Sixteen Volts

If the transhumanists get their way, we could live to be hundreds of years old and we might even thrive if we were still alive in the year 2525. Of course, the working assumption here is that the extra years are added to the first half of your adult years before the middle age when we are young and healthy instead of to the end when we are old and feeble. As anybody can verify by visiting an old folks' home, becoming very old is a fate so horrible that it is almost beyond what we can imagine, and prolonging this stage by several centuries would be something that only a sadist at the level of Dr. Mengele might come up with. As The Danimal once noted, if somebody invented a raygun whose hit would have the physical effect of aging its target 60 years, this weapon would be immediately banned and its very manufacture would probably be declared to be a crime against humanity.

As I wrote in my previous post, I am an economic ignoramus, so perhaps somebody more familiar with this dismal science could explain the following problem that I have. For the sake of argument, let's assume that we humans were otherwise the same as we are now, with the same skills and technology and the subjective sense of time, but that the average human lifespan was something like 500 years instead of 70 years that it is now. How would this make the world different? For starters, it would be much better, obviously, assuming the overcrowding problem were somehow solved. A person could have an ordinary career for 40 years, and then move on to do something completely different, living in freedom with your accumulated savings while instead of being an old doober he would still have the body of a young thirtysomething. But therein lies a huge problem.

In our world, middle-aged people have typically accumulated more knowledge and economic and political power than young people, but not really that much more, so that they can't really boss around us twenty- and thirtysomethings too badly. But in our hypothetical scenario, if somebody were able to accumulate wealth and power exponentially for a few centuries, this would make him immensely powerful, almost godlike, compared to young adults who are only at the start of their lives. Investing 10% of his annual net income would make the average person a billionaire in perhaps about 100 to 150 years, thanks to the magic of compound interest, and thus reach a total liberty to only do things that were interesting and pleasant to him. A billionaire never has to do any "work" or toil and moil in drudgery in any meaningful sense of these words, since he has an army of henchmen at his disposal to do all his laundry, cleaning, cooking, driving or flying him wherever he feels like going each day, handling his taxes and other finances etc. For a billionaire to actually be a "billionaire" the way that we comprehend this word, there necessarily has to exist a large number of people who produces all the goods and services that the billionaire consumes.

The value that money really has is not in the number printed on the bill but in what you can buy with it, because anything that anybody consumes, somebody else has to produce. Thanks to these unavoidable facts, I don't see how a society in which three out of four people were billionaires would be possible. Something has got to give, but what exactly, since we know that even conservative investing habit would make pretty much every bicentennial man a billionaire?

The only solution to this economic conundrum that I could come up with is that if the average human lifespan were 500 years, then money would be essentially worthless, and there would be massive annual inflation which would make the real interest rates heavily negative. If most people were billionaires, they would have to compete for the non-billionaires' labour so intensely that you would have to pay some young guy a monthly salary of a million bucks to have him flip hamburgers. Money being worthless, most of the economy would probably run in some kind of bartering basis. But if the older people couldn't really accumulate money, what would they accumulate instead?

One solution would be to increase the labor pool by inventing better technology to do all the work. We know that this works, since precisely this solution has effectively made the average person to live better than a billionaire hundred years ago. Such a rapid techonological boost would even be likely, since we would have the great minds working and accumulating new knowledge for centuries.

On the other hand, if we think about another extreme scenario in which the average human lifespan was only 20 years so that a person would reach physical adulthood in 4 years, money would be pretty important and the interest rates would be enormously high. (I know I certainly wouldn't give away my money for a significant chunk of my lifetime without getting an enormous return to show for it.) And this assuming the whole concept of interest even existed, since such a short-term society would probably never proceed past the prehistoric age, assuming that humans were as slow to learn things as they are now.

Would the length of the human lifespan be another instance of the anthropic principle so that the universe appears as if it was designed for human life? Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Maybe not. But at least it shows that our physical makeup exerts constraints to us that are not immediately obvious, and if some other species would have evolved to be intelligent, their society would necessarily be quite different from the society of us hairless apes.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Sunday, April 30, 2006 at 8:07 PM