Incumbents have some advantage but, if gerontocracy became a serious problem, we could always extend the application of term limits that we already use. A better solution would be to shrink the government so it doesn't matter who is in charge.
I think you are making that comment on an unsympathetic forum. However: The less power government has, the less it matters who controls it. Free rider and externality problems are vastly exaggerated and the costs of "fixing" them is often too high to be worth it.
climate change, pollution, and the providing of public goods are crucial to the economy's functioning (e.g. free education, govt run utilities, free healthcare, etc.). i mean, ok, even if you're right, there's still the issue of monopolies, dutch disease, the need for legal arbiters, etc.
> Currently, about a quarter of US deaths are before age 65. If we take that as a rough measure of mortality in a developed country not caused by aging, population should stabilize at about four times its present level, with as many people dying each year from causes other than aging as are born.
This seems to assume that people are all the same in their propensity to die from causes other than aging and that this propensity does not change with age. If we do not make such assumptions, we'll end up with a higher estimate for the population size.
> One pattern with aging that I have observed in myself is a shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is what you use to solve a new problem. Crystallized intelligence consists of remembering the solution you found last time and using that. The older you are, the more problems you have already solved and the less the future payoff from finding new and possibly better solutions. If that shift has been hard wired in by evolution, with its timing based on past lifespans, it could make us less and less able to deal with issues that arise in our later centuries.
Well, that depends of whether the anti-aging treatments address the aging of the mind like they address the aging of the body.
Yes, but if aging of the mind is significantly about previous experiences filling it up, then "treatment" either can't happen or results in at least a partial loss of memory and/or identity.
I imagine it would be a very weird experience to be 200 years old but not really remember much from before 20 years earlier. On some level I would have to ask - what's the point? If you can recall all of those years with any kind of detail, then your brain is going to have a lot of stuff to sift through.
"In principle it should be doable, since the information to reconstruct my body is in every cell, massively redundant; if the information in one cell is degraded by mutation it can be reconstructed by majority vote of several others. "
But David, among those of us who want you to live forever, I'm guessing that a vast majority want you more for your mind than they do for your body. Your mind is not stored in those cells.
My mind runs on my brain which is part of my body. If we use the information in the cells to continually rebuild the body that should keep my mind alive, although it might change due to the accumulation of memories.
Will you write more about visiting Prospera? I've liked Scott Alexander's posts on it a lot, and hearing someone's first hand account would be interesting
Can you write more of what you know about current research around aging? I watched some videos of dr.David Sinclair and got pretty excited about their work on aging and thought that they might have a way to a silver bullet.
An interesting take, but an unlikely hypothetical. Not just AI will change everything - if we can cure aging, we can also make people smarter and more rational. Since you can't just change one thing, speculation of the effects of changing just one thing seems pointless.
I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts about Prospera.
Me, I'm all for death, rot and corruption. As has been often been noted, if it weren't for rot and corruption we'd be well more than knee deep in bird feathers and use your imagination, etc.
Death? Having reached four score and six, though I'm not particularity looking forward to it, a last curtain call is good, need make room for younger, newer , here, hold my beer, buffoons.
Though if we get serious about Mars and then the stars, I'd seriously consider extended longevity. An ageless Captain Kirk for a 600 year sub-light speed trip to Betelgeuse might be advantageous.
As it is we under utilize our aged, who better for high risk jobs than us with not all that much left to risk?
OK we're starting that with some extreme risk positions such as the presidency but there's plenty of room for far more geriatrics that laugh in the face of danger!
"OK Davie, here the plan, you distract them for 30 minutes with your Bing Crosby singalong and I'll hobble up the hill with my army issue walker and toss the grenade in the pillbox slot. Yea yes, I'll remember to pull the pin first this time hey, sometimes we're all a wee bit forgetful."
Dr. Friedman, have you written an article about a post scarcity society or the impossibility of it? With the recent technological developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence, people are starting to talk about mass automation and mass unemployment more and more.
I am trying to hone my arguments and I currently believe that technological advancements will not lead to unemployment in the long term, just like the unemployment rate today is lower than 100 years ago, even though only a fraction of the people still work in agriculture.
Elizabeth Moon is also the author of the Heris Serrano and Esmay Suiza novels, set in a society that is facing the problems of life extension in a big way, particularly in its military forces, where there are so many admirals and chief petty officers that the path to promotion is virtually blocked for everyone young.
It has been argued that the main difference between the rash but vital Europe of pre-WWI and the atrophied society we see today is simply median age. If median age is distance from the beginning of life and not to its end, we can estimate what defeating death would do.
We have largely solved the problem of living to 100 already, yet many die young. Until education includes nutrition education, and while people follow their ever-diminishing tastebuds, problems will set in around age 65 and the last years will be miserable for many people, who go in and out of hospitals. Avoiding excess animal products, including dairy, is key, and getting "G-BOMBS--" Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, Seeds & nuts daily is crucial. After age 65, most adults are living with cancer cells. Without sufficient micronutrients, cancer cells grow; with enough nutrients, especially green veggies, they die. The reason animal products are problematic is partly because of IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor one) which speeds growth when young (think of the young calf rapidly growing on mother's milk) but also fuels tumor growth, and partly because of toxins like TMAO. (Google it. All the info is there.) In a scientific review of many studies, the consumption of raw vegetables showed the most consistent and powerful association with the reduction of cancers of all types. But they also help prevent heart disease, dementia, lupus, chronic fatigue and more. See board-certified physician and best-selling author Joel Furhman, MD on YouTube, as well as his many books, most recently "Eat for Life." See also NutritionFacts.org. Of course, some people, like your father and mother, won the genetic lottery and lived a long time without going on a primarily plant-based diet. (P.S. I mention "ever diminishing tastebuds" because on the sweet-meat diet, a strawberry no longer tastes sweet, and meat has to be salted. Recently, I read about the loss of whale tastebuds; now they can only taste salty substances: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24803572/ You'd think they'd need the bitter taste to identify toxins.
"These worries assume that we are curing the physical effects of aging but not all of the mental effects." Until we can actually reverse brain aging, we won't know how much of the shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence is due to neurological aging. The same for changes in creativity, adventurousness, etc.
If we live for centuries or longer, and if we cannot expand our brains (with additional neurons or synthetic add-ons), and if we find ourselves falling into a rut, perhaps we might choose to stir our personality up, disrupting old patterns. (I seem to recall something like that, but for robots, in Rudy Rucker's Software.) Too much disruption and it's doubtful whether you continue as you, but a fair bit of disruptive stirring should be feasible.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (and the rest of the Mars trilogy) attempt to work out what would happen with radically longer life spans. He's a lefty, but he's also a very good writer and takes ideas seriously. The libertarian-ish /pro-market characters tend to be unpleasant people in his books, but the "novel as model" does a good job of thinking through what a world with really long lived people is like. Neal Stephenson's superb Fall covers what happens when we start getting uploaded into the cloud and living forever as code. Also a great read.
Red Mars is worth reading but personally I did not enjoy Fall, despite enjoying everything else I've read by Stephenson. It too much like a fantasy novel.
Incumbents have some advantage but, if gerontocracy became a serious problem, we could always extend the application of term limits that we already use. A better solution would be to shrink the government so it doesn't matter who is in charge.
shrink the government? why is this a good solution? you would be opening the economy to a slew of free rider and externality problems.
I think you are making that comment on an unsympathetic forum. However: The less power government has, the less it matters who controls it. Free rider and externality problems are vastly exaggerated and the costs of "fixing" them is often too high to be worth it.
climate change, pollution, and the providing of public goods are crucial to the economy's functioning (e.g. free education, govt run utilities, free healthcare, etc.). i mean, ok, even if you're right, there's still the issue of monopolies, dutch disease, the need for legal arbiters, etc.
> Currently, about a quarter of US deaths are before age 65. If we take that as a rough measure of mortality in a developed country not caused by aging, population should stabilize at about four times its present level, with as many people dying each year from causes other than aging as are born.
This seems to assume that people are all the same in their propensity to die from causes other than aging and that this propensity does not change with age. If we do not make such assumptions, we'll end up with a higher estimate for the population size.
Fair point.
> One pattern with aging that I have observed in myself is a shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is what you use to solve a new problem. Crystallized intelligence consists of remembering the solution you found last time and using that. The older you are, the more problems you have already solved and the less the future payoff from finding new and possibly better solutions. If that shift has been hard wired in by evolution, with its timing based on past lifespans, it could make us less and less able to deal with issues that arise in our later centuries.
Well, that depends of whether the anti-aging treatments address the aging of the mind like they address the aging of the body.
Yes, but if aging of the mind is significantly about previous experiences filling it up, then "treatment" either can't happen or results in at least a partial loss of memory and/or identity.
I imagine it would be a very weird experience to be 200 years old but not really remember much from before 20 years earlier. On some level I would have to ask - what's the point? If you can recall all of those years with any kind of detail, then your brain is going to have a lot of stuff to sift through.
"In principle it should be doable, since the information to reconstruct my body is in every cell, massively redundant; if the information in one cell is degraded by mutation it can be reconstructed by majority vote of several others. "
But David, among those of us who want you to live forever, I'm guessing that a vast majority want you more for your mind than they do for your body. Your mind is not stored in those cells.
My mind runs on my brain which is part of my body. If we use the information in the cells to continually rebuild the body that should keep my mind alive, although it might change due to the accumulation of memories.
Will you write more about visiting Prospera? I've liked Scott Alexander's posts on it a lot, and hearing someone's first hand account would be interesting
Can you write more of what you know about current research around aging? I watched some videos of dr.David Sinclair and got pretty excited about their work on aging and thought that they might have a way to a silver bullet.
An interesting take, but an unlikely hypothetical. Not just AI will change everything - if we can cure aging, we can also make people smarter and more rational. Since you can't just change one thing, speculation of the effects of changing just one thing seems pointless.
I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts about Prospera.
Me, I'm all for death, rot and corruption. As has been often been noted, if it weren't for rot and corruption we'd be well more than knee deep in bird feathers and use your imagination, etc.
Death? Having reached four score and six, though I'm not particularity looking forward to it, a last curtain call is good, need make room for younger, newer , here, hold my beer, buffoons.
Though if we get serious about Mars and then the stars, I'd seriously consider extended longevity. An ageless Captain Kirk for a 600 year sub-light speed trip to Betelgeuse might be advantageous.
As it is we under utilize our aged, who better for high risk jobs than us with not all that much left to risk?
OK we're starting that with some extreme risk positions such as the presidency but there's plenty of room for far more geriatrics that laugh in the face of danger!
"OK Davie, here the plan, you distract them for 30 minutes with your Bing Crosby singalong and I'll hobble up the hill with my army issue walker and toss the grenade in the pillbox slot. Yea yes, I'll remember to pull the pin first this time hey, sometimes we're all a wee bit forgetful."
Dr. Friedman, have you written an article about a post scarcity society or the impossibility of it? With the recent technological developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence, people are starting to talk about mass automation and mass unemployment more and more.
I am trying to hone my arguments and I currently believe that technological advancements will not lead to unemployment in the long term, just like the unemployment rate today is lower than 100 years ago, even though only a fraction of the people still work in agriculture.
Elizabeth Moon is also the author of the Heris Serrano and Esmay Suiza novels, set in a society that is facing the problems of life extension in a big way, particularly in its military forces, where there are so many admirals and chief petty officers that the path to promotion is virtually blocked for everyone young.
It has been argued that the main difference between the rash but vital Europe of pre-WWI and the atrophied society we see today is simply median age. If median age is distance from the beginning of life and not to its end, we can estimate what defeating death would do.
We have largely solved the problem of living to 100 already, yet many die young. Until education includes nutrition education, and while people follow their ever-diminishing tastebuds, problems will set in around age 65 and the last years will be miserable for many people, who go in and out of hospitals. Avoiding excess animal products, including dairy, is key, and getting "G-BOMBS--" Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, Seeds & nuts daily is crucial. After age 65, most adults are living with cancer cells. Without sufficient micronutrients, cancer cells grow; with enough nutrients, especially green veggies, they die. The reason animal products are problematic is partly because of IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor one) which speeds growth when young (think of the young calf rapidly growing on mother's milk) but also fuels tumor growth, and partly because of toxins like TMAO. (Google it. All the info is there.) In a scientific review of many studies, the consumption of raw vegetables showed the most consistent and powerful association with the reduction of cancers of all types. But they also help prevent heart disease, dementia, lupus, chronic fatigue and more. See board-certified physician and best-selling author Joel Furhman, MD on YouTube, as well as his many books, most recently "Eat for Life." See also NutritionFacts.org. Of course, some people, like your father and mother, won the genetic lottery and lived a long time without going on a primarily plant-based diet. (P.S. I mention "ever diminishing tastebuds" because on the sweet-meat diet, a strawberry no longer tastes sweet, and meat has to be salted. Recently, I read about the loss of whale tastebuds; now they can only taste salty substances: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24803572/ You'd think they'd need the bitter taste to identify toxins.
"These worries assume that we are curing the physical effects of aging but not all of the mental effects." Until we can actually reverse brain aging, we won't know how much of the shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence is due to neurological aging. The same for changes in creativity, adventurousness, etc.
If we live for centuries or longer, and if we cannot expand our brains (with additional neurons or synthetic add-ons), and if we find ourselves falling into a rut, perhaps we might choose to stir our personality up, disrupting old patterns. (I seem to recall something like that, but for robots, in Rudy Rucker's Software.) Too much disruption and it's doubtful whether you continue as you, but a fair bit of disruptive stirring should be feasible.
Remember what I told you..... imagine...create....be relevant. Use your imagination and be creative. Say, think, dream, do, feel what is relevant.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (and the rest of the Mars trilogy) attempt to work out what would happen with radically longer life spans. He's a lefty, but he's also a very good writer and takes ideas seriously. The libertarian-ish /pro-market characters tend to be unpleasant people in his books, but the "novel as model" does a good job of thinking through what a world with really long lived people is like. Neal Stephenson's superb Fall covers what happens when we start getting uploaded into the cloud and living forever as code. Also a great read.
Red Mars is worth reading but personally I did not enjoy Fall, despite enjoying everything else I've read by Stephenson. It too much like a fantasy novel.
Agreed! I loved Snowcrash, but unlike most people I was least interested in the Metaverse parts. IMHO his best work is the Baroque Cycle.