[ExI] Life extension

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 2:44 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 2013-10-22 21:04, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
>> The biggest insight I think he's had is that you don't talk about life
>> extension. Particularly radical life extension. You talk about people
>> living healthy into older age.
>>
>
> Yes. This is important, since you do not want to give people an excuse for
> not listening.
>

For some reason, a lot of people tune out to radical life extension, but do
not tune out to radical health improvement.


> Another approach is to point out the enormous savings.


But there is the pension side of things. That's scary, isn't it?


> Olshansky and the other longevity dividend people have come out with yet
> another article looking at the healthcare economics of life extension:
> http://sjayolshansky.com/sjo/**Longevity_Dividend_Initative_**
> files/Health%20Affairs%202013%**20LDI%20Final.pdf<http://sjayolshansky.com/sjo/Longevity_Dividend_Initative_files/Health%20Affairs%202013%20LDI%20Final.pdf>
>
> Then there is the unavoidable boredom and overpopulation arguments. I
> usually handle the boredom with a Nietzsche quote and then discuss the
> tragedy of life projects cut short. A very cool answer to the usual
> overpopulation worry can be found in this paper:
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/**pmc/articles/PMC3192186/<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/>
> They use Swedish demographic data to demonstrate that even with radical
> life extension the population does not have to explode.


I would also appeal to the data from Hans Rosling (you can find him on
TED.com, if nowhere else) that shows that having lots of children is about
being taken care of in your old age. If you can come up with other ways to
take care of the elderly, such as social security, it reduces the
population growth. If you can just reduce the need to take care of the
elderly, since they aren't really elderly anymore, that is a better way to
resolve the problem.

Unfortunately, you still have people who have the expectation to retire at
65, even if they expect to live to 300. That probably can't work with a
social security type model.

The whole concept of retirement clashes with radical life extension in ways
that make the middle east conflict a cake walk to solve by comparison.

-Kelly
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