Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

http://books.google.com/books?id=3PSTqQrrzjEC&pg=PA141&#...

The premise of the story is that an effective life extension treatment has been found, and it is so expensive that only the politically powerful can have access to it. The protagonist (and first-person narrator) of the story is an assassin whose job is to murder the immortal oligarchs who rule a future United States--it is pretty apparent that the target of his assassination plot is J. Edgar Hoover in a far-off future. That has always caused me to pause and think about whether I would really like society to discover an effective longevity treatment. Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence scale as HN readers will have access to the treatment?

There's plenty of evidence that evolution is extremely inefficient. Due to its very nature it can't look forward, it can only hill-climb. Since evolution can't re-architect things, it gets stuck in local maxima all the time.

We can be reasonably sure of evolution's inefficiencies after looking at some some examples. Problems like the laryngeal nerve and backwards vertebrate retina are commonly brought up in these sorts of debates, but they forget that evolution doesn't even look at the vast majority of solution-space. It limits itself to squishy things in the discipline of biology. For example, neurons run at 10-200Hz and conduct signals at 0.000001c. Other substrates like silicon and diamond are much faster.

A human visual cortex has billions of neurons doing complicated procedures (edge-detection, FFTs, motion-detection, etc). But only a tiny fraction of humans can multiply two 4-digit numbers without the aid of pen and paper. Had the human brain been designed by a human, every programmer in the world would scream, "Why didn't you give us an API you idiot?!"

Of course, we'd also complain about the brain's lack of 4G, since evolution never invented a radio.

To give an obvious contemporary example - gay marriage is a lot more controversial among older American voters than younger voters.

Now multiply that times a thousand - what if people who grew up in the time of Christ were still a significant part of the voting population? We can't just assume they'll all become hip techno-libertarian atheists/extropians just because they managed to live long enough. My guess is that they'd have a strong attachment to the values and way of life they grew up with - thus creating potentially bitter conflicts among the different cohorts which might make contemporary domestic politics seem downright friendly.

So while its cool to imagine living indefinitely - it seems to be in many ways healthier for society to have a continuous "purge", to constantly start fresh with new minds that have less baggage from the past.

Also on a personal note - if society in 2,000 years is radically transformed into something I find really bewildering and bizarre - do I really want to be around for that? Of course I would gamely try and adapt, but it might be better for everyone to just leave that future world for people who grew up with it and who find it natural.

Still, I am not any kind of Luddite - if life extension and mind uploading etc. is perfected I won't oppose it - I'll just have a lot of misgivings as will a lot of other people.

Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" has some good exploration of the nature of "Future Shock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War

Actually, now that I think about it, if this whole scenario actually happens the best thing might be to maintain separate societies for people born in different time periods, which can communicate and interact but which operate relatively independently.(e.g. Being gay might be illegal in the 1000 CE society but being straight could be illegal in the 3000 CE area!) That might be the only way to keep some relative peace.