Slashdot Mirror
OpEd Piece on Extended Life Expectancy
daksis writes "CNN has posted an OpEd piece from the New York Times that raises some interesting issues. With the current advances in biology, we as a society are facing the real possibility that "immortality" could some day be the norm. What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?"
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
There are some great SciFi books/series that deal with extended life-spans and the societal issues that arise from such an issue. The first that come to mind are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series (humans use genetic massaging to prolong their lifespan; initially for the rich) and Larry Niven's Ringworld series (an alien race in the series has extremely long life spans and therefore everything is built for caution). Aside from being excellent books, they offer some insight to the topics in the article, and some ways we should avoid (Robinson) handling or handle (Niven) if the situation arises.
NMG
without even reading the friendly article, I can already accurately predict (based on my education, which is mostly from slashdot):
Sounds like a blast to me.
Oh, wait, forgot... we can argue about BSD dying unto eternity as well (and perhaps Apple too).
Cheers,
Justin
and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement?
No one... that's why they're not going to retire for 240 years, but work for at least 200.
Imagine the type of skilled labor you could obtain over 200 years... More and more people will become highly (and i mean highly) trained specialists in whatever they do. This would allow for ever-increasing advanced in science, medecine, and technology which would appear to "boom" in the first century of this kind of "immortality".
I, for one, would love to see this kind of thing happen.
But I am planning to insult every person in the Universe.
Perpetual Copyrights. Life of the Artist/Author plus 969 years, once the Methuselah Copyright Extension Act is passed.
Imagine the type of skilled labor you could obtain over 200 years... More and more people will become highly (and i mean highly) trained specialists in whatever they do.
There's the optimist! And here I am worried that my specializations won't be relevant five years from now... =)
Rather than continuing to promote specialization over those 200 years, I'd like to see people branch out in to new fields.
Specialization is one of the top problems with jobs here - we have people who are on unemployment who complain about not being able to find a job in their field, who don't even look outside their field. Unions are also a problem here - they seem to work under the idea that people will have the same jobs their entire lives. 30-40 years is already a long time - 200 years is approaching insanity.
Looking at the posts that come before my own, it seems that there is a basic assumption that there would be a 'forever young' situation: no aging and always in your 20s or 30s. Is this necessarily the case?
Look at those -now- that have lived to be over 100. Their quality of life is piss poor. As a matter of fact, most people's quality of life past 70 is pretty bad compared to their half century younger versions of themselves or quarter century younger versions, for that matter. That's just their physical health. Then shall we, the /. community, start discussing how many seniors begin losing their minds to alzheimers, senility, etc.?
If it means living forever, but being an invalid the whole time, um, forgive me, but count me out. The winter of my life will hopefully be blessedly short and my mind intact through it all as it stands. If they come up with UberYoung Disney Magic Drug(tm), then, maybe, if they have the comparable medical regeneration, we'll talk about immortality.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Karma: NaN
Ah yes...as if it's not already hard enough for me to find a new job...
Programmer Wanted. Must have 100+ years experience in object-oriented programming, 50+ years as Senior Developer.
I wonder if they'll start coming up with new levels of experience? Senior Programmer...Guru Programmer...UBER Programmer...God-like Programmer. As if programmers egos weren't big enough...
Here's an interesting and much less fluffy interview with the guy quoted at the top of the piece.
QED
Back when FDR first instituted Social Security, average life expectancy was approximately 58. The retirement age, of course, was 65 -- or 112% of average life expectancy. Think about it... the average worker didn't live long enough to collect a dime of SS retirement benefits. No wonder the SS payroll tax was low then, and SS appeared to be a sustainable system, not a pyramid scheme.
If a retirement age 112% of life expectancy was fair then, why wouldn't it be fair today? If that were true today, we'd have no fears of the system becoming insolvent when the baby boomers retire. And I think society would be a lot better off if there was an expectation that people would continue to be productive past the average life expectancy.
Yeah, the retirement age was recently raised to 68... big whoop. That's much too little too late to address the root cause of the problem. Hope to God the government doesn't get its mitts on my IRA ad 401k, or I'll really be screwed!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.