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 our institutions. The old guard would never die off, and so would never be replaced by young bloods. 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?
It’s a real concern. But here are three reasons why curing aging could help progress:
- Population. One of the greatest threats to long-term progress may be a slowdown in global population growth. We need more brains to keep pushing science and technology forward. Yet right now, many wealthy nations have fertility rates below replacement levels. Curing aging would help temporarily by lowering the mortality rate. 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 means maintaining reproductive health for all those years.)
- 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. They are also forced to specialize—but breakthroughs often come from making connections across far-flung disciplines. If individuals had much longer lifespans, it would be no problem for them to spend 30 or 40 years just learning, before making major contributions. And you could spend another 10 or 20 years picking up a couple more specialties in disparate areas.
- 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.
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 to consider, and it’s not clear what the net impact would be.
(Not that this is an argument for or against curing aging! Ultimately, the knock-down argument for curing aging is that death is bad. In light of that, other considerations pale into insignificance.)
This essay was originally a Twitter thread, and was inspired by an online discussion about the Foresight Institute’s book-in-development, Gaming the Future.
New fields appear, circumstances change, tools change, and so on; consequently, experience is not a permanent advantage, but is constantly evaporating. In some fields, how quickly you can learn is more important than how much you already know. I don't know how much cognitive flexibility in old people will be regained by aging treatments, but even if that problem were reduced to "maintaining flexibility in the presence of long-ingrained habits", I expect that's something that the majority of the population wouldn't be very good at, so by default the young would have some advantages there.
Genetic counseling, embryo selection, and possibly even genetic engineering would tend to make the new generations inherently smarter than the older one. (They'll want to enhance adults too, but it's easier to enhance a human who hasn't grown up yet, and that will probably remain so for a long time.) Thus the young, as a group, will have advantages in jobs where that's more important than experience.
Come to think of it, the above applies more generally to fields where there's a relatively low ceiling to how much experience brings you versus natural advantages (I suspect, say, modeling is one such), and those would end up dominated by people with the greatest natural advantages no matter their age. (And, again, if these advantages get genetically selected for, then they will tend to be dominated by the young as a result.)
It seems reasonably likely that we'd see a need for multi-specialties—we want someone who's very good at subjects/skills A, B, and C all at once. This may lead to a combinatorial explosion such that it's often possible to find some combination of specialties where you don't have much competition. (On the one hand, probably most combinations are not useful; on the other hand, which ones are not useful will probably keep changing, so a new combination will become vogue that no one is good at yet.)
Multi-specialties would come with a longer educational period. A longer educational period would become viable and likely necessary. (If your career ends at age 65, then continuing to study from age 25 to 45 is throwing away half your career, so the education needs to double your earnings plus pay its costs to be worthwhile; but if your career ends at age 665, then increasing your earnings by 4% is sufficient.) Today, presumably no one has even tried to develop a curriculum spanning 100 years, because no one would try to take such a course; but as time went on, people would create and improve such curricula, so the young people would be competing with old people who never took those courses. (Of course, it's possible for older people to continue with education too, and, depending on their planning horizon, some will; but since they can currently earn more, they have a stronger incentive to just keep working, and will take less advantage of the new education.)
Even if education didn't improve or become obsolete over time, presumably one learns faster in education than in industry (otherwise what's the point? (which is a valid question for today's education)), so even if others started thousands of years ahead of you, you could still catch up eventually—assuming you could pay for it.