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At the beginning of 2017 I made some predictions. These were not predictions just for the coming year, but rather predictions for the next 100 years. A list of black swans that I thought either would or would not come to pass. (War? Yes. AI Singularity? No.) Two years later I haven’t been wrong or right yet about any of them, but that’s what I expected, they are black swans after all. But I still feel the need, on the occasion of the new year, to comment on the future, which means that in the absence of anything new to say about my 100 year predictions, I’ve had to turn to more specific predictions. Which is what I did last year. And like everyone else (myself included) you’re probably wondering how I did.
I started off by predicting: All of my long-standing predictions continue to hold up, with some getting a little more likely and some a little less, but none in serious danger.
After doing my annual review of them (something I would recommend, particularly if you weren’t around when I initially made those predictions) this continues to be true. As one example, I predicted that immortality would never be achieved. My impression has always been that transhumanists considered this one of the easier goals to accomplish, and yet we’ve actually been going the opposite direction for several years, with life expectancy falling year after year, including the most recent numbers.
As I was writing this, the news about GPT-2s ability to play chess came out. Which, I’ll have to admit, does appear to be a major step towards falsifying my long term prediction that we will never have a general AI that can do everything a human can do, but I still think we’ve got a long way to go, farther than most people think.
I went on to predict: Populism will be the dominant force in the West for the foreseeable future. Globalism is on the decline if not effectively dead already.
I will confess that I’m not entirely sure why I limited it to “the West”. Surely this was and is true. The historic general election win by the Tories to finally push Brexit through, the not quite dead Yellow Vests Movement in France and the popularity of Sanders, Warren and Trump in the run up to the election are all examples of this. But it’s really outside of the West where populism made itself felt in 2019. One example of that, of course, are the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, as well as protests in such diverse places as Columbia, Sudan and Iran. But it’s the protests in Chile and India that I want to focus on.
The fascinating thing about the Chilean protests is that Chile was one of the wealthiest countries in South America, and seemed to be doing great, at least from a globalist perspective. But then, because of a 4% rate increase in public transportation fees in the capital of Santiago, mass protests broke out, encompassing over a million people and involving demands for a new constitution. I used the term “globalist perspective” just now, which felt kind of clunky, but it also gets at what I mean. From the perspective of the free flow of capital and metrics like GDP and trade, Chile was doing great. Beyond that Chile was ranked 28th out of 162 countries on the freedom index, so it had good institutions as well. But for some reason, even with all that, there was another level on which it’s citizens felt things were going horribly. It’s an interesting question to consider if things are actually going horribly, or if the modern world has created unrealistic expectations, but neither is particularly encouraging, and of the two, unrealistic expectations may be worse.
Turning to India, I ended last year’s post by quoting from Tyler Cowen, “Hindu nationalism [is] on the rise, [but] India seems to be evolving intellectually in a multiplicity of directions, few of them familiar to most Americans.” I think he was correct, but also “Hindu nationalism” is a very close cousin, or even a sibling to Hindu populism, and, as is so often the case, an increase in one kind of populism has led to increases in other sorts of populism. In India’s case to increased expressions of Muslim populism. Which has resulted in huge rallies taking place in the major cities over the last few weeks in protest of an immigration law.
Speaking more generally, my sense is that these populist uprisings come in waves. There was the Arab Spring. (Apparently Chile is part of the Latin America Spring.) There was the whole wave of governments changing immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, which included Tiananmen Square. (Which unfortunately did not result in a change of government.) In 1968 there were worldwide protests and if you want to go really far back there were the revolutions of 1848. It seems clear that we’re currently seeing another wave. (Are they coming more frequently?) And the big question is whether or not this wave has crested yet. My prediction is that it hasn’t, that 2020 will see a spreading and intensification of such protests.
My next prediction concerned the fight against global warming, and I predicted: Carbon taxes are going to be difficult to implement, and will not see widespread adoption.
Like many of my predictions this is more long term, but still accurate. To the best of my knowledge while there was lots of sturm und drang about climate change, mostly involving Greta Thunberg, I don’t recall major climate change related policies being implemented by any government, and certainly not by the US and China, the two biggest emitters. Of course, looking back this prediction once again relates back to populism, in particular the Yellow Vest Movement, who demanded that the government not go ahead with the scheduled 2019 increase to the carbon tax, which is in fact exactly what happened. Also Alberta repealed its carbon tax in 2019. On further reflection, this particular prediction seems too specific to be something I add to the list of things I continue to track, but it does seem largely correct.
From there I went on to predict: Social media will continue to change politics rapidly and in unforeseen ways.
When people talk about the protests mentioned above social media always comes into play. And in fact it’s difficult to imagine that the Hong Kong protests could have lasted as long as they have without the presence of social platforms like Telegram and the like. And it’s difficult to imagine how the Chilean protests could have formed so quickly and over something which otherwise seems so minor in the absence of social media.
But of course the true test will be the 2020 election. And this is where I continue to maintain that we can’t yet predict how social media will impact things. I would be surprised if some of the avenues for abuse which existed in 2016 hadn’t been closed down, but I would be equally surprised if new avenues of abuse don’t open up.
My next prediction was perhaps my most specific: There will be a US recession before the next election. It will make things worse.
Despite its specificity, I could have done better. What I was getting at is that a softening economy will be a factor in the next election. This might take the form of a formal recession (that is negative GDP growth for two successive quarters) or it might be a more general loss of consumer confidence without being a formal recession. In particular I could see a recession starting before the election, but not having the time to wrack up the full two quarters of negative growth before the election actually takes place.
In any event I stand by this prediction, though I continue to be surprised by the growth of the economy. As you may have heard the US is currently in the longest economic expansion in history. And if I’m wrong, and the economy continues to grow up through the election, then I’ll make a further prediction, Trump will be re-elected. The Economist agrees with me, in their capsule review of the coming year:
Having survived the impeachment process, Donald Trump will be re-elected president if the American economy remains strong and the opposition Democrats nominate a candidate who is perceived to be too far to the left. The economy is, however, weakening, and a slump of some kind in 2020 is all but certain, lengthening Mr Trump’s odds.
As long as we’re on the subject of the economy, I came across something else that was very alarming the other day.
Waves of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. In emerging and developing countries, there have been four major debt waves since 1970. The first three waves ended in financial crises—the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asia financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the global financial crisis of 2007-2009.
A fourth wave of debt began in 2010 and debt has reached $55 trillion in 2018, making it the largest, broadest and fastest growing of the four. While debt financing can help meet urgent development needs such as basic infrastructure, much of the current debt wave is taking riskier forms. Low-income countries are increasingly borrowing from creditors outside the traditional Paris Club lenders, notably from China. Some of these lenders impose non-disclosure clauses and collateral requirements that obscure the scale and nature of debt loads. There are concerns that governments are not as effective as they need to be in investing the loans in physical and human capital. In fact, in many developing countries, public investment has been falling even as debt burdens rise.
That’s from a World Bank Report. Make of it what you will, but the current conditions certainly sounds like previous conditions which ended in crisis and catastrophe, and if the report is to be believed conditions are much worse now than on the previous three occasions. I understand that if it does happen there’s some chance it won’t affect the US, but given how interconnected the world economy is, that doesn’t seem particularly likely. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I should mention that one of my long term predictions is that: The US government’s debt will eventually be the source of a gigantic global meltdown. And while the debt mentioned in the report is mostly in countries outside of the US, it is in the same ballpark.
Moving on, my next prediction was: Authoritarianism is on the rise elsewhere, particularly in Russia and China.
I would think that the Hong Kong protests are definitive proof of rising authoritarianism in China or at least continuing authoritarianism. But on top of that 2019 saw an increase in the repression of the Uyghurs, most notably their internment in re-education camps, and this in spite of the greater visibility and condemnation these camps have collected. But what about Russia? Here things seem to have been quieter than I expected, and I will admit that I was too pessimistic when it came to Russia. Though they are still plenty authoritarian, and it will be interesting to see what happens as it gets closer to the end of Putin’s term in 2024.
Those two countries aside, I actually argued that authoritarianism is on the rise generally, and this seems to be confirmed by Freedom House, which said that in 2018 that freedom declined in 68 countries while only increasing in 50, and that this continues 13 consecutive years of decline. You did read that correctly, I gave the numbers for 2018, because those are the most recent numbers available, but I’m predicting that when the 2019 numbers come in, that they’ll also show a net decline in freedom.
My final specific prediction from last year was: The jockeying for regional power in the Middle East will intensify.
Well, if this didn’t happen in 2019 (and I think it did) then it certainly happened in 2020 when the US killed Qasem Soleimani. Though to be fair, while the killing definitely checks the “intensify” box, it’s not quite as good at checking the “regional power” box. Though any move that knocks Iran down a peg has to be good news for at least one of the other powers in the region, which creates a strong suspicion that the US’s increasing aggressiveness towards Iran might be on behalf of one or more of those other powers.
Still, it was the US who did it, and it’s really in that context that it’s the most interesting. What does the Soleimani killing say about ongoing American hegemony? First, it’s hard, but not impossible to imagine any president other than Trump ordering the strike. (Apparently the Pentagon was “stunned” when he chose that option.) Second and more speculatively, I would argue this illustrates that, while the ability of the US military to project force wherever it wants is still alive and well, such force projection is going to become increasingly complicated and precarious.
At this point it’s tempting to go on a tangent and discuss the wisdom or foolishness of killing Soleimani, though I don’t know that it’s really clearly one or the other. He was clearly a bad guy, and the type of warfare he specialized in was particularly loathsome. That said does killing any one person, regardless of how important, really do much to slow things down?
Perhaps the biggest argument for it being foolish would have to be the precedent it sets. Adding the option of using drones to surgically kill foreign leaders you don’t like, seems both dangerous and destabilizing, but is it also inevitable? Probably, though I am sympathetic to the idea that Trump set the precedent and opened the gates earlier than Clinton (or any of a hundred other presidential candidates you might imagine.)
That covers all of my previous predictions to one degree or another, along with adding a few more and now you probably want some new predictions. In particular, everyone wants to know who’s going to win the 2020 presidential election, so I guess I’ll start with that. To begin with I’m predicting that the Democrats are going to end up having a brokered convention. Okay, not actually, but I really hope it happens, I have long thought that it would be the most interesting thing that could happen for a political junkie like me. But it hasn’t happened since 1952, and since then both parties have put a lot of things in place to keep them from happening, because brokered conventions look bad for the party. That said, some of these things, like superdelegates, have been recently been weakened. Also Democrats allocate delegates proportionally rather than winner take all like the Republicans. Finally, it does seem that recently we’ve been getting closer. Certainly there was talk of it when Obama secured the nomination in 2008, and then again in 2016 when they were trying to figure out how to stop Trump.. So fingers crossed for 2020.
If it’s not going to be a brokered convention, then the candidate will have to come out of the primaries, which may be even harder to predict than who would emerge from a convention fight. Which is to say I honestly have no idea who’s going to end up as the Democratic candidate. Which makes it difficult to predict the winner in November. Since I basically agree with The Economist quote above, there is a real danger of Trump winning if they nominate Sanders or Warren. I know the last election felt chaotic, but I think 2020 will be more chaotic by a significant margin.
All that said, gun to my head, I think Biden will squeak into being the Democratic nominee and then beat Trump when the economy softens just before the election. And I hope that this will bring a measure of calm to the country, but also I have serious doubts about Biden (my favorite recent description of him is confused old man) and I know that a lot of people really think he’s going to collapse during the election and hand it to Trump. Which, if you’re one of the Democrats voting in the primary, would be a bad thing.
A lot hinges on whether Bloomberg is going to make a dent in the race. I kind of like Bloomberg. I think technocrats are overrated in general, but given the alternative, a competent technocrat could be very refreshing, and I can see why he entered the race. With Biden’s many gaffes there does seem to be a definite dearth of candidates in that category. Unfortunately, despite dropping a truly staggering amount of money he’s still polling fifth. In any case, there’s a lot of moving parts, and any number of things can happen, still, on top of my prediction that Biden will squeak in as the Democratic nominee, I’m predicting that even if he doesn’t a Democrat will win the 2020 election. But I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
In summary, I’m predicting:
- Everything I predicted in 2017.
- A continuation of my predictions from last year with some pivots:
- More populism, less globalism. Specifically that protests will get worse in 2020.
- No significant reduction in global CO2 emissions (a drop of greater than 5%)
- Social media will continue to have an unpredictable effect on politics, but the effect will be negative.
- That the US economy will soften enough to cause Trump to lose.
- That the newest wave of debt accumulation will cause enormous problems (at least as bad as the other three waves) by the end of the decade.
- Authoritarianism will continue to increase and liberal democracy will continue its retreat.
- The Middle East will get worse.
- Biden will squeak into the Democractic nomination.
- The Democrats will win in 2020.
As long as we’re talking about the election and conditions this time next year, I should interject a quick tangent. I was out to lunch with a friend of mine the other day and he predicted that Trump will lose the election, but that in between the election and the inauguration Russia will convince North Korea to use one of their nukes to create a high altitude EMP which will take out most of the electronics in the US, resulting in a nationwide descent into chaos. This will allow Trump to declare martial law, suspending the results of the election and the inauguration of the new president. And then, to cap it all off, Trump will use the crisis as an excuse to invite in Russian troops as peacekeepers. After hearing this I offered him 1000-1 odds that this specific scenario would not happen. He decided to put down $10, so at this point next year, I’ll either be $10 richer, or I’ll have to scrounge up the equivalent of $10,000 in gold while dealing with the collapse of America and a very weird real-life version of Red Dawn.
I will say though, as someone with a passion for catastrophe, I give his prediction for 2020 full marks for effort. It is certainly far and away the most vivid scenario for the 2020 election that I have heard. And, speaking of vivid catastrophes. With my new focus on eschatology, one imagines that I should make some eschatological predictions as well. But of course I can’t. And that’s kind of the whole point. If I was able to predict massive catastrophes in advance then presumably lots of people could do it, and some of those people would be in a position to stop those catastrophes. Meaning that true catastrophes are only what can’t be predicted, or what can’t be stopped even if someone could predict them. That may in fact be fundamental to the definition of eschatology no matter how you slice it, going all the way back to the New Testament:
Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.
This injunction applies not only to the Son of Man but also to giant asteroids, terrorist nukes and even the election of Donald Trump, and it’s going to be the subject of my next post.
I have one final prediction, that my monthly patreon donations will be higher at the end of 2020 than at the start. I know what you’re thinking, why that snarky, arrogant… In fact saying it makes you not want to donate, but then everyone has to feel the same way, which ends up being a large coordination problem. On the other hand it just takes one person to make the prediction true, and that person could be you!
On increasing rates of debt: I’ve always had a bias toward looking at debt and thinking of the risk of collapse in the face of default as you did above. And while I think this is always a concern – a concern that increases proportional to debt level increases – there are other sequalae that emerge from increased indebtedness that track directly with levels of debt.
For example, I’m reminded of Tomas Piketty’s insight that the basis of capitalism is accumulation of capital, and that the returns to capital are greater than the returns to labor. This is exactly what we’d expect of course (otherwise why make capital investments?) but it has some specific implications about rising indebtedness. On the individual level, the more people go into debt the more they transfer capital owned by individuals to banks (or more particularly to the individuals who benefit from banking accumulation of wealth). At the level of government debt, the same idea applies, where governments transfer capital to banks and those who benefit from them.
The end result of all this is rising inequality, which increases political will to ‘do something’ about it – usually through additional transfers. In short, debt concentrates capital – the engine of growth – which in turn increases structural inequality as debts persist for years. The more people and governments transfer their underlying capital away from themselves, the more they’ll become frustrated about their inability to make any progress.
This is, of course, the fundamental observation behind Marxism, except that most Marxists tend to focus more on the idea that capitalists directly concentrate wealth, than that debt works to concentrate capital.
Could it be both? Could debt have slow, but ever-accumulating negative effect which gradually undermines things but doesn’t every explode spectacularly (or when it does people blame something farther down stream). But then less frequently and possibly even, on net, less damaging, the occasional spectacular meltdown?
I think it does both. There’s a long run systemic risk and a short/mid run cost to social cohesion. I think both are directly proportional to how much debt is out there relative to assets. I’m just observing that the seldom-realized risk often gets more attention – especially from the right – than the structural costs associated with higher levels of debt. If/when the risk is realized that’s probably all we’ll talk about. But there’s no reason to focus only on hypotheticals.
“On the individual level, the more people go into debt the more they transfer capital owned by individuals to banks (or more particularly to the individuals who benefit from banking accumulation of wealth).”
Not really. Standard accounting has the balance sheet built on the formula Assets = Liabilities + Equity. Added debt, by definition, equals greater capital since anything that increases liabilities also adds to assets. Debt here does not transfer capital to the bank. In fact it is the opposite. By lending a business money, you protect yourself at the expense of the upside. The guy who loaned Bill Gates $1000 to help start Microsoft gets nothing but his $1000 back. If he had given him $1K in exchange for 5%, on the other hand, well he’d be a billionaire.
Ahhh but you say consumers are borrowing money too. Well yes but they are also saving. Consumer debt (which includes home, car and student loans as well as the old credit card) is about $14T. But retirement assets are about $28T. It’s a wash out (granted the people with big 401K balances are not the exact same people with big credit card and student loan balances, but that’s the cycle of life).
“My impression has always been that transhumanists considered this one of the easier goals to accomplish, and yet we’ve actually been going the opposite direction for several years, with life expectancy falling year after year, including the most recent numbers.”
I’m thinking here you’re a bit too comfortable with this prediction. You are confusing achieving immortality with the distribution of immortality. Two different things. We achieve flight a long time ago, yet most humans have never flown in an airplane.
With immortality I would not look at average lifespans but the outliers. Supercentenarians (those that push past 110 yrs old), specifically. Per http://www.grg.org/SC/SCChartsGraphs.html, there are about 180 such people who were born in 1903. Go back a quarter century to 1878 and there were barely 40. The trend is going up and you have to consider someone born in 1903 spent until 1942 or so before penicillin started being used as a treatment. Maybe a half century before the smallpox vaccine was common, TB, etc. Heck even seatbealts and people figuring out that smoking was risky rather than healthy. In other words, a lot of people who probably should have become supercentenarians were killed off by those easily solved causes of death.
WIkipedia:
“Research on the morbidity of supercentenarians has found that they remain free of major age-related diseases (e.g., stroke, cardiovascular disease, dementia, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes) until the very end of life when they die of exhaustion of organ reserve, which is the ability to return organ function to homeostasis.[12] About 10% of supercentenarians survive until the last 3 months of life without major age-related diseases, as compared to only 4% of semisupercentenarians and 3% of centenarians”
So here’s the issue. Basically your 50’s and 60’s are the point where you are likely to be offed by those major diseases above (cancer, stroke, cardio etc.). Even assuming we make no more progress there, we have a huge boatload of people who are going to start arriving at 110+ from all the public health advances that happened from after 1903. We also have the huge surge of population that went from somewhere around 1.6B back in 1903 to about 7B today. Expect to see the 110+ crowd swell from dozens to hundreds to thousands to probably millions even absent any sci-fi health breakthrough.
“Organ reserve exhaustion” appears to be poorly understood. Does everyone get it or almost everyone? We don’t really know since dozens of supercentenarians isn’t much of a population. Start getting millions, though, and we’ll find out if even 1 in a million don’t get ‘reserve exhaustion’. And at that point it will start to be possible to do research on treatments to hold off exhaustion or prevent it.
So your bet is kind of a simple video game with an escalating boss bet. You’re assuming as we get past the ’60’s level’ and hen the ‘110 level’ the ‘boss diseases’ just keep getting harder and harder. Yet that may simply not be the case. It isn’t with much else. We started using planes more and more and today there are millions of flights yet large planes almost never crash. Doesn’t seem like that with cars. You may remember Rachel Veitch who had a 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente still running good after 576,000 miles. It only stopped running when she couldn’t drive anymore and she didn’t have to hire smarter and smarter mechanics, she just had regular mechanics maintain it and fix parts as needed.
You’re essentially betting that a semi-type of functional immortality where we live a few centuries is impossible. Yet it seems like that bet is a bit risky. If living a few centuries is possible, I think then all bets are off on functional biological immorality. By that I mean something like the Mercury Comet Caliente. Of course most of the ones made in 1964 are no longer with us. If you drove it off a cliff or let it catch on fire or simply had bad luck, you might not have held on to yours like Rachel did, but barring that the car could essentially go forever. Now of course you have things like the sun exploding, protons decaying, so we aren’t talking a religious type of immortality here.
So like flight, I suspect you are overestimating how safe your prediction on immortality is by using life expectancy stats. The number of people who fly in a given year may go down due to the economy but planes are still better today than they were in the past. It’s possible extreme lifespan can increase even if average lifespan goes down due to things like addiction and suicide. It is also possible there is a psychological barrier to immortality, after a few hundred years life simply becomes too boring for people to follow whatever rules they need to follow to keep going. But no evidence is there any such barrier exists.
I’d say his bet is a safe one within his lifetime. You’re right to focus on lifespan, but lifespan hasn’t increased in the last hundred years in any meaningful way. As you noted, we’ve dramatically increased our sample size (world population) and still haven’t seen the average age of people 2+ STDev from the mean going up. In other words, if the people predicting immortality through longevity were right we’d expect to see outliers getting to their 130’s and 140’s by now. Yet that’s not what we observe. Lifespan isn’t increasing.
It’s possible you’re right and we’ll find a way to achieve greater lifespans sometime in the future, but the evidence does not support the conclusion that we’re making any progress in that dimension right now. Maybe that’s because we’re focusing on heart disease, diabetes, and cancer right now more than exhaustion. Maybe in the future we’ll start doing that research and make some headway on it. But as of now we are not doing this, and there are no serious programs to start doing it with anything more than some fringe research efforts.
Therefore I’d consider the prediction against immortality to be built on a firm foundation of, “we see no evidence this is already happening” and “we’re not even really working on it that much”. Maybe it will start happening 70+ years from now, but if we have to wait longer than our own lifespans for it to happen I don’t see how this is functionally different from being an accurate prediction against the hype.
The oldest person ever confirmed was 122 yrs. She was born 1875 and died in 1997. Not that far from the 130-140 you say would indicate increasing lifespan.
Problem here is how do you know human lifespan? You take a lot of humans and see how old the oldest get. But have conditions stayed the same? Has living from 1900-1950 been the same as living 1950-2000? If some people born in 1950 are going to make it to 140, we won’t be able to confirm that until 2090. Right now we are looking at lifespan of people born in 1900. Back in 1900:
1. World population was much smaller than it is now.
2. The portion of people living in decent conditions was very tiny.
3. People were being killed by things that we’ve long since resolved.
Let’s just look at 1950 vs 2000. In 1950 a lot of people were living in India and China, where things were horrible plus on top of that people were getting killed by ‘own goals’ like the Cultural Revolution and the riots after India divided. In 2000 you have many, many more people and many of them are living closer to a middle class lifestyle and both nations are less likely to do ‘own goals’ like inducing a massive famine.
Recall the last Christopher Nolan Batman movie where they had that prison that was inside a deep hole somewhere in the Middle East. Every few weeks someone would try climbing out and would have to make that last long jump that was just too far and they would fall back down. You may conclude that the prison was constructed with the last step being outside the ‘jump span’ of humans. But suppose the prison’s population swelled so instead of one guy every week there was 10 guys trying every week. Suppose the prison was managed better so instead of guys getting killed in riots and gang fights, they instead were around to try the jump so now there’s 100 guys trying each week. Throwing so many at that wall, you may very well find some who make the jump. What happens after that is unknown.
Until recently we’ve only had a few dozen making the jump attempt in any given year. Now we have hundreds and it will go easily into hundreds of thousands at least. The moment you have thousands making the attempt, you’re really going to test the assumption that the lifespan is 130. But that is assuming no attempt is made to get past 130 by innovation. When you start having thousands and millions of people hitting 110+, you can do real controlled studies of different treatments to try to provide a boost.
As for his bet being safe within his own lifetime, I have to object to that. He was free to have predicted something like “Immortality will not be accomplished witihin my lifetime”. This would have been an easier challenge but still he would have gone against some of the more aggressive transhumanist types predicting a singularity type event in the next decade or two. He choose the more difficult prediction of ‘never’. It’s on him then to play the harder game. If he dies of old age in 2060 and in 2061 they invent the immortality pill, his prediction failed.
My claim is that he won’t be proved wrong within his own lifetime, not that his claim is an ultimate truth. I don’t personally believe increased lifespan is impossible, but I don’t disagree with RR on the direction (or lack thereof) in his prediction. Yes, he could have picked wording with less certainty baked into it, and I personally wouldn’t use that kind of language, but the observation that lifespan is not increasing is sound. The argument that there is no time horizon on which current trends can be used to predict increasing lifespan is ALSO sound. You could equivocate that you would like to make a NEW prediction that it should start increasing in the future based not on evidence but on a projection of hoped-for trends in the future – which seems like what you’re doing – which would square with your contention that you think he will be proved wrong some day in the future. Meanwhile, his assessment that his prediction is still on track in 2020 is accurate. If he dies in 2060 and there has still been no progress against increasing human lifespans he can at least die knowing his prediction was accurate to that degree. Again, I wouldn’t make an absolute prediction of that nature, but since I’m not a machine I’ll grant him some wiggle room that his strong claim is supported by the data to date, with no evidence that’s changing in the future.
I would not count your arguments as a win for the expectation of increasing life expectancy, since they seem to point the opposite direction. First, there’s the idea that increased population numbers should allow us to see increasing numbers of outliers. Without resorting to Batman analogies, we can just reference that in a normally distributed population of elderly people, we expect a certain percent of them to live 2+ standard deviations older than the mean. With more people, we will see more older-living people. Except we don’t see that. There are accounts that people lived into the late 110’s long before the 1900’s (not talking about the Bible here, obviously, but well-documented accounts). If the best we can boast is a woman who might have lived 5 years longer than the previous best record of an old person back when population size was at least an order of magnitude lower than today, then statistically speaking that’s the same as no progress. Worse, if population is growing over that time – which has been true even if we count people from the global population data based on their birth year cohort and not their year of death – we should see more outliers (and more extreme outliers) just from the larger sample size alone even if the population isn’t changing. So the comparison doesn’t help you there either because you’re still looking at a larger population and the only ‘increase’ you see is exactly what you’d expect from a larger sample size of the same population, possibly not as large an increase as you might have expected indicating lifespan is either constant or slightly falling. (If I have a million people and the tallest is 7’6″, versus a billion people of whom the tallest is 7’7″ that’s not evidence the second population is naturally taller from a statistical distribution standpoint.) If the early 120’s is the oldest we can currently live according to the data that’s not encouraging for the thesis that lifespan is increasing. Statistically speaking there is no evidence for the claim that we have already observed lifespan increase.
Worse, since we now have fewer people dying under the age of 5 and fewer people dying from polio and smallpox, we have more people living long enough to compete in the old age competition for longest lifespan. So a greater proportion of today’s population is living past 60 than in the past. So it’s misleading to take bare world population numbers from the past, we should take world population numbers and compare how often people over some old-age threshold (i.e. didn’t die young) even make it past 100, and there again I don’t think the data are encouraging. If we stop people from dying young, why aren’t we seeing more and larger outliers? We’re actually far behind where we should be!
Indeed, where would this hypothetical increased lifespan come from? If it’s just “throw enough people at the problem and you’ll eventually get someone 5 STDev from the mean” that’s not the same as increasing lifespan. That’s natural variation and better record keeping than the ancients – and we still fail by that measure. Maybe if we increase population to 700 billion, or a trillion? Except population growth rates are slowing. Besides, that doesn’t appear to be what people who are hypothesizing increased lifespans mean. They’re not looking for a statistical artifact within an unchanged population, but a real difference in outcomes – even if it only goes to those wealthy enough to afford it.
It’s one thing to say we’ve conquered most deadly pathogens and infant mortality, both of which improve life expectancy. But those are improvements that stop you from dying early of random one-off events, not improvements that allow you to overcome chronic conditions that will kill you tomorrow if they don’t kill you today. What’s our track record against chronic disease? It’s worse than nothing, it’s declining. Compared to the 1950’s we’re seeing increases in all chronic diseases, and not by a little bit. And we don’t have a history of curing these diseases, we just develop more treatment options that help people live with them. Statins aren’t a substitute for a healthy heart, and even an artificial pancreas isn’t a substitute for having functional islet cells in your actual pancreas. If you want to measure heath care and nutrition against their ability to decrease incidental mortality over the past 100 years you find significant improvements that should be celebrated – that ARE celebrated. But the logical leap from there to predicting increased lifespan is an error of equating two ideas that are not the same. If you want to judge nutrition and health care against chronic diseases that accelerate mortality we’re going the wrong direction, away from helping people live past 90 years old.
That means we can expect a greater percentage of people to make it to 60, but a smaller percentage of people to make it to 100 if current trends continue. That explains why, despite a growing population, we still haven’t seen anyone live to 130 years old yet – and that’s a low bar to set if you’re looking at immortality.
I’m not sure why you think we are missing outliers here. The number of people older than 110+ has been growing exponentially. What I think you missed is the starting point. If you are talking about someone who is, say, 117 yrs old, today you are talking about someone born in 1903.
The exponential growth seen so far is reflecting the advances of maybe 1800-1900. Frankly if you had to be born into a year with a given knowledge of medicine, 1900 would probably not be your first bet. If you had to grow to full adult hood and approach the end of middle age, the period 1900-1950 would probably not be your first choice if all you could base it on was medical care. Yet the 110+ ers came from that cohort and they are growing exponentially. The cohort on its way has never been seen in human history. We frankly have no idea what the post 110+ age is like for a population of millions. It may very well be the case that there are ‘islands of stability’ in age that basically say something like if you make it to, say, 130, your chance of death falls a lot.
So we haven’t really seen what is natural yet and we haven’t even begun to change nature. Most of our efforts to date have concentrated around repair of injury, treating infection and going after the class of illnesses that beset us from say 50-70. Those that hit the 100+ mark are simply allowed to go as curiosities. When you start getting large populations in that age range, real research can be done both observational and interventional.
My point therefore is simply we haven’t the slightest idea what human lifespan is if by that you simply mean some type of engineering max age the human body can hold out too.
There’s no empirical evidence to support the hypothesis of islands of stability in old age. Quite the opposite, we see people die at an expected distribution given the absolute numbers at play.
Also, there’s no difference at old age between preserving lives of babies or young people who would have died of polio and just having more babies, such that the number of people you throw at old age increases. That’s not the same as extending human lifespan through medical science. That’s just the law of large numbers on a population.
So, again, there’s NO MECHANISM by which you can plausibly hypothesize extended lifespans. We have a good handle on current human lifespan. You’re seeing something in the data that isn’t there.
Current world record for running a mile is 3 minutes, 43.13 seconds. There are thousands, probably, who try to run a mile in a seriously short period of time every year. There are two possible outcomes here. Either the time will continue to fall or an ultimate barrier will be hit and you’ll see more and more people hitting that barrier (say 2 minutes 59 seconds) without beating it. The behavior of a ‘hard cap’ would be like that.
We have a problem with statements about age that we don’t have with running a mile. You can sample thousands of people running a mile on any given day. There is no way to sample people living to 100+ years born after 1920 because those people aren’t there yet.
Our progression on running records would be seriously hampered if only a few dozen people were allowed to attempt it each year. That has been human history until now. Until we see the sample, nothing can be said but a ‘hard cap’ is, I think, unsupported by the evidence for age that it wouldn’t be for running. At the end of the day the human body is never going to run a mile in zero seconds so somewhere between zero and 3 min 43 seconds there is likely a hard cap created by the biological engineering of our bodies. Any hard cap due to age, though, is just pure speculation and cannot be derived from engineering.
One thing we do know is to find the max. in human performance you need huge sample sizes. Scouts know to find the best athletes you ideally need thousands of schools pushing kids into the sport. (See the Jon Hamm movie Million Dollar Arm, for example). On top of that, you also need a huge sample size of athletes trying to achieve the performance. The US has NFL football but India doesn’t have an NFL level football team. But are not the 11 most built men in all of India not good enough to form even a low level NFL team? You need to filter thru millions of people AND have large numbers of those people training. Hence the NFL worries a lot about its future as more and more parents pull their kids away from football.
What will happen then when millions of people hit the 100+ mark AND there’s serious efforts at extending life at that age level? I say quite literally all bets are off.
I think our disagreement stems from the last part of your last sentence, “AND there’s serious efforts at extending life at that age level”. I agree that if and when that happens all bets are off.
As of today, you’re not relying on actual improvements in getting people to the 100+ mark, but the law of large numbers to get you there. That’s not equivalent to medical science having succeeded at extending human lifespan to date, just at keeping a larger number of total humans from dying before age 40 and hoping their distribution matches historical trends. If we colonize a million worlds and swell human population to 100 quadrillion we might find some cohort capable of living to 150+ years old. And I’m sure if that happens we’ll do the genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, microbiomics, etc. to understand how they got there, and how to get other people beyond that point.
Until we START doing something about extending human lifespans, the current paradigm of medical science is better characterized as trying to keep people from dying younger than the current lifespan, as opposed to pushing the current lifespan boundary. Maybe there are some people at the fringe interested in the hypothetical concept that we might be able to push lifespan out a few years, but from where I sit that effort doesn’t have the kind of funding or commitment that would instill confidence we’ll make progress in the offing. At the very least, it’s not a hypothesis that has been remotely tested.
Most people who support it are non-biologists who do so from a vague idea that life expectancy improved in the 20th century and they extend the line on the graph. They misunderstand that pre-1900’s life expectancy was a bimodally distributed graph heavily weighted at <5yo and the elderly; people didn't actually die that often at age 35, just because life expectancy was near that range. But neonatal survival, while a wonderful achievement, is not a well we can visit again; and it's not an improvement in lifespan – by which we mean humans capable of living longer, not keeping them from dying young.
Projecting extended lifespans requires us to make two hypotheses, neither of which has been remotely tested: 1. that future research will make significant progress against extending lifespan, and 2. that future researchers will care enough to seriously focus on the problem. You're projecting that in the next few years lots of people who didn't die of polio/war/neonatal disease will start entering the 100+ crowd and we'll see a big push toward researching them as more than just a small cohort. I'm skeptical that this will pan out as projected. Especially if they remain the same percentage of the population, they'll likely retain the same level of concern – or lack thereof. And even if it did get big-time funding, aging is such a complex phenomenon that we can expect it to take at least as much work to make progress against as cancer, heart disease, or any of the other chronic diseases of a clearly more narrow scope.
We currently have more than enough diseases to occupy us, including conditions that affect many millions of people and whose incidence is increasing. Helping centenarians live an extra ten years is low on the priority list, and there's practically no money in it anyway. If you're saying, "yes, but one day it will be prioritized!" based on some vague idea that as we cure cancer, autoimmunity, metabolic disease, heart disease, etc., we'll free up resources to focus on immortality (and new conditions won't take their place) … let's just say I won't hold out for this happening within my lifespan.
“As of today, you’re not relying on actual improvements in getting people to the 100+ mark, but the law of large numbers to get you there.”
You’re forgetting that’s already done. If you are 100 today you lived thru all the improvements that happened since 1920. If you are 100 in 2070 then you lived thru only improvements that happened since 1970. A serious amount of stuff happened between 1920 and 1970 to ‘get people to 100’.
“Until we START doing something about extending human lifespans, the current paradigm of medical science is better characterized as trying to keep people from dying younger than the current lifespan, as opposed to pushing the current lifespan boundary.”
Well by ‘younger’ you’re talking about 50-70 or so right now. A lot of research is going into things that are besetting people in that bracket and there’s probably overlap with the 110+ crowd. Flu shots, avoiding heart failure, even treating cancer all are probably helping the 110+ crowd as a side effect of helping the under 80 crowd. So is even other mundane things like ergonomic improvements that keep older people from falling and breaking bones as easily.
I think most of your thinking about current lifespan is just speculative at this point. Until we start seeing thousands of people over 100, we aren’t going to know much of anything about them. Here the data is not cumulative. You can say for the past 1000 years there’s been about 40 people or so over 110+, but that’s not the same as having 40,000 people alive at once over 110+. This would work for animals but not humans because, except for some advances in veterinary science targetting a few animal species we favor like dogs, there’s been no substantive change in accumulated lifetime experience. For humans there has been and it is all bunched up in the recent past
Not to keep a thread that was on life support going beyond its time, but it occurred to me our discussion of the Aztecs with 95% fatality caused mostly by disease and the violence of the Spanish conquest illustrates my argument here in a way that’s a bit more simple.
Let’s say medicine pre-1950 we call bad. 1950-1975 is ok. 1975-2000 is good and 2000-2025 is very good.
What have we seen about people over 110? Have we had a big enough sample to know that maybe what you say is lifespan doesn’t apply to 100% but 95% or even 99%? You might say yes because for every given year there’s been about 40 or so people in that bucket, so slowly over a few centuries that’s been thousands of people….a pretty good sample to see if there’s some trait that applies to just 5% or even 1%.
However that’s not what we have. We’ve had huge numbers of people hit 110 with bad medicine and then live with bad medicine after 110. Today, we have some people who hit 110 with 50 years of bad medicine, 25 ok, 25 good and 25 very good. We have never seen a sample of people who get 100 years of good or very good medicine. There are babies born today who will see 2150 and assuming present trends hold not just 40 babies but probably millions. We are about to throw a huge sample size against the lifespan hypothesis.
I understand what you’re saying, but I think you’re only looking at one side of the equation. Even if we grant that, “medicine pre-1950 we call bad. 1950-1975 is ok. 1975-2000 is good and 2000-2025 is very good.” Health when measured by things like heart disease, diabetes and similar has gone in the opposite direction. Yes, it will be interesting to see what age someone who has spent their entire time in the very good medicine era lives to, but it will also be interesting to see what age someone who has spent their entire life in time in the obesity era lives to, and as it turns out they’re the same people.
True but there are Olympic athletes in this ‘obesity era’. The initial question, I think, on immortality will not be will everyone get it but will anyone get it. Some health problems are on the rise but the fact remains the hundreds of thousands that will likely be living past 110 whereas before no more than a school bus or two of people could do it indicates a dramatic improvement in general public health and medicine. 110+ yr olds are a bit like fossils in that their bodies are preserving ages of medical innovation that seem so far past that it is easy to assume we already reaped all the benefits possible.
Penicillin was widely available around, say, 1945. It will not be until 2055 that the crop of 110+’s will all have grown up in a penicillin world. The crop today still had much of their youth without it! It’s being generous to say that we realized smoking was a major problem and started to curb around 1970 (and of course there was still plenty of smoking and 2nd hand smoke post 1970 so I’m being generous). 2080 is when you’d finally see a crop of 110 yr olds who were fully grown up in a semi- ‘post smoking’ environment.