This entire argument is predicated on the false assumption that you know what being young and healthy for 200 years will be like. We don't. We don't know if old people are "stuck in their ways" because it is an intrinsic part of being old, or if it is because their brain is becoming physically less flexible, and subsequently they rationalize the ways they first learned.
It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either; society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the casual assumption of the truth is unjustified.
Having 120-year-old youth will be a genuinely new phenomenon, and nobody knows what that means. Preventing such technologies from being used or developed (or even arguing against it) based on such terrible arguments would be a terrible thing to do.
It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either; society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the casual assumption of the truth is unjustified.
With a 200 year lifespan, we would have people trying to enforce cultural norms from 180 years ago. In 1829, women couldn't vote, slavery was common, imperialism was considered good foreign policy, it was common sense that women and blacks were incapable of complex tasks or higher level reasoning, and forcible relocation of American Indians was being practiced. Meanwhile, the steam engine was considered pretty hot shit.
To ask someone who grew up in that era to accept the son of an African immigrant as president, gay marriage, streaming pornography, the fall of the European empires, globalization, and software startups as facts of life is absurd. Likewise, if we lived long enough to build the world of 2189, it would have the same petty biases and taboos that we have today.
It's important sometimes for generations to forget bygone eras and move on.
Because they are increasingly outnumbered by younger people. The social norm changes, probably faster than they're comfortable with, but with or without them as they die out. Black people go from slaves to sharecroppers in a generation, but it takes over a century for any of them to become millionaires, CEO's, and presidents. Women have progressed even slower.
My grandparents are all dead, but I suspect that few of them would be pleased with the prospect of a black president. Even my parents would be less than pleased to learn that I was bisexual.
Your grandparents may be more open minded than mine, and that is a credit to them. But for every one of them there's ten old people who don't keep up as well.
I think there are a lot more people nowadays that are open to new and changing possibilities than there were in 'bygone eras.'
{edit} Just to add, I think this is because newer generations are growing up in a world where things are increasingly in flux; whereas older generations grew up in much more stagnant times (with respect to social and technological progress). {/edit}
Everyone thinks they're open-minded about change, because they only see a relatively small amount of social change in their lives. I wish we could revisit this discussion when we get old though, because I suspect many of our ideas and taboos will seem silly and be routinely flouted by future generations.
Maybe the 'general population' but I, personally, am accepting of a great many things. But I guess if we went into reverse social change I would have a hard time living in a society with slavery reinstated... But in general, I'm disappointed with the lack of social changes in many aspects of society today.
I didn't mean to imply that you weren't. I think there are people living today who would get along fine living in the year 2189. But even a progressive in today's society usually wants a specific set of changes that are orthogonal or even opposed to changes that may come in the future. The comeback of polygamy (now billed as "polyamory") in some circles would have come as a shock to the generations that abolished polygamy.
Since we don't know what being "young" and healthy for 200 years is like, the assumption isn't false. I'd prefer to call it unverified.
I never said that it's bad to be stuck in your ways: what I said (or tried to say) was that not being stuck in your ways makes it easier for you to come up with novel solutions to problems.
Having a certain amount of momentum in society is definately a good thing, but having too much of it means that society will respond too slowly to a changing environment. In my opinion, our current momentum doesn't make us too volatile. That's just my opinion, though, but that might just be a reflection of me being fairly young.
"In my opinion, our current momentum doesn't make us too volatile. That's just my opinion, though, but that might just be a reflection of me being fairly young."
I'm only 30 myself, which definitely moves me out of the flush of 18-24 but hardly qualifies me as an old fart. I sometimes think that going a bit slower could be helpful to society, but the truth is that we don't have forever to dilly-dally where we are. If we're going to win the sustainability race with the high-technology solution [1], we need to get there before the resources run out.
It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either; society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the casual assumption of the truth is unjustified.
Having 120-year-old youth will be a genuinely new phenomenon, and nobody knows what that means. Preventing such technologies from being used or developed (or even arguing against it) based on such terrible arguments would be a terrible thing to do.