My weekend work usually averages around 4-5 hours a day, I get to relax, I get to run out and do groceries and don't even notice having worked.
I think it's mostly physical jobs that 70 year olds cannot perform well. And that kind of job can be automated by robots anyway. For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds.
A 2002 study (published in the Alzheimer's and Dementia Journal) found that ~91% of people 70 and older were capable of normal mental function.
Also, experience
Since there is no other evidence that a 40 year old in the 90th percentile for mental performance is equal to a 20 year old in the 50th percentile, it seems more than likely that the data is skewed.
Perhaps Lumosity.com attracts above average young people and below average older people (given those results, some variation on that theme is the likely explanation).
If chess Grandmasters dropped in mental acuity as fast as those Luminosity results suggested, a 60 year old Grandmaster could be beaten by any young novice.
Also worth mentioning is that competitive chess is favors very quick thinking and action in a way that most careers don't.
Maybe in 50 years, but currently I'd say a 20-30 years old is the prime programmer age. Young people tend to learn new tech quicker, and be faster/more efficient at typing and using computers.
But I do agree that it without hard evidence, it's unfair to assume older programmers are slower or less capable. I have personally worked with some exceptional older programmers.
The only that the 40 sets is the threshold at which workers attain specific rights regarding overtime, benefits, and other things.
Says who ? This preposterous way of thinking has been around for x years already. "when the world population will reach 4 billions people, there will be no jobs for everyone", yet the population is still increasing beyond 6 billions and most people still work to live/survive. There is no hint we are moving to a post-labor world.
You will see that there is a strong relationship between reduced employment/working hours, welfare benefits when not working, and government spending. And somehow most of the countries which went down that way have now humongous public debt problems to solve. Their model is not sustainable in the long term.
This is just ideology, and not factually accurate. (P.S. Cheers from Scandinavia.)
Most likely, a post-labor world should be capable of arriving well before that. Once we can automate the production of basic necessities, working should become largely optional.
Automation has already been happening in many industries, in case you have not noticed, and that did not result in lost job opportunities on the whole of the economy. Agriculture is also largely mechanized all around the world and you have only a very little portion of the population (5% or so) in developed countries to produce far enough for everyone.
Most jobs in developed countries are service related. These jobs will not disappear even if you automate the production part of the economy.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'm not suggesting we should go back to an agrarian society, but we have a serious economic and political problem where the benefits of technological advancement are going in overwhelming proportion to a very small subset of the population. If something isn't done about that, and soon, the resulting upheaval may force us back to pre-industrial living anyway (or more likely, much worse).
Can you support this? Millions of people all over the world are being lifted out of poverty.
Here is a chart of per capita GNI for the past 20 years http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...
edi: linked wrong chart
Right, per capita, as I stated, but really just GNI is fine too.
> people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S
Unfortunately the google public data didn't have enough US data but take a look at these two charts for India.
First is just India's per capita GNI the second is India's income distribution over the same time frame. Notice how the income distribution is relatively flat and how the GNI is growing.
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...
What is the proper proportion?
Why not? They already are. Self-checkout, online forms and purchases, ATMs, touch tone phone menus, etc.
Here is Marshall Brain's optimistic but well explained and convincing view: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
You could have a hundred billion people and everyone would still want that. The difference is post-labor comes when you don't need human capital (or at the worst, a negligible amount) to produce the necessities for people to survive. We are approaching that, look at how manufacturing is returning to the US in 99% automated facilities. Once you can grow food (or fabricate it with molecular engineering) without requiring human labor to produce it, you can already distribute it with automated vehicles, and you can produce electricity via solar, hydro, or nuclear wtih very little human capital involvement after you set the system up.
The idea is you put systems in place that the fruits of them are effectively infinite without human engagement. Once you can do that, you have post-scarcity bounded on the limits of the planet and our ability to deploy infrastructure, not in how much labor we can produce. We are getting there, but the fundamental problem is we try to squeeze these no labor return systems into classic market capitalism and it isn't working (a concentrated wealthy class ends up owning these means of production, and power and wealth are concentrated as a result).
We are moving away from doing anything useful and we are now even running out of excuses that could entitle us to getting some money to provide for ourselves.