Come on The Economist, no mention at all of the economic implications of this? Of people getting older and older and richer and richer without end, hoarding all the wealth and power, and young people with flexible minds being very rare indeed.
Another interesting dystopian exploration is the Miracle Day season of Torchwood. They don't even go onto long term outcomes outside of in-world speculation, but it primed me very 0well for the methuselah topic in Altered Carbon.
I know many people 3 times older than I am with much more flexible minds. I also don't think there is a biological basis for inflexible minds.
Actually the smartest person and the most flexible mind I know is also the oldest man (87 y/o) I know. It's infeasible for younger people to have his outlook, that simply comes with his life experience.
My neighbor is 89 and still works part time as orthodontist for children here in Toronto. When he was 6, his job was to run from one outpost to another delivering messages during World War 2.
He volunteers weekends removing trash from the public parks and cleaning up our streets of litter.
I am teaching him how to play professional chess and we had plans to go to professional tournaments (but covid hit so maybe next year) and he is picking up really well.
What if: Neuroplasticity allows you to build new base cognitive tools from sensory information, or dump/change existing tools. If you build sufficiently numerous, broad, and adaptive tools when you are young, you will be able to do many, many things when you are older.
Still might have challenges learning new languages, or say to dance if you never learned how to dance at all, at the same rate as a toddler, tho.
Maybe compared to a toddler, but this person I am talking about became a programmer at 65 after being a physicist and then a biologist. I know more old people like that from the university. I really don't think age is so much of an issue that it should us stop from prolonging life. I really want these brilliant people to have more time on Earth. And I want more time too, even if I can't learn anything new at all past 125. Life is beautiful.
Yes, I also ignore the basic science behind neuroplasticity. There is no doubt that the developing brain has a higher plasticity than the fully adult brain.
From what i understood by other articles posted here at the past, unless there is some actual brain issue, the practical difference is very small and it is largely a matter of self-imposed limitation (e.g. people stop learning or get set into their ideas because that is the path of least resistance, but if are placed in an environment that encourages or forces them to learn they can do that fine).
Regardless, if we figure out how to live more and end up with brain zombies, we'll also have an incentive to figure out how to improve our brains. There is a lot of research into such topics too (see topics on research on Alzheimer's disease which are also posted here often).
Sure, so do I, but that doesn't change the general outlook. Just look at the boomers voting for the most regressive policies to entrench their wealth and privilege.
It's not only about flexibility. When eventually Rupert Murdoch dies, his wealth and power will be split up amongst his children and the state. But if he lived on and on we'd be stuck with him forever.
Keeping minds flexible is both a nature and nurture issue. We can increase neuroplasticity and new neuron/dendrite growth with a variety of compounds that trigger BNDF secretion, but people still have to expose themselves to and try to learn new things.
Your mind already does this by itself. Of course, nobody knows what would happen if we left our natural "garbage collector" running for multiple centuries.
It's an interesting thought. If we radically extended life (say to 1000 years), how would society change?
Would people still want to marry? Would we pursue careers as aggressively? You could spend your first 80 years in school and still have 9 centuries of career left. How would savings change? Criminal justice?
I don't know what would happen, but the changes would be radical and have many knock-on effects that we cannot predict.
Personally, I wouldn't spend 80 years in school in one go. I would likely have taken a break to reset in the middle of my undergrad - and would certainly be in grad school now.
I'd imagine that many individuals will grow bored with their career after some number of decades and will switch. Starting at the bottom doesn't sound so bad if you can get to the top of the skill tree in 10-15 years out of 1000. It would practically be the same as spending a year on a transition today.
Political power is just one form of power, with economic power being the other great influencer in our capitalistic world. Given that capital can accrue exponentially, I'd say that capital power would outweigh political power in this theoretical world.
