Come on The Economist, no mention at all of the economic implications of this? Of people getting older and older and richer and richer without end, hoarding all the wealth and power, and young people with flexible minds being very rare indeed.
For this to work, we need to continuously outlaw any affordable anti-aging therapies.
(Altered Carbon is one of my favorite recent sci-fi dystopias, though it’s somehow more offensive than Repo: The Genetic Opera)
On the upside, it doesn't have Paris Hilton
Perhaps that's what it'd take for the widespread mentality of «après moi, le déluge» to finally come to an end.
Actually the smartest person and the most flexible mind I know is also the oldest man (87 y/o) I know. It's infeasible for younger people to have his outlook, that simply comes with his life experience.
He volunteers weekends removing trash from the public parks and cleaning up our streets of litter.
I am teaching him how to play professional chess and we had plans to go to professional tournaments (but covid hit so maybe next year) and he is picking up really well.
What if: Neuroplasticity allows you to build new base cognitive tools from sensory information, or dump/change existing tools. If you build sufficiently numerous, broad, and adaptive tools when you are young, you will be able to do many, many things when you are older.
Still might have challenges learning new languages, or say to dance if you never learned how to dance at all, at the same rate as a toddler, tho.
Regardless, if we figure out how to live more and end up with brain zombies, we'll also have an incentive to figure out how to improve our brains. There is a lot of research into such topics too (see topics on research on Alzheimer's disease which are also posted here often).
It's not only about flexibility. When eventually Rupert Murdoch dies, his wealth and power will be split up amongst his children and the state. But if he lived on and on we'd be stuck with him forever.
Would people still want to marry? Would we pursue careers as aggressively? You could spend your first 80 years in school and still have 9 centuries of career left. How would savings change? Criminal justice?
I don't know what would happen, but the changes would be radical and have many knock-on effects that we cannot predict.
I'd imagine that many individuals will grow bored with their career after some number of decades and will switch. Starting at the bottom doesn't sound so bad if you can get to the top of the skill tree in 10-15 years out of 1000. It would practically be the same as spending a year on a transition today.
So much of human progress depends on old, inflexible minds passing away to make room for new, young minds and ideas to take hold and evolve.
Can there be evolution without death and rebirth?
Maybe have a crypto-contract for that at 20 years you need to each pay a token to remain married else it's automatically disolved.
It's kind of cold, but so is living 1000 years I'd imagine. Though, I'd signup first thing just to see tech evolve.
> Science progresses one funeral at a time.
You mean, political implications? (I can’t even imagine what the world would look like today if some old ... would still be alive.)
... Or continue their extended living. (At least until they get a chance to swap sleeves.)