One consequence of defeating aging I haven't heard discussed is the tendency of society to become very conservative.
Even if someone's mind regains the flexibility of a 20 year old, it's hard to see how the lessons of a lifetime wouldn't lead to some fairly fixed beliefs. If you can a population with only a trickle of actually young people, it seems like the rate of change could become very slow.
This is a very common trope, but it fails to address what might be the cause, rather than the mere correlation, of age-driven conservatism: imminent mortality. If you're 50 years in to an 80 year lifespan, it's more difficult to imagine starting over, with reduced vigor, to revamp your thinking and lifestyle. If there is essentially no increased risk of next-year mortality with age, and if we all have the stamina and energy of 20-year-olds, then there truly are no old dogs.
Also, I'd really like to hear this "tendency of society to become very conservative" fleshed out. I think you meant "as average age goes up," but I'm not sure why "society" gets brought into it. Aren't we pointing to a tendency of individuals to become more conservative as they age?
That's a very interesting perspective! Any particular reads inspired it?
Though I think "imminent mortality" is not the only thing at the foundation of age-driven conservatism. I think there is also tendency to follow paths of least resistance (energy conservatism): learning/discovering new ways of doing things comes with more friction (if one does not enjoy the learning/wandering process).
EDIT: I just realized that the two points are really intertwined. Time conservatism is closely related to energy conservatism and cannot be regarded in isolation. (forgive the awkward terms)
If anything, I formulated it–I'm sure it's not original–as a reaction against Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and its nearly universal adoption by the worst kind of smug, vocal startuppity Silicon Valley types, who apply it to every objection to their newest pet projects. It just seems obvious to me how the fear and resentment of an imminent decline and demise transfers into one of the few places in an older person's life where they still have power, the dinner table and the voting booth. Aging is degrading and humiliating, and you're supposed to wear it with grace and dignity. And then the "news" guy on the conservative channel tells you about all the mistakes that kids and immigrants are making... Presto! Instant "conservative" harking back to an invented Golden Age.
> ...if one does not enjoy the learning/wandering process...
Or, if one does not perceive that the investment has time to pay off.
The Book Algorithms to Live By describes some research which found that it is not chronological age, but rather one's position on the explore/exploit curve that drives the apparent conservatism of old age. So a 70 year old who expects to live 50 more years might be considerably more novelty-seeking than a 70 year old who expects to live 20 more years, because the first has a longer interval within which to exploit the benefits of any useful finds.
Hey! Thank you for your post! I was pretty sure I hadn't formulated something new, and it's great to have a new book recommendation!
The result you mention seems intuitively correct, and meshes with my own experience. The career changes that I'll consider in my 40s are definitely not the same ones I'd have considered in my 20s. There's no time!
It's a general result. Same reason why target date funds shift to more conservative assets as they approach their due date. Recovery time hedges risk, the absence of recovery time promotes risk aversion.
"If you're 50 years in to an 80 year lifespan, it's more difficult to imagine starting over, with reduced vigor, to revamp your thinking and lifestyle."
It's not a disinclination to starting over that fuels (social) conservatism, but rather a yearning for an older, simpler, "more virtuous" time (one often that never actually existed, except in the imagination).
This is how you wind up with old people wearing clothes that were fashionable in their youth, still behaving in "old fashioned" ways, still consuming media from bygone eras, etc. Not that such behaviors and tastes necessarily make you a conservative, nor is this restricted to just old people. Some young people also yearn for the past, and enjoy affecting styles of dress and consuming media from bygone eras. But the cause of such sentiments is shared with conservatives: that is, it's a rejection of modernity and a yearning for a mythical past.
People who are "living in the past", as it were, or wanting to re-create the past in the present aren't interested in reinventing themselves or embracing the present or the future. If anything, living for longer is likely to exacerbate this. The feeling of nostalgia and yearning for an older time is likely to get worse, and the inability to cope with the modernity is only likely to increase (barring breakthroughs in psychology, sociology, neurology, or psychopharmacology that might make such coping with and accepting of the chaotic and ever-accelerating present/future easier).
I dunno. It seems basically game-theoretic to me. The cost to a youth of adopting a "conservative" viewpoint is being outmoded for the rest of their lives. The cost to the elderly of keeping up with new technologies, trends, theories, and so on has to at least involve invalidating their lives and behavior, so far, and all for little or no real payout given the duress of aging and short remaining years. In other words, I'm hypothesizing that nostalgia is the effect of the underlying cause, "deterioration with age and short time horizon for payout." You're going to die, soon. May as well be comfortable.
As with a lot of tropes, we're having trouble nailing down terms, too. As you allude, we've at least meant a few different things by "conservative;" 1) social conservatism, 2) technological nostalgia, and 3) scientific conservatism. This seems to be one of those memes (I use the word deliberately as a "persistent mental structure or coding," separate from the term "idea.") that survives by coding multiple actual ideas. Not that you're doing the following, but reciters of the meme can always switch between ideas/fields when the current case becomes problematic. Societies don't become conservative? Well, what about Kuhn/Planck and scientific conservatism? Oh, scientists do actually adopt new theories late in their careers? What about people who restore classic cars? People buy new cars late in life? Well, societies become more socially conservative as the population ages. And so on.
One final point that, again, you're not doing right now, but I find ironic and amusing. Critics of life extension will oft lament that "mortality makes us human," and that we'll become inhuman monsters if we routinely live to be 1000. Then, in the next breath, they'll then insist that we'll behave exactly as if we died at 80 when it comes to things like conservatism, or reproduction, or career choices. But that's just the amusing part; the ironic part is that they'll do this at just about any age!
> Democrats: 27% of Millennials and 21% of Gen Xers identified as liberal Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents.
> Nearly a third of Boomers (31%) and 36% of Silents described themselves as conservative Republicans or Republican leaners, which also is higher than in the past.
This is a very common trope, but it fails to address what might be the cause, rather than the mere correlation, of age-driven conservatism: imminent mortality.
Well, the main factor I'd say is that being older involves having accumulated a lot "functional" opinions and solutions to problems. That is, a lot of approaches that may not be absolutely optimal but work (and which would require a lot of time to work out alternatives to - in the fashion it takes a lot of time to train a neural network). So basically, it is extremely difficult for those who have a fully functional coping strategy to go back to "not knowing anything" and relearn.
I mean, while most people are more flexible at twenty than at fifty, most people are more flexible at ten than at twenty and it would be hard to revisit the "personality choices" that happened at ten when you are twenty even when mortality is a ways a way.
The idea does have some basis in empirical truth: in democratic systems, older groups are more reliable voters than any other group. As such, they are incessantly pandered to, and eventually society shifts.
There was also a recent study suggesting a link between successful efforts to reduce birth rates in China and their higher political stability compared to neighboring countries, because the young bring instability while the old like the status quo.
> ... it's hard to see how the lessons of a lifetime wouldn't lead to some fairly fixed beliefs.
As someone who has spent some time talking to several 80+ olds, my impression is quite the opposite. People are much more open-minded at 80+ than they are 30-60. With age comes wisdom and the ability to see what really matters.
I see that in my parents. They used to be very narrow minded but now in their end-80s they have a much broader perspective and openly regret things they did when they were younger.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -Max Planck
One approach that universities could use would be force a given professor to retire and leave their field after, say, 50 years, sending them to perhaps join a different field where they could have fresh insights.
This concept isn't applicable just to science. It's applicable to policy, politics, social opinion, etc. Young blood and new ideas are a constant threat to the status quo.
it seems like the rate of change could become very slow
No, the opposite would occur, because of the compounding value of experience. Imagine what engineers would be like with 10x the experience to bring to bear on any problem. Imagine the megascale engineering we could do.
But you don’t have to because we have actual evidence: life expectancy 1000 years ago vs now. Which society changed faster?
I think you maybe be on a bit of a red herring here. Yes, values vary by age group but I'm unconvinced that cohorts change predictably over their lifetimes especially if we consider a more international view.
However, values aside I think there is an impact from neuroplasticity in terms of how younger people adapt more readily to new technology, etc.
One consequence of defeating aging I haven't heard discussed is the tendency of society to become very conservative.
Your most conservative groups are families with dependent children. Old people vote more consistently not because they are conservative, but because they have the time. They aren't working full time while raising kids, etc.
I see no reason to assume old people would be inherently conservative. Older people who are not risk averse may not look real wild because they know how to hedge their bets and how to explore what they want without calling so much attention to it. That isn't conservative. It's competent.
Learning new ideas becomes harder as we age due to atrophy in the mechanisms of long term potentiation. If learning were easier in old age there would be a lot less conservatism and nostalgia among the elderly.
Would it? As I get older, I can tell you that my feelings and thoughts are not really influenced by that; I learn as I’ve always done, by trying out stuff; and if it takes a bit longer, who cares.
Imho, a much more powerful force is the loss of innocence. You know X is bad for you because you experienced it before; so you don’t do X. And Y. And K. And slowly, you don’t do very much at all, except very safe boring stuff. You would really like to go back being a fearless child, but you can’t: even if your body could heal like it did before, your mind won’t forget all the stuff you went through.
Study history and you find regulations tend to be repealed as soon as their cause is forgotten. US fiscal policy for example was far more rational when people who remembered the great depression where still in control. I expect air quality standards to start to slip in about 20 years etc etc in an endless cycle.
I see where you're coming from, but on the other hand its almost a contradiction to say that a mind regains its flexibility yet remains stuck on fixed beliefs. If rigid beliefs are the product of a rigid mind, then a youthful mind would not suffer from the same problem.
> with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60)
That does not sound like the most radical life extension one can imagine.
IMHO the most radical one is : no more aging after the age of say 30. In that case, one crucial question is : would women remain fertile? If so, what would be their reproductive behavior?
The biggest consequence of defeating aging is how people will work and will other people have jobs . We already see this happening now.
If you have a set of very experienced people that can perform their tasks why do you need to replace or fire them? Consider the job market with professors in math. Due to tenure you have a bunch of math professors that do extraordinary work. People who would have replaced them instead get non tenure track positions or go into other fields .
This is not to blame math professors that have jobs right now. Or the situation that grad students have in becoming professors.
It also has a weird effect where the social dogma stays for longer than would be if medical science wasn’t so good. I don’t know what the long term changes that will do.
To be honest if there wasn’t so much emphasis on people learning calculus math would have become like getting a
Philosophy degree.
"Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time." I don't understand how this would decrease the population. Also why would they even bring this point up in the abstract. I thought this study was supposed to analyze the worst case scenario. Additionally an increase of 22% is not a trivial number when the population of the world is 7 billion.
Interesting to see this article today with the release of the show Altered Carbon this weekend. I haven't gone far in the show but the implications there is that society will bifurcate into the affluent class called the Meths that can afford to resleeve into new bodies whenever and wherever they want vs the grounded class that can't afford to.
People are too hung up on the Utopia vision that comes with curing aging but the probable outcome is that the Rich won't die and will get to accumulate more and more wealth until they don't have to answer to anyone. And then society as a whole becomes stagnant because it has reached an optimal point because the Rich wants to keep it that way.
That's unlike today where the Rich do sway politics and hold considerable power, but they will eventually die off and then change may come of it.
I recommend folks who like these kinds of sci-fi shows to check Altered Carbon out.
It doesn't make sense to worry about what happens if humanity become immortal and nothing else changes. Technology is going to change everything about the world, and immortality may be the least of it.
There's every reason to think humanity will develop super intelligent life, or augment itself into super intelligent life, within 100 years.
Which means that there will never be billions of ape-like humans living to be hundreds or thousands of years old. When super intelligent life emerges, it will probably be immortal, but none of the concerns we have about immortal humans will apply.
There's only one part of our future we can be sure of, and that's giving birth to Superhumanity. It almost doesn't matter what we do before this, and we will have no control over what happens afterwards.
Agreed. People already live quite long, so immortality would take a very long time to make a difference with how things already are. If the first person to live 150 years is twenty years old today, he will reach that age in 130 years, that is in 2148.
I believe that in 2148, the world will be vastly different than it currently is, and to a degree we can't even imagine. So to me the desire to be still alive then sounds naive, even futile.
I understand that from a subjective point of view, and especially to people who fear death, immortality is of prime importance, but in the grand scheme of things, it's just a detail : paradoxically it does not matter in the long term because its effects take too long a time to manifest.
Defeating aging or extending human life to some extent say 150 years, gives us time to extend life to 300 and so on. It solves for true deep space travel and colonization of habitable planets.
Do you really think a reasonable solution for deep space travel is to spend centuries in a spaceship? Don't you think some kind of suspended animation would be preferable?
> That's not defeating of aging until you found a way to prolong youth and not just the old age as this research seem to assume.
The article considers four separate cases: 1) negligible senescence, 2) slowed aging, 3) continuous rejuvenation, and 4) one-time rejuvenation.
It seems that at least 1 and 3 are what you want. Have I misunderstood your comment?
EDIT: thriftwy is correct, here. The authors leave the crucial detail of when, in their model, life extension begins, until deep in the article. It's around age 60, in their model. This is in no way what is conventionally meant by these terms as I have ever seen them used when reading about "negligible senescence," "anti-aging," "SENS," & etc.
Apparently, every opportunity that women are given to delay pregnancy and childbirth is taken. Education advances, health advances, birth control, and wealth have each caused a delay and decrease in reproduction. It's a bit of a cliche fear that is popular because of its simplicity, not its correctness, IMO.
I’m not convinced. It does that for a high percentage of the population. However, after a period, the smaller percentage of the population that don’t reduce their birth rate will become increasingly dominant.
Current examples are the rapid growth of Orthodox Jews as a percentage of Israel’s population, and evangelical birth rates in the US.
My bet is that given technology to allow massive extension of fertility into older age, the fertility differences between religious groups that believe in a religious duty to procreate, and everyone else, will increase even more.
Yeah, it's weird to me that people in general don't see this.
I like to joke that the Amish are obviously the one true religion because eventually they'll cover the earth: They live long and peaceful lives, have scores of children, and are among the best farmers on Earth.
As long as the rest of us don't do something horrible the end state is inevitable.
That has a lot to do with consequences of having child. If you are young for long, giving some years to one more child might be less of sacrifice. If you know that having one more child is game over for everything else, you wont get a chance to restart the rest of your life.
That was the idea. But why would want to move there?
In 60-s, people imagined how population would line up for space colonies to build a farm there. And a big house.
Now, people want not just live on Earth. They would prefer to live in, let's say, the EU. And not even all of the EU; how about a Paris arrondisement? That's the place we find desirable.
A few people would like to be the first to space colonies. I fail to see how a few billion people would like to move there, to become some sort of worker drones. Plus, this tend to not end well. Compare how well do people in Spain live, and compare it to how people who went abroad to South America live.
> Compare how well do people in Spain live, and compare it to how people who went abroad to South America live.
The fate of South America is not due to the failures of the local population... more "thanks" to decades of racist and/or anti-"communist" US foreign policy.
South American (Venezuelan) here. This is not true. Blaming US foreign policy for all or even most of South America's failures is silly and a common tactic of demagogues, with no basis in reality, to deflect from bad domestic policy.
Admittedly, I did not fully understand the point the GP was trying to make with the Spain comparison.
We may argue why South America has lower life quality than Spain, but the fact that it has.
This will be the case with space colonies too, I'm afraid. While it will be debatable why colonies perform worse than Earth, it will be apparent that the best course was to stay.
> I'm not sure that Australia (and even US) fares much better than e.g. source England and Norway.
I don't know many fellow Americans that are of Norwegian descent but the US fairs better than the UK on lists of human development, happiness, and productivity. That has to mean something.
Even if someone's mind regains the flexibility of a 20 year old, it's hard to see how the lessons of a lifetime wouldn't lead to some fairly fixed beliefs. If you can a population with only a trickle of actually young people, it seems like the rate of change could become very slow.