What will happen when biomedical science allows people to live healthy lives lasting well beyond what is now considered "maximum possible age?" This is not a new question at WorldChanging; both Alex and I have addressed various possible scenarios and possibilities. It is a topic less often explored in the mainstream media, however, and when it is, it's usually presented as something wacky or fringe, and rarely given its due consideration. It's highly likely that the next several decades will see substantive breakthroughs in health and longevity science; it's important to start thinking now about how we want such a world to turn out.
Charles C. Mann, in the May 2005 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, gives us "The Coming Death Shortage," one of the few mainstream articles that both takes the idea of radical longevity seriously and explores its implications. It's not a perfect article -- some of its conclusions are a bit alarmist -- but it's a good one. The full text online is available only to subscribers, so I would encourage you to either pick up the issue or find it in your local library. Hit the extended entry here for some excerpts and discussion.
Mann's depiction of what a world of radical longevity would be like falls closest to the "Dorian Gray" scenario I outlined in my "What Would Radical Longevity Mean?" article last year -- a succession of otherwise-desirable medical technologies making it possible for people live longer and longer healthy lives, without "immortality" ever being the intended result. His article doesn't address what might happen should longevity allow for a physiological "reset" (a la Holy Fire), admittedly a less-likely near-term pathway to longevity.
He doesn't shy away from recognizing the scale of the changes emerging from extreme life expectancy:
From religion to real estate, from pensions to parent-child dynamics, almost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations. Every quarter century or so children take over from their parents—a transition as fundamental to human existence as the rotation of the planet about its axis. In tomorrow's world, if the optimists are correct, grandparents will have living grandparents; children born decades from now will ignore advice from people who watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Intergenerational warfare ... will be but one consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober social scientists find themselves discussing pregnant seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms, protracted adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance companies. Indeed, if the biologists are right, the coming army of centenarians will be marching into a future so unutterably different that they may well feel nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.
This passage also hints at Mann's general disapproval of the idea of radical longevity. He doesn't explicitly suggest that medical science leading to life extension should be banned; it seems more of a lament that it's going to happen, regardless. And when it does, in his view, the inevitable result of life extension is increased social inequality. Some of that will come from older people in positions of power refusing to give up their seats to new generations; some will come from differential access to the life extension technology. And some will come from compound interest.
...a twenty-year-old who puts $10,000 in the market in 2010 should expect by 2030 to have about $27,000 in real terms—a tidy increase. But that happy forty-year-old will be in the same world as septuagenarians and octogenarians who began investing their money during the Carter administration. If someone who turned seventy in 2010 had invested $10,000 when he was twenty, he would have about $115,000. In the same twenty-year period during which the young person's account grew from $10,000 to $27,000, the old person's account would grow from $115,000 to $305,000. Inexorably, the gap between them will widen.The result would be a tripartite society: the very old and very rich on top, beta-testing each new treatment on themselves; a mass of the ordinary old, forced by insurance into supremely healthy habits, kept alive by medical entitlement; and the diminishingly influential young.
Mann draws a parallel between this notion of the deathless refusing to give up power to the young and the current situation in Japan. Japan has the world's oldest population, the highest percentage of working senior citizens of any developed nation, and one-third of its young adult population unemployed or working part-time, many still living with their parents. This is the first hint of a flaw in his scenario, however, as he later asserts that increased longevity will inevitably lead to fewer couples having children, raising the specter of fewer young people working to subsidize the retirements of older generations. But wouldn't many older people, still healthy and mentally fit, want to continue working, as seen in Japan? That wouldn't matter -- companies will ruthlessly dump expensive older workers in favor of... well, what will replace them is largely left unsaid. If there's a baby bust associated with radical longevity, there are fewer "cheap" young workers to replace those oldsters forced to retire, and with fewer of them to go around, the less "cheap" they'd be to hire. Conversely, if radical longevity doesn't result in a drop in the birth rate -- because, for example, potential parents recognize that they have more time to build careers, and can afford to focus on having kids early on, or because the medical science extending healthy lifespans also allows for healthy pregnancy and birth no matter how old the mother -- then the fear of too-few young folks is a non-issue.
Most importantly, Mann makes no room in his scenario for society to change in response to (or in co-evolution with) changes in lifespan. He seems taken in by the speed with which technology itself changes, and extends that pace to technology's results. But demographic change is a slow process. Non-catastrophic changes in birth rates and death rates take decades to have substantial results. Even if radical life extension became available today, its broad social effects wouldn't be visible for many years. As a result, this could well be a technology-driven change that society will have time to grapple with. This does not mean that the adjustment will be painless, or that we'll get our choices right the first time. More likely, we'll see indignant public debate, politically-inspired legislation, repealed legislation, judicial proceedings, ethical rumblings, and on and on. In short, the slow pace of demography means that we should have time for our culture to adjust, and to learn from its mistakes.
This doesn't mean we can put off thinking about the issue, however. Mann quotes geneticist Aubrey de Grey as noting that society can't wait until the last minute to start planning for this eventuality, as "you live with longevity for a very long time." Society may have time to learn from its mistakes, but those mistakes will mean suffering for real people. It is imperative that we start to think now about our options. We won't get all of our scenarios right -- in fact, we'll get most of them wrong -- but they'll still be testing grounds for how we will eventually proceed. The more people involved in these discussions, the better; even if I take issue with some of Mann's conclusions, he has done a terrific service to our society by bringing these issues forward intelligently and coherently in a mainstream non-techie publication.
Too often we are dazzled by the strange and often troubling implications of change, forgetting that change is not new. Too often we give insufficient credit to the resiliency of human cultures. We adjust and we learn -- and all the better when we can help that along with a bit of forethought.
(Thanks to James Hughes for bringing this article to my attention.)
