhood death improved life expectancy at birth most dramatically on a global scale. But if you look from other points (say life expectancy at age 20), or scope it for locality and gender, the ability to intervene for many formerly mortal events pushed the needle up significantly. Examples: heart attacks, diabetes, cancer.
The differences aren't as dramatic -- saving someone from a heart attack at 50 may move the needle 5 years. But they are real.
Seems a little shoddy.
Personally, I think it's more than a little unlikely that we're the last generation to know death.
I think it's (not im)possible that rates would go up! Here's why:
The most risky (largest) life insurance policies aren't taken out by people who fully expect to reach old age; rather, they are taken out by people in their prime with young families or other dependents. So you have people taking out large policies from ages 25 - 50 or so, and then going back to small policies or no policy at all. The risk pool is now very different -- lots of very pofitable policies, but also a lot of risk. The existential risk to the insurance company might actually increase in that case, and rates would have to be increased to accomodate this risk.
Probably not, and IANAA, but it'd be interesting if an actual actuary familiar with life insurance could chime in.
Compared to stuff like cancer, I feel like replacing hearts is more an issue of cost and engineering rather than developing entire new forms of treatment.
This suggests a law:
Maes-Garreau Law: Most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point."
http://kk.org/thetechnium/the-maesgarreau/
There exist a growing number of people propagating various forms of the viewpoint that we middle-aged folk in developed countries may (or might, or certainly will) live to see the development and widespread availability of radical life extension therapies. Which is to say medical technologies capable of greatly extending healthy human life span, probably introduced in stages, each stage effective enough to grant additional healthy years in which to await the next breakthrough. You might think of Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, both of whom have written good books to encapsulate their messages, and so forth.
Some people take the view of radical life extension within our lifetimes at face value, whilst others dismiss it out of hand. Both of these are rational approaches to selective ignorance in the face of all science-based predictions. It usually doesn't much matter what your opinion is on one article of science or another, and taking the time to validate science-based statements usually adds no economic value to your immediate future. It required several years of following research and investigating the background for me to feel comfortable reaching my own conclusions on the matter of engineered longevity, for example. Clearly some science-based predictions are enormously valuable and transformative, but you would lose a lifetime wading through the swamp of uselessness and irrelevance to find the few gemstones hidden therein.
As a further incentive to avoid swamp-wading, it is generally well known that futurist predictions of any sort have a horrible track record. Ignoring all futurism isn't a bad attention management strategy for someone who is largely removed from any activity (such as issuing insurance) that depends on being right in predicting trends and events. You might be familiar with the Maes-Garreau Law, which notes one of the incentives operating on futurists: 'The Maes-Garreau Law is the statement that "most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point", defined as "the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it".'
If you want to be a popular futurist, telling people what they want to hear is a good start. "You're not going to be alive to see this, but..." isn't a compelling opening line in any pitch. You'll also be more convincing if your yourself have good reason to believe in your message. Needless to say, these two items have no necessary relationship to a good prediction, accuracy in materials used to support the prediction, or whether what is predicted actually comes to pass. These incentives do not make cranks of all futurists - but they are something one has to be aware of. Equally, we have to be aware of our own desire to hear what we want to hear. That is especially true in the case of predictions for future biotechnology and enhanced human longevity; we'd all like to find out that the mighty white-coated scientists will in fact rescue us from aging to death. But the laws of physics, the progression of human societies, and advance of technological prowess don't care about what we want to hear, nor what the futurists say.
I put value on what Kurzweil and de Grey have to say about the potential future of increased human longevity - ...
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/12/the-maesgarreau-...
You can ask there, or search through that blog.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pu...
While I do feel that life expectancy of everyone below 40 is probably going to massively higher than historical life expecancies (disregarding systemic failures of society and outside influences), I don't foresee a future where everyone gets to live forever.
However, I seem to remember a similar argument being made in a book I read at high school, which obviously wasn't yesterday. The Mighty Micro, published in 1979, talked about the imminent creation of UIM's (Ultra-Intelligent Machines) by the 1990s and that these would, naturally, lead to such rapid advancements in healthcare as to give effective immortality.
http://www.tof.co.uk/stories/page8.html
[NB Mind you that book did make me rather interested in AI and I did do a CS degree and go on to do post-grad AI research for 6 years up to 1994 where I encountered a far better technology for enhancing intelligence. I can't really be too critical of someone getting this excited, after all I did, eventually somebody is going to do it...].
Despite that optimism and my very healthy diet and exercise regimen, I deal with increasingly deteriorating knee cartilage, loss of muscle mass, an impinged disc in my neck, decrease in reaction times, typical age-related memory degradation, increase in hair loss, yearly removal of pre-cancerous skin anomalies, failing reading vision, mild hearing loss, etc... you know, I'm getting old. This crap is building up and modern medicine offers no magic bullets to even the most minor of my age-related symptoms.
If I do make it another 30 years and if I'm still mentally with it, I'm sure that I'll be poo-pooing some claim that "in just another 30 years, you may live forever".
I don't doubt that eventually humans will figure out aging and be able to stop it -- but by that time, society will look a lot more like Star Trek with ubiquitous ability to manipulate our biology at an atomic level. Star Trek is at least hundreds of years away, not 30.
I seem to find that playing online games does wonders for this...
Only thing that really annoys me at the moment is my eyesight - I'm quite shortsighted and wear contacts to do things like skiing. Trying to navigate a new ski area (just back from the vast Portes de Soleil) with a map is now getting quite tricky as I can't read stuff up close with my contacts in....
Also I seemed to develop the rare blue/black colour blindness which my wife wasn't happy about.
My own pessimism is not helping.
[1] http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
The very decadence that corrodes an empire's institutions, rendering its governments unable to effectively thwart the rise of bandits who conquer vast swarths of territory, creates the conditions necessary for a new cycle with a new empire. Even if they can deal with one, or two, or three, each new group of bandits will become harder and harder for a decadent declining empire to deal with. Taliban, Shia militias, ISIS....Anyway: Yes, we will do great advances in health care, but will we _cheat_ death? Will those advancements be available? Is this something we _should_ do as a society? Technological determinism/solutionism (as presented in the article) is a really shoddy idea. It ignores so many things and assumes that progress is an arrow always flying forward…
To quote Max Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time." That's as true of anything as it is of science.
If you end that cycle of renewal, the rate at which our society reacts to change and adopts new ideas would significantly slow.
That's a problem regardless of how well the society aligns with my ideals.
Personally, I think one of the biggest challenges to transitioning to a low-birthrate, ultra-long-lived society is that a constant influx of young blood seems to be a necessary engine for new ideas and progress. There's a combination of not knowing better[1] and not having as much to lose that makes young people more willing to take big risks and push for more egalitarian societies over time. Left to their own devices, accumulation of wealth and status tend to ossify people's belief systems and reduce their incentives to throw everything out and start over.
[1] by this I mean not having the same accumulated beliefs about what is best. Sometimes those beliefs turn out to be unfounded, and you discover that by challenging them.
Actually, the opposite is true to a degree. Limited resources increases the birth rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
The only way around this is advances in technology that improve food production/distribution, but if this were to occur, then population would no longer outstrip resources and a new balance would be reached.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
Last time I checked space is pretty huge, we could move there.
And if you live long enough, you might not need a biological body to survive.
if done incorrectly, this might end up in quite a disaster
So many things change with lifetimes that long and it seems more likely to me that the human timeline would adjust to the new lifetime. Physically maturing into an adult may take the same amount of time, but now it's a tiny fraction of your overall life. You may spend 50 or 100 years in secondary education, then another 200 in a career at which point you should have enough money put away to live on the interest.
And it's at this point, when you're 300+ years old that you start having children. On this timescale, you'd still see more generational overlap than we have today, but no so much that overpopulation is a concern.
In the case of men, sperm quality declines with age, so a man is more or less fertile his entire life, but that may not hold true in the case of extreme longevity. If this decline in sperm-quality is due to age damage, then an age treatment may also improve sperm quality. But this is not guaranteed and may require its own specific treatment.
Women produce all the eggs they will ever produce before they are born. Menopause occurs when a woman runs out of eggs. So in the case of females, an anti-aging treatment is unlikely to extend her reproductive years beyond the current age of menopause (although it may make pregnancy safer and more viable during the latter half of her reproductive years). Like sperm, a woman's egg quality also declines with age, creating further difficulty.
So the idea that women will put off having children for a couple centuries seems to be a nonstarter lacking other advances as well, but it may be a possibility for men.
For example: "Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest and placing greater demands on the private sector to take down offending content. "
https://www.freedomhouse.org/issues/freedom-expression
Oh, and cancer.
However, just like 100 years ago, you will almost certainly be dead by age 100. For certain by 120.
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Seeking-immortality-Aubrey-de...
More info on Aubrey de Grey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/executive-team
The thing to take away here is that this is inevitable, but not necessarily for us, unless we dig in and get the job done right now. The development of the necessary technologies is very thinly funded, meaning that timelines are very uncertain. Senescent cell clearance may be under development in two US startups right now, a part of allotopic expression of mitochondrial DNA in clinical trials in France, clearance of one type of amyloid has had a successful trial in the UK, and clearance of glucosepane cross-links a couple of years away from a drug candidate, but other areas of biological repair needed for SENS-style rejuvenation of the old are still years away from getting to even this nascent stage. It is a miserable state of affairs given that the cost of progress towards prototypes in mice is a few hundred million, less than a single drug's development funding. Funding and advocacy make a huge difference at this point in the bootstrapping of rejuvenation therapies.
----
Escape Velocity: Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423155/
The escape velocity cusp is closer than you might guess. Since we are already so long lived, even a 30% increase in healthy life span will give the first beneficiaries of rejuvenation therapies another 20 years—an eternity in science—to benefit from second-generation therapies that would give another 30%, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, if first-generation rejuvenation therapies were universally available and this progress in developing rejuvenation therapy could be indefinitely maintained, these advances would put us beyond AEV. Universal availability might be thought economically and sociopolitically implausible (though that conclusion may be premature, as I will summarise below), so it's worth considering the same question in terms of life-span potential (the life span of the luckiest people). Those who get first-generation therapies only just in time will in fact be unlikely to live more than 20–30 years more than their parents, because they will spend many frail years with a short remaining life expectancy (i.e., a high risk of imminent death), whereas those only a little younger will never get that frail and will spend rather few years even in biological middle age. Quantitatively, what this means is that if a 10% per year decline of mortality rates at all ages is achieved and sustained indefinitely, then the first 1000-year-old is probably only 5–10 years younger than the first 150-year-old.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
Life expectancy is skewed by infant mortality rates:
> Our conclusion is that there is a characteristic life span for our species, in which mortality decreases sharply from infancy through childhood, followed by a period in which mortality rates remain essentially constant to about age 40 years, after which mortality rises steadily in Gompertz fashion. The modal age of adult death is about seven decades, before which time humans remain vigorous producers, and after which senescence rapidly occurs and people die.
[1] https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
PDF: http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...
[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_05.pdf page 3
Even if we accept that life-extending and rejuvenating technologies will progress as described, and that all diseases will eventually be either curable or eradicated, there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder).
In England and Wales in 2010, about 0.025% of the population died from accidental or malicious (but not self-inflicted) injury or poisoning. If we take that as a typical annual risk of death, then over a thousand years you have a 22% chance of dying from one of those causes. At about 3000 years, it becomes more likely than not: at about 9000 years, overwhelmingly more likely (~90% chance of death); at about 50000, a practical certainty (> 99.999%).
Of course, the above assumes that risk of death from injury won't drop as medical technologies improve, which is wrong, but as long as it's non-zero, there is still going to be a statistical limit on the length of life. No hanging around till the heat death of the universe for you.
The world where life span runs on like that is deeply, profoundly weird, and thinking about it is hard because it's so unlike where we live. You can't just imagine one 9,000-year-old and try to imagine what the world is like, because they will not be alone.
I mean in the current world rich assholes do eventually die and sometimes their replacements are better (or worse, but in a way that destroys their power base). Do you really want to live in a world where the Bilderberg Group is immortal?
But there's a reason we use the word "singularity" to describe that kind of future- it really is impossible to envision with any greater accuracy or confidence than elizabethans could imagine the world of 2016.
At that point the crystal ball becomes too fuzzy for me to guess exactly how they will react, except to point out that "go kill all the old people" is a really uncreative solution to the problem, and you've got a lot of people who will be highly incentivized to find another solution, since they plan on being the old people at some point.
Except everyone (the majority) could be old people too.
If you can live for 5000 years for example, you don't need as many reproduction going on (besides the huge overpopulation that would already be going on).
It is possible that human mentality would change if we had to start thinking about longer timescales like this, but that seems optimistic.
There no pressure to get your stuff together if you know you can mess around for a couple of centuries and still have time to get your life in order.
Plus, can you imagine the compound interest? :)
You're putting too much faith in the judgment of centuries-old "teenagers". My guess is that they would squeeze 100-200 years of drinking and partying into 5-10 years :)
Also, how would your memory hold up? Would you even be able to really remember anything that happened over a century or two ago?
Let's take binge-drinking, for example. Let's suppose that each binge-drinking episode has a .0001% chance of causing a fatality. That is trivially low.
However, in order to consider the trade-offs involved, you have to think about the expected value of your life in either scenario. So you must compare E(life | no drink) with E(life | drink).
These are practically the same, but where they differ is that in the drink scenario, your expected value is broken down into two scenarios -- one if you die as a result of the binge drink, and one if you don't. So you can break E(life | drink) into
99.999(E(life + d)) + .001d, where d is the added enjoyment you get from that one night of binge drinking.
The comparison, then, is ultimately whether E(life) >=< 99.999(E(life + d) + .001d
You can tell from this that what really matters is the ratio of d to E(life), the enjoyment you get from drinking that one night, compared to your overall enjoyment of your ENTIRE subsequent life. As we extend your life expectancy, as long as we assume that life is a good thing, we make the value of your subsequent life higher and higher. This, in turn, should make any rational actor be less willing to take on risks that would cut it short.
So, you might have ultra rich at 850, rich at 800, and the masses at 750. But, having access to 100 years of refinement the 750 year old's ongoing treatment is likely far cheaper.
Though IMO, this is all wishful thinking. 1,000 years ago people thought they where close to unlocking immortality, and we are likely just as wrong.
e.g. Assuming not everyone could afford the technology and you have a 30 yro killer who lacks the funds to rejuvinate committing murder on somebody much older. Would that even be a crime or could it be argued that a 2nd class citizen has only tried to revenge or to set right to what they perceive an unjust society.
Playing god is scary. I think we can only do it if we are really thick enough and full of our selves to believe that certain individuals are better than the rest. (... of course all under the usual disguise of democracy and with a system that ensures the majority of those living under it, that what they do is right and for the greater good).
People suck :-/
Yes.
On the perpetrator side, the punishments themselves are in the context of current lifespan. If the life expectancy jumps to 150, is 36 the new 18?
On the victim side:
"A Denver Post analysis of five years of state sentencing data found that those convicted of child abuse resulting in death between 2007 and 2011 got prison sentences 25 percent shorter than those who killed adults and were sentenced for the comparable felony charge of second-degree murder."
http://www.denverpost.com/failedtodeath/ci_21996958/inequity...
Yes, everyone already knows that. I wouldn't worry about living for 1000 years if you're alive in 30 years, the human races spends much more time discussing the inane. Someone yells the equivalent of "squirrel" and down the rabbit hole we go...
Just as one example, I think it is far more likely that an anti-age treatment would prevent the formation of wrinkles than that it would remove existing wrinkles.
By the time we can go in and reinvigorate teeth, bones, all the internal organs, all the cells in the brain... restoring patches of skin will likely be trivial.
Solving the problem of aging generally means solving an avalanche of specific problems - one of which is the rejuvenation of skin.
This is not correct. The core concept is that we will develop individual solutions which solve pieces of the longevity problem. Living to 150 may only require solving one of them. Living to 1000+ may require what you propose (although that is not clear either) but in the intervening time period between the initial solution and the ultimate solution you cannot assume all other physical aspects of an aged individual will simply vanish.
you might live for 1000 years in the body of a 25 year old, but if you age and then get the treatments, even though you might have the body of a 25 year old, you might have some scarring or other effects left over
I feel that you're moving the goalposts on me by talking about the initial stages when some might make it to 150. My comments were regarding what you originally said above, not what you might have meant and tried to clarify in later comments.
I agree with you that at first we might solve some problems that extend life some years here and there but still be left with other semi-debilitating issues.
But once you're talking about all of the issues needed to be solved to reach 1,000 years, the technology will have to be far far far beyond the ability to repair some scarred skin.
To be clear, I wasn't only talking about scarred skin, but any consequence of aging. I was using excess skin due to rapid weight loss as an example of this type of comorbidity, in which one problem must be dealt with separately from another problem. It may be true that extending lifespans to 1000+ years will require technologies which will also resolve all other age-related issues. It may even be likely. But there is no principle that says it must be so.
(since what we're talking about is the probability of independent events.)
If you were just born, then you will probably die by age 4000. But if you are 3999 then you will almost certainly live to age 4000. Your probability of reaching a certain age is always contingent on your current age.
Everyone would just have too much at risk, to allow anything dicey.
Technically, this is not correct.
If your chance of dying drops exponentially (perhaps not very realistic, hence 'technically'), your probability of survival converges to something greater than 0.
E.g.: If your probability of dying in the first year is 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 and so on, then your probability of living forever is roughly 29 % ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=product+i%3D1+to+infin... )
I used to do yearly blog posts on the current state of whole brain emulation, and we are very very far away from any breakthrough there. So far away in fact that some prominent neuro scientists like Dennett believe this can't be done even in principle (I disagree with them, but it shows how far we have to go still).
In any case, I'll probably not be around in 30 years, and many HNers won't be either.
I'd be very skeptical that it will be noticed that it's possible, around the time that leap forward is about to occur. History indicates the exact opposite is most common when it comes to great technological leaps forward. Instead, what will occur is an ecosystem of supporting technology will prime the ground. Among the very few people that recognize the time as being ready, will be the person that actually invents said leap technology. And it may even be by accident, the ground was primed and an inventor in a garage put the pieces together (ala the inbound virtual reality revolution, it was all skepticism skepticism skepticism for decades, until the ground was primed to leap forward, while most weren't even looking at it).
Not in this case, no. I realize your argument is mostly generic, too. Everybody understands that some problems are expected to have these kinds of revolutionary solutions or no solution at all. However, reading a mind into the computer and then executing it is not a matter of figuring just one missing thing out.
A workable solution requires us to be able to decipher and efficiently digitize the fine structure of the brain. Acquiring missing pieces of technique or technology is a necessary but not sufficient piece of this specific puzzle's solution. There is no sudden eureka moment where it all falls into place, it's just a near endless chain of painstaking detective work in biochemistry.
Those problems you're talking about will be figured out bit by bit, and only once all those things are figured out, will someone realize "Oh shit, we're at the point where this is possible now!" while everyone around them isn't paying attention and still thinking "It's impossible. It's impossible."
Sounds like the premise of what would be a very interesting sci-fi book.