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This article seems to be about the economic value gained by reduced health care or something. If you actually extended lifespans by a significant margin (say t

This article seems to be about the economic value gained by reduced health care or something. If you actually extended lifespans by a significant margin (say to 200 years) there would be other knock on effects that would completely derail the global economy & markets. This study doesn't seem to think about how those things could actually negatively impact economics. Eventually if you're intelligent and you're trying to self-fund your retirement you build up assets that are growing at a sufficient rate that you can live off the growth without touching your principal. Once you hit that, work becomes unnecessary. If everyone goes from retiring for 20-30 years to suddenly possibly retiring for 120-140 years things get all kinds of strange things happening, the percentage of the population working would diminish. But then that would negatively impact companies due to increasing difficulty in finding workers, which would negatively impact markets, which would then feedback into ruining the investments allowing all these retirees to live off investments & savings. The current system couldn't work without room to greatly expand the population of living people to ensure growth of the workforce. I have seen these ideas explored in Science Fiction occasionally, but not many other places. There is another aspect as well, if you lived 200 years, what if you ended up having multiple successive families? Raise a family, your kids grow up, then you raise another family 50 years later?

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> If you actually extended lifespans by a significant margin (say to 200 years) there would be other knock on effects that would completely derail the global economy & markets Re-structure? Sure. De-rail? No. One could imagine our current low-interest rate environment (interest rates and time horizons are fundamentally linked) as a first step towards that world. You're highlighting a problem of retirement savings running out and the labor pool diminishing. These problems offer an obvious solution.
- ben7799 5y ago
  Retirees running out of money because the economy is crashing doesn't really match up with "they'll just go back to work". People might stop having kids too, then there will be no new workers entering the work force eventually if lifespan was extended indefinitely.
joshmarlow 5y ago
Just increasing lifespans alone would have lots of effects, but they wouldn't be happening in a vacuum. Once we have that type of technology, there's going to be other variables at play. For instance, I think we'll see close to 100% technological unemployment before we can extend human lifespans by 200 years. In that type of environment, most humans would be effectively retired. Even if we have less than 100% technological unemployment, birth rates are generally declining, so there's lots of ways that could interact with increased longevity. EDIT: fixed mispelling
_Nat_ 5y ago
These concerns seem pretty hypothetical because AI's going to be putting everyone out of a job before such things could be an issue anyway. That said, even in a hypothetical primarily-human labor-market, market-dynamics would fix the problem anyway. For example: say food becomes scarce because no one's farming. Then the remaining farmers would become rich (they could raise their prices tons) while everyone else would end losing their money to buy the food. Eventually folks would start going into farming until the imbalance is corrected. And, yes, this would mean that those who'd refuse to go into farming would end up draining their retirement funds away -- a retirement fund wouldn't be a permanent no-work ticket, at least in an economy where labor was in too short of supply. At least, in an ideal free-market economy. In practice, we tend to simplify things and have regulations for practical reasons. Such deviations from an ideal free-market economy might mess up the correction-process.. at first. However, if such regulations did prove to be problematic and prevented the economy from working, then we could just change the laws/regulations to fix that problem -- the simple approach would be to simply repeal problematic regulations. In short, the stuff you're worried about can't happen (because AI will take the jobs anyway) and wouldn't be a problem even if it could (because market-dynamics fixes such things). --- Separately, might be worth noting that the big future problem would likely be population-control. Once we have good AI/robotics providing exploding wealth, and then clinical-immortality, it'd be all too easy for people to just keep having endless babies. Doubly so when we have good enough 3-D printing to literally print people, and easy test-tube babies before that. That may be an issue society'll need to address.
mlon_eusk 5y ago
mothers used to have kids at age 15 and only lived to their 40s - now folks have kids in their late 20s and live to their 80s

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> If you actually extended lifespans by a significant margin (say to 200 years) there would be other knock on effects that would completely derail the global economy & markets Re-structure? Sure. De-rail? No. One could imagine our current low-interest rate environment (interest rates and time horizons are fundamentally linked) as a first step towards that world. You're highlighting a problem of retirement savings running out and the labor pool diminishing. These problems offer an obvious solution.

ben7799 5y ago
Retirees running out of money because the economy is crashing doesn't really match up with "they'll just go back to work". People might stop having kids too, then there will be no new workers entering the work force eventually if lifespan was extended indefinitely.

joshmarlow 5y ago

Just increasing lifespans alone would have lots of effects, but they wouldn't be happening in a vacuum. Once we have that type of technology, there's going to be other variables at play. For instance, I think we'll see close to 100% technological unemployment before we can extend human lifespans by 200 years. In that type of environment, most humans would be effectively retired. Even if we have less than 100% technological unemployment, birth rates are generally declining, so there's lots of ways that could interact with increased longevity. EDIT: fixed mispelling

_Nat_ 5y ago

These concerns seem pretty hypothetical because AI's going to be putting everyone out of a job before such things could be an issue anyway. That said, even in a hypothetical primarily-human labor-market, market-dynamics would fix the problem anyway. For example: say food becomes scarce because no one's farming. Then the remaining farmers would become rich (they could raise their prices tons) while everyone else would end losing their money to buy the food. Eventually folks would start going into farming until the imbalance is corrected. And, yes, this would mean that those who'd refuse to go into farming would end up draining their retirement funds away -- a retirement fund wouldn't be a permanent no-work ticket, at least in an economy where labor was in too short of supply. At least, in an ideal free-market economy. In practice, we tend to simplify things and have regulations for practical reasons. Such deviations from an ideal free-market economy might mess up the correction-process.. at first. However, if such regulations did prove to be problematic and prevented the economy from working, then we could just change the laws/regulations to fix that problem -- the simple approach would be to simply repeal problematic regulations. In short, the stuff you're worried about can't happen (because AI will take the jobs anyway) and wouldn't be a problem even if it could (because market-dynamics fixes such things). --- Separately, might be worth noting that the big future problem would likely be population-control. Once we have good AI/robotics providing exploding wealth, and then clinical-immortality, it'd be all too easy for people to just keep having endless babies. Doubly so when we have good enough 3-D printing to literally print people, and easy test-tube babies before that. That may be an issue society'll need to address.

mlon_eusk 5y ago

mothers used to have kids at age 15 and only lived to their 40s - now folks have kids in their late 20s and live to their 80s