https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/the-futurist-who-predicted-the-iphone-and-internet-now-claims-that-immortality-could-be-reached-in-5-years-time Safeguarding Humanity Tue, 25 Mar 2025 02:57:17 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/the-futurist-who-predicted-the-iphone-and-internet-now-claims-that-immortality-could-be-reached-in-5-years-time#comment-523856 Tue, 25 Mar 2025 02:57:17 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/the-futurist-who-predicted-the-iphone-and-internet-now-claims-that-immortality-could-be-reached-in-5-years-time#comment-523856 Should this prediction come true, society itself as we know it will be shattered. One of the first casualties is likely to be the retirement system. After all, if people can live for hundreds or thousands of years, it would be unsustainable to pay pensions for centuries or millennia (heck, Social Security and its equivalents in other countries, municipal and corporate pensions already are close to collapsing) so we would probably expect people to be earning their keep for all those centuries. All this is unless we get a post-scarcity system soon after. But then again, post-scarcity should it become possible is a new can of worms. Freed from the necessity to earn a living, humans might lose purpose in life (we see this among those on disability and other forms of welfare, as well as people on trust funds, they rarely have a sense of purpose and are certainly not using all that extra time for things like creating art), people might also lose a sense of morality (after all, morality is partially predicated on a healthy work ethic) as those lucky enough to not have to earn their keep tend to be the most entitled people on the planet.

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