How would society change if we cured aging, and people could have as many healthy years of life as they wanted?
A common concern is that this would ossify all of our institutions: the old guard would never die off, and so could never be replaced by young bloods.
Conversation
This could threaten progress across the board, from governance to physics. If “science advances one funeral at a time,” what happens when the rate of funerals plummets?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27
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It's a real concern. But here are three reasons why curing aging could *help* progress:
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1. Population
One of the greatest threats to long-term progress may be the slowdown in global population growth. We need more brains to keep pushing science and technology forward.
ourworldindata.org/future-populat
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Right now many wealthy nations have fertility rates below replacement levels. Curing aging would help temporarily by lowering the mortality rate.…
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And it could help permanently if people decide to have more children, on average.
That might happen if longer lifespan means people feel they have time for both children and a career. (Remember that fully curing aging meaning maintaining reproductive health for all those years.)
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2. Burden of knowledge
There is a hypothesis that as knowledge grows, it takes longer to reach the frontier, and so individual researchers have less time to contribute advancements.…
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Also, they are forced to specialize. But breakthroughs often come from making connections across far-flung disciplines.
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If individual humans had much longer lifespans, it would be no problem to spend 30 or 40 years just learning before you make major contributions. And you could spend another 10–20 picking up a couple more specialties in disparate areas.
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3. Long-term thinking
How would people's thinking change if they felt they were going to live 150, 300, even 1,000 years or more? The very long term becomes much more personal. Posterity is something you're going to be around for.
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I still think the “old guard” problem is real, and we'd have to come up with new mechanisms to address it. (Perhaps influential positions would institute a mandatory retirement age of 350.)
But there are other factors, and it's not clear what the net impact would be.
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(Not that any of this is an argument for or against curing aging! The knock-down argument for curing aging is that death is bad. In light of that, every other consideration pales into insignificance.)
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PS, the above thoughts were spurred by an online discussion about 's book-in-development, Gaming the Future: foresightinstitute.substack.com
There are many more sessions, check it out!
Quote Tweet
great tweet thread seeded by last Sunday's discussion in @foresightinst Gaming the Future book club. @marksammiller and @lifeext, anything to add? twitter.com/jasoncrawford/…
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Incidentally, some people suggested that if we fully solve aging, we'll also preserve the neuroplasticity of youth, and that will solve the “old guard” problem.
Maybe! But it might be as much a psycho-social problem as a physiological one. So we might need additional solutions.
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