The Singularity of Aging

A recent Time magazine cover story told us that technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that the human mind which drives its discovery may be superfluous by 2045. Curiously, around the same time, people will be looking forward to the longest life expectancy of any generation. The number of people 65 and older is expected to more than double worldwide to about 1.5 billion by 2050 from 523 million last year, according to estimates by the United Nations.

More people will be living longer with technology essentially doing all of the work. That can’t be good. Techno-futurists see the moment when superhuman intelligence can take over as “The Singularity,” a term they took from astrophysics that refers to the point at which the rules of ordinary physics no longer apply, Time explains.

‘The Singularity” has taken on a life of its own and become a movement of thinkers at the outer edge of the many ramifications of that moment when artificial intelligence collides with human intelligence. Singularitarians, as they are called, are, for example, seriously looking at the biology of growing old as a problem that has positive solutions. They see the human body as a machine that can be repaired periodically, much like a vintage car. Clearly, advances in everything from heart transplants to more efficient artificial body parts suggest that they may be right.

Meanwhile, marketers and the people who make stuff right now are waking up to the inescapable reality that the population of the world is already aging at a rapid rate, raising hither to for ignored questions about how to appeal to this well-heeled market.

New interest in what older people want and need has led researchers to simulate the physiology of aging so that people who want to capture the billions of dollars controlled by the elderly can experience what it feels like to be old. The experiments conducted at MIT’s AgeLab, which have gotten wide publicity of late in print and on TV, put people in the shoes of the aged so they can know the physical restrictions of growing old.

The AgeLab reportedly hooks up hip young marketing types, who want to experience the pain, to a jumpsuit of pulleys and restraints that restrict movement and function the way the aging process might.

A better idea, it would seem, is to hire older people to recount how they feel; what they like and don’t like. If the marketers are concerned about the validity of the findings, there are already machines that do that so that they don’t have to wait for “The Singularity” to determine what aging is all about.

And That’s That…