Societies and companies will have to adapt to 150-year-old lives – 05/17/2023 – Rodrigo Tavares

When I was born, in the late 1970s, the average life expectancy in my country, Portugal, was 71 years. Whoever is born today in the same city and in the same hospital will live, on average, 84 years. Advances in medicine and improved nutrition have added pieces of life, postponing predestined death. At this rate, when I celebrate my 84th birthday, the life expectancy of anyone born on that day will be 109 years.

We are used to looking at population aging as a problem. It affects the economy both on the expenditure side, with the increase in pensions and public health costs, and on the revenue side, due to the slowdown in the future supply of labor, contributing to a decrease in productivity and economic growth. In Brazil, 18% of elderly people said they had been discriminated against or mistreated. They are stigmatized as vulnerable or dependent. Ageism –discrimination against the elderly– is a reality.

One of the arguments used by the American Amy Pope, 49 years old, against her opponent in the elections to head the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which took place this week, was that the Portuguese António Vitorino, at the inexcusable 66 years old, already carried the plague of old age. It lacks “energy”, she claimed.

But the rise in average life expectancy could take a hit in the next decade. Perhaps growth is no longer proportional, gradual, silent. Technological advances will allow medicine to shift from being centered on healing to preventing disease and prolonging human life. Anyone born today could live to be 150 or 200 years old, startling the social and governing structures designed since the Enlightenment, for more ephemeral life expectancies.

Countless studies, such as these specialized interviews published in Nature, indicate that doctors will become, mainly, validators of the solutions proposed by artificial intelligence, generated by the collection and analysis of a large volume of global data and following algorithms defined by specialists.

Each individual will also have their health constantly examined through “wearables” (clothes, watches, bracelets, glasses), which detect anomalies before they are felt by the patient, automatically calling doctors and prescribing solutions.

But there is much more: 3D organ printing, personalized diagnostics and medicines, gene editing (CRISPR), epigenetic reprogramming, use of senolytics, robotic assisted surgery, regenerative medicine. We will manage to reprogram the genetic, molecular and cellular mechanisms that make age the dominant risk factor for certain diseases and degenerative conditions.

In the capital market, investment funds have taken advantage of these opportunities. Not to invest in nursing homes or tools to improve the quality of life of sedentary seniors. But to contribute capital to startups with solutions to prolong life. The Bold Longevity Growth fund, to be launched next month in the US, predicts that the longevity technology market could reach $1 trillion over the next decade.

If technology also reaches the poorest sections of the population, the longevity of society as a whole could shake economic foundations and social norms. Instead of having three or four generations simultaneously in the workforce, we will now have five or six, stimulating the need for constant training. Instead of a child growing up with the presence of parents and grandparents, they will live, until adulthood, with their great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, generating new models of emotional security and individual and collective identity.

Universities have been the engines of this transformation, with departments like Harvard’s Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology operating as interfaces between medicine, engineering and biology. Other centers, such as the Stanford Center on Longevity, are opening doors to study the consequences and opportunities of a long-lived society.

We will have to stop looking at an aging population as a lament, as if creases in the forehead and sagging skin are a slip to death. Or as a loss: of independence, mobility, quality of life. Or energy, as the American candidate said.

Advances in geroscience –the science that studies biological aging– will make it possible to bring the elderly back into economic, corporate and political decisions. Companies will be able to enjoy, for the first time, the interaction between the entrepreneurial drive of the youngest and the wisdom and emotional intelligence of the elderly. The extension of life will mean that people can live non-linear lives, with multiple careers and interests, alternating between paid and unpaid periods. There will be more time for a person to recover from disadvantages and setbacks. Longevity could become an opportunity, with all the breadth that this vague term provides.

One of the next steps will be to update the legal framework for a person to be considered elderly. Sixty years in Brazil. Sixty-five years in most countries, including the USA, since 1935, and in Portugal, since 1944. These 65 years are, as you can see, an anachronistic number. The average age of Brazilian deputies, those who can change the legal framework, is 49 years old. A century ago they were elderly. Today they are adults. In the future they will be teenagers.

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