[ExI] Ossification (Was: riots)

[Charlie Stross]

On 25 Sep 2012, at 00:09, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Typically people behave as if they had a declining learning rate across the lifespan, producing a "autobiographical bump" of highly influential memories in the 20's that likely define much of their world-view.

Yup.

> But what we remember is a function of what we are now: knowledge and mindstates filter recollections. Key experiences are reinforced by being recalled often and made part of our autobiographical "critical paths" (no matter what their actual importance were). So learned schemas might be self-reinforcing and persist even if the brain is very plastic.

That too. You'd need to enforce some degree of rolling amnesia if you want to maintain plasticity. Which itself is probably a bad thing -- you lose any benefits you might have gained from depth of experience.

> And then there is the vested interest angle. Older people have reached desirable positions in society or professions, and that means they have more to lose if things get changed around.

Worse. We currently live in a society where human life expectancy is bounded at around 114 years, but where most people in the developed world *expect* 70 years in decent health, then declining faculties and abilities. So someone who has, for example, reached 60 and accumulated significant assets will (a) have a very strong incentive to hang onto them (as a cushion for their declining years) and (b) have the means to defend them against young, inexperienced, low-social-capital interlopers. 

We have a societal set-up that gives disproportionate wealth, power, and status to the elderly. This is not a HUGE problem, as long as there's a grim garbage-collector running in the background, but there are already signs that it is damaging our larger society -- the transfer of real estate wealth to the old facilitated by the credit bubble, for example, that has led to the freezing out of the under-30s from property markets. 

The first order effects of age extension *right now* would be to tip the balance of power further towards the elderly -- who, in our current system, are largely a transient rentier class. Immediate consequences: rising youth unemployment, a recession or depression caused by the partial collapse of the investment sector due to the destabilization of pension schemes, the collapse of social security systems, and a rain of boiling frogs. (Well, not the latter bit.)

> It might be useful to have simple rules of thumb like the century rule: nobody gets to keep a job/office more than a century, but again there are likely exceptions.

Try applying that to self-employed people? Or artists? (I suspect self-employment would rapidly rise among the young-elderly as they have the self-confidence and assets to make a fist of it.)

The real problem, though, is to find ways of destabilizing rigid structures while encouraging social fluidity and minimizing inequality of both opportunity and outcomes.

Oh, and the folks who keep banging on about "freedom" (meaning personal freedom) are going to have a fun time adjusting their strategies to come to terms with the number of iterations in their Prisoner's Dilemma scenario tending towards infinity ...


-- Charlie