The future of old: If you’re 30 now, what can you expect at 80? | Hacker News Reader

The future of old: If you’re 30 now, what can you expect at 80?

boston.com

45 pointswallflower39 comments

The article succumbs to the fallacy of predicting the future from current trends. To give you an example, here are some things that didnt exist 50 years ago that were life and culture changing. Personal computers, the internet, cell phones, most of the interstate, networking, cable, computer games, CDs, personal electronics, google, twitter, medical imaging, nearly all heart surgery, gene sequencing, financial oligopolies, media domination, civil rights, gender equality, terrorism, airport searches. Missing predictions: AI, flying cars, nuclear power too cheap to meter, fusion power, colonies on the moon and mars and of course, flying cars.

My point is that 50 years from now is going to be way different from what we imagine.

...here are some things that didnt exist 50 years ago...terrorism...

Terrorism isn't new. See the Wikipedia list of terrorist incidents: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_terro...

Also, it could be argued that the early American revolutionists, especially those who participated in the Boston Tea Party, were terrorists. What seems to be new is the widespread paranoia regarding terrorism.

Widespread paranoia is an effect of the ever-increasing empowering effect of technology putting greater and greater destructive power into smaller and smaller numbers of hands. Science fiction has been predicting the rise of terrorism for a long time. I tend to agree that we are currently overreacting to the problem (at least in terms of actions taken within the US), but in a somewhat longer term it is not hard to imagine that it will be necessary to step things up even more. And other arguments can be made, and I would make some of them. But the argument that we can't help but progressively step up our levels of "paranoia" about terrorism over the next century is a good, solid one with lots of sensible things to say about it.

I instinctively believe that there is a better way to prevent and/or deter terrorism than increased oppression and violation of the rights of the protected. Some combination of analyzing the motives of relatively-sane terrorists and removing those motives, promoting the availability and appeal of psychiatric help for insane potential terrorists, and coping with acceptable risk seems better than focusing primarily on security theater, warantless spying, and invasive searches.

To be fair, many things that exist today would have been considered AI back then. Part of the problem with AI, as John Neumann observed it already is that if you can formulate precisely enough what you want, you are already on the way to solving it so it is a shifting definition to some extent.

Otherwise totally agree with your point, it's amazing how most science fiction of the past missed things like the internet.

I am amused at how wrong SF authors often get the details of every,day future things. In Stranger in a Strange Land, set around 2000(?), one of the characters mentions a mobile phone the size of a brief case. Or in recent David Weber novel, the heroes get through customs, because the agents hadnt received their photos. In the year 4000 something. I will admit that with a 2000 year advance in security the book would have been a lot shorter.

Apart from "A Logic Named Joe", which was eerily prescient.

To be fair, many things that exist today would have been considered AI back then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Summary: Advances in medicine has increased the life expectancy of Americans. As a greater proportion of people live longer, there will be stresses on our economy and healthcare system and society's expectations/perceptions of the elderly will change. We cannot predict the future, but much medical research is being done and we hope that can address problems associated with aging.

No offense, but this article doesn't say anything insightful or novel about aging other than rehashing what is relatively obvious.

No offense, but this article doesn't say anything insightful or novel about aging other than rehashing what is relatively obvious.

I find myself saying this quite a few times too. But sometimes I wonder, is it because of such articles that these things are relatively obvious?

Perhaps to the uninitiated, but I think any reasonably-informed person can keep up with at least the latest headline-grabbing advances in medicine. A highly generalized technological vector, one could say, is not too difficult to glean from the day-to-day news, but the distance between now and the realization of any sort of major advance is always difficult to determine.

You should expect that you have the opportunity, between now and 2061, to meaningfully contribute to the development of rejuvenation biotechnology that will be able to repair the biological causes of aging - to prevent frailty and increased mortality in the old, and reverse those problems where they already exist.

There are plenty of projects to support now:

http://www.fightaging.org/take-action/

And more will arise in the years ahead.

Since I am a long ways past 30, I hope you guys get it done a lot sooner than that.

It can already be done. I'm doing it now. I've had a hole in my left lung close and decades-old scars itch like new ones and visibly shrink. I have less gray hair than I had ten years ago. But a) you won't believe me and b) even if you did, you would reject the things I have done to accomplish this.

My next amazing feat: Figure out how to shut up about this health stuff and do something that actually makes money.

Peace.

Edit: I take it the downvotes suggest a few folks don't believe me. Please enlighten me if this assumption is incorrect. Thank you.

Elaborate.

I was bed-ridden for about 3.5 months the first part of 2001. In May 2001, I was diagnosed with "atypical cystic fibrosis". After a lifetime of being treating like a hypochondriac and months of being denied treatment while doctors referred me for more testing and said things like "we can't find anything physically wrong with you, would you like to speak with a psychiatrist?", the first thing I was told after being diagnosed was "People like you don't get well. Symptom management is the name of the game." In other words, doctors were all too happy to consign me to a slow and torturous death.

Since doctors were not helping me and I had largely been on my own in dealing with my health already, I continued working on the problem myself. I gradually got healthier by throwing out all my worldly possessions in order to break the cycle of contamination (this piece is heavily objected to by other folks who are dying of cystic fibrosis) and I did enormous research into what nutritional deficiencies I had, how to effectively treat them, and so on. I made drastic dietary and lifestyle changes.

I have a diagnosis of a genetic disorder with a life expectancy of around 36 or 37. I will be 46 in one month. (I sometimes joke that 'in human terms, I'm the equivalent of an octogenarian'.) People routinely think I am in my thirties and I am healthier than I have ever been. I live without a car and me and my oldest son (who has the same diagnosis) walked 8 miles both yesterday and the day before to further the healing process. It isn't news that exercise, eating right and so on can delay the aging process and is generally good for one's health. Most people don't bother to explore the degree to which that can now be leveraged with the vast amounts of information readily available online.

Peace.

PS: There is a website, though that might die when my web-hosting expires later this month (I'm broke and don't know how to pay for it). For now, it's here: http://healthgazelle.com/

I sent you some money to cover your hosting for a while longer.

Since you're discussing medical issues, I'd use Google Keyword Tool to look up exactly what people are searching for in relation to the topics you're discussing. Use the most searched for phrases in the titles and bodies of your posts.

Get a Twitter account for each blog you run and use one of the Wordpress plugins that auto-tweets your new posts. Use appropriate hashtags.

You should also install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin on all your blogs. It generates a robots.txt and sitemap.xml.gz which maps out all the content on your site. This helps search engines find it all and index it properly.

Thanks.

I've read a lot of your comments on HN, thank you for sharing all this. I know you probably have better problems to worry about than your website, but I think you can back it up in the wordpress admin panel and import the backup file to wordpress.com which is free (if you need to minimize your costs). You may also need to copy your wp uploads manually, I don't remember frankly.

The blog is in Wordpress but the main site is hand-coded by me. It died once before and donations brought it back to life. If nothing else, I will FTP it down to my netbook before the hosting expires. I would be much more interested in information on a) how to get more traffic to my various websites and b) how to effectively monetize them.

I suspect the real money will be in a webcomic I plan to do and another site that my sons blog on that we have additional plans for. I have considered posting this as a question, but I completely suck at that so haven't bothered. I continue to read stuff here to work on that angle of things.

Thank you for your support.

I'm no expert really, but in case someone else doesn't jump in I'd have thought Google Adsense would work pretty well with your content. Also maybe Amazon Affiliates links to relevant books etc. I'm sure with that and a little SEO you'd easily cover the costs of a cheap VPS quite quickly.

So far this month, my google adsense account has racked up 3 cents in earnings. It's not usually that pathetic, but it's not great either. If nothing else, I need more traffic.

I'm working on stuff. But I've been working on stuff a long time and I'm just really frustrated. I can figure out a cure for an incurable medical condition but can't pay my bills and can't figure out marketing (or some such). <insert crossed eyes> It's not a happy place to be and not one I desire to remain in.

Peace.

Sounds more like you treated the symptoms of atypical cystic fibrosis than the symptoms of aging.

Yes, but some of those symptoms included things like gray hair. I also wore bifocals at a really early age. I got my first bifocals at age 30 and three years later when I got new ones the woman who fitted me said over and over "god you are young to be in bifocals". So being so sick aged me, tremendously. I heard that gray hair was indicative of things like a PABA deficiency and adrenal stress. I treated those nutritionally and I have less gray hair than I had in my early thirties.

I'm happy to see this article discussed on Hacker News, I joined a startup in Jan, but before I was working as an Interaction Designer at the http://www.trilcentre.org . Working at TRIL made me realise the fragility of old age, I reviewed many ethnographic studies into the aging process. It made me realize that even a small event could result in drastic ageing. For example many fallers struggle to regain independence after even the smallest fall. This can lead to social isolation, which has a knock on affect to cognitive ability. All ageing research pillars are interlinked, if your interested you can read about TRIL's here http://www.trilcentre.org/tril-research/research-themes.html

I personally developed http://jive.benarent.co.uk | http://www.bett.ie , 2 years prior to the iPad launch.. and while I think the iPad is very accessible, there is a lot of opportunity in apps and other services.

There is a huge opportunity for startups, Anyone here working in this area?

*Alzheimer and Dementia are the elephants in the room. At a recent conference the Alzermers presenter noted that the cost of Alzermers is more expensive than 'cancer'.

"Demographers predict that by 2030, average life expectancy will have climbed past 80"

In most European (and a couple of Asian) countries, average life expectancy is already above 80. Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators

I believe the future of old people will be old people rejuvenating to a younger biological age, preferably when we're in our prime.

That's not the foreseeable future, though. We don't even have any lines of research that could plausibly lead to that end AFAIK. Greatly prolonging youth (i.e. slowing age-related damage rather than actually reversing it) seems likely to come much earlier, and even that is a ways off.

Our ability to fight aging is greatly dependent on people's willingness to spend , the intellectual resources that we pour into it, and the speed at which innovation happens. (hampered or speed up by political institutions)

Actually testosterone and other hormone therapies are very effective at making older people feel like they did in their prime.

LSD is very effective at making people feel like they're purple clouds. Making people feel good is not a bad thing, but it isn't the same as actually changing their biological age.

Stallone would agree with you: http://news.celebritywonder.com/2008/01/24/Sylvester_Stallon...

Would you want to overclock your body in an isolated area, in what would seem an artificial way?

I think the concept of a highly enabled, connected, and active senior class has a lot more impact than people are considering. The points made about a society that financially cannot retire are powerful because it forces us to adapt a much longer view on our career objectives (which is always healthy).

I'm about 30 and all I know of future is that I don't know.

But one thing I'm rather certain about: the world will be significantly poorer in 50 years. And that I'll be totally dependent of my children, since it's unlikely I'll ever see one cent of my pension.

But one thing I'm rather certain about: the world will be significantly poorer in 50 years.

That's the one thing I would most resolutely bet against among predictions about the future fifty years from now. I've been hearing predictions of a poorer world to come throughout my more than fifty years of life, and they have consistently been proved wrong.

I may not have total buy-in to the views of the author I cite below,

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/books/rational-optimist-how-...

but he is on the right track about the long-term historical trend, which is increasing worldwide prosperity. That's a trend I have observed in all the countries I have lived in or visited, on two continents.

We agree to disagree when it comes to mid-term, tens of years of development. I'm just expecting current trends to continue for a couple of decades more, until we solve ongoing energy crisis. I'm sure that occurs in less than 50 years; however at that point we'll probably still be rebuilding.

Long term looks good, when we're talking about over 100 years.

"And that I'll be totally dependent of my children, since it's unlikely I'll ever see one cent of my pension."

Have you considered saving money in addition to your ephemeral pension?

I think the only reasonable prediction we can make is that the world is going to be even weirder in 50 years.

A catastrophic war. Possibly several if you're lucky enough to survive.

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