Millennials as the Forever Generation

Epistemic status: Obviously speculative, but interesting.

Sometime in the next few decades it seems likely that we will have the singularity. If all goes well and we ssuccessfully create aligned AI systems, humanity will continue to exist but in an entirely new phase. This will likely include the vindication of much of the early transhumanist visions such as anti-aging and mind-uploading. Undoubtedly there will be many changes but one thing I want to highlight is that we will likely quite rapidly successfully solve aging and thus transition to a world of negligible (human) senescence and indefinite life extension (ILE). Biological humans might still be able to die, but they will stop aging. Making the unrealistic assumption of a world much like today, but where huamns do not age, demographics will still profoundly shift. The mortality distribution will change from being super-exponential Gompertz curve to a slow exponential curve of natural causes with the average human lifespan likely lasting for at least several thousand years until one has some kind of fatal accident or disease¹. Of course, in a true post-singularity world final death will become even rarer because of the ability to back up multiple copies of your mind-state in various secure locations around the solar system and ultimately the universe which will make actual irreversible death almost impossible for a very long time indeed.

For a long while this seemed like the distant future, but with rapid advancements in AI, it seems likely that we will see all of this unfold very quickly probably within the next 1-4 decades. For instance, when I was a teenager before the recent AI progress I used to be very worried about whether we would successfully solve ageing in my lifetime. Progress there seemed extremely slow (and indeed it still is extremely slow!²). I used to think about concepts like longevity escape velocity. Now, I no longer think about this overmuch becuase it is so obvious that we will reach the singularity before the natural lifespans of myself and most of those around me. Although anti-aging progress seems slow now it will probably be quickly solved once AGI and the singularity is here and, once solved, will be rapidly diffused across the population.

Successful anti-aging will mean that humanity enters an interesting new phase of existence, one where generations accrete rather than replace. This will change many dynamics that we otherwise take for granted and means that the ‘first’ generations – which are probably going to be millenials or generation X could have an eternally ‘locked in’ outsized role in the future ³. In some sense we are cosmically lucky to be a member of one of these generations.

Much has been said of the Boomer generation as having outsized influence, power, and longevity where politics, the arts, and even our cultural conception of time is deeply rooted in the bomer phenomenology. This was also true of prior enerations such as the WWI generation until the 50s. My prediction is that counter to the current doomsaying around millennials, we will end up remembered as the cosmic and eternal boomers where millennials will be the ones astride all the commanding positions of power, influence, and wealth when we reach AGI, the singularity, and anti-aging and then, unlike the boomers, millennials will largely never retire, never pass on their wealth, and never give up their positions of cultural prominence.

My current, very rough, timelines are something like 5-15 years for AGI and then 10-20 years after that for widely rolled out and accessible ILE for currently existing humans ⁴, accompanied of course with a large amount of other classic transhumanist technology. In the conservative case this is a 35 year lag time from today to ILE. Assuming an average life-expectancy of 80 then somebody age 45 today has a pretty good chance of reaching ILE and somebody age 35 has a very good chance. Age 45 (birth date 1980) pretty much demarcates the millennial generation from gen X.

Clearly this cut off won’t be exact as many people live significantly longer than 80 (and women tend to live longer than men) and others will live a lot shorter. There are likely also to be significant errors in my timelines but from this reasoning it seems quite possible that significant fractions of currently existing millennials will live through the singularity and beyond to reach ILE while larger proportions of earlier generations will fail to make the cut. In effect, the millennials stand a good chance of becoming the first major generation to pass from the mortal presingularity world to an immortal post-singularity existence. This means that today’s millennials stand a good chance of becoming some of the oldest minds in the human-derived lightcone.

In effect, millennials will become the first ‘forever generation’.

The shift from a world of mortal generations replacing one another to a world of immortals accreting on top of one another will change some fundamental dynamics of human history. Obviously, the invention of AGI and the resulting singularity will also change many more fundamental dynamics beyond just biological immortality for existing humans but, just for fun, we can try to trace out some of the consequences of moving to an immortal accretive society in a somewhat ‘business as usual’ scenario where we still e.g. have a capitalist-style economy comprised of many cognitively limited agents like we have today.

Obviously, this description also assumes that human agency still remains somewhat important in the economy and that we have recognizable things like societies made up of individual agents instead of e.g. wrapper-minds that are waging genocidal paperclip wars against one another, or that we just all submit to the utopia of the aligned singleton, or that we all mind-merge into some collective gestalt societal mind or various other increasingly weird possibilities. The aggregate probability of these weird possibilities vastly exceed the ‘business continues mostly as usual with a normal capitalist human society continuing to exist except with anti-aging’ that I describe above. Even so, it’s interesting to speculate about the obvious effects of anti-aging in an ‘all things held equal’ world.

Perhaps the first and most obvious is that longer lifespans privilege longer time horizons of actions. Today, people (rationally) have a high discount rate for many actions. Money today is better than money tomorrow, for tomorrow you may be dead⁵. Similarly, people need investments in e.g. education or in children to pay off within the relatively few decades that comprise the working lifespan. Immortality lifts all these constraints and allows time horizons to become very long indeed. This will result in people making much deeper and longer lasting (including potentially riskier) investments than can make sense today. It also means that increasing shares of resources will go towards agents with the longest time horizons and which optimize for far-future utility rather than today’s utility. The fact that greater time horizons will tend to win out will ultimately create societies with elites with exceptionally long time-horizons indeed. Perhaps this will be wiser, in a sense, but things will certainly likely be more conservative and more carefully controlled.

Even for specific individuals, this also likely means increasingly large shares of resources going towards savings, since today savers have a short time horizon of utility of perhaps 50-60 years ⁶, in the future this could become thousands or millions of years. In the long run, economically, this will result in a glut of savings which will lower the equilibrium interest rate to something very low and result in all asset prices being very high, driving effective returns to near zero. In the short run of the early singularity with the massive capital investments needed to e.g. build dyson spheres, things may be very different.

Related to this is that compound interest will go from being the least powerful force in the universe to one of the most powerful. Today compound interest is powerful intra-lifetime for those who tend to act with long time-horizons but relatively weak between lifetimes because many resources which are actively accumulated and compounded by some specific individual are dissipated through a combination of taxes and the shorter time horizons or worse decision-making of the inheritors which almost always regresses to the mean. This does not always happen of course, and a large enough fortune can prevent it for many generations, but empirically fortunes do not continually grow due to compound interest but tend to be diminished and dispersed over time. This will stop ocuring with immortality since the original accumulators will stay around and continue accumnulating indefinitely so control of their resources will never pass to less qualified descendants and be squandered. This will mean that power and resources over time will increasingly pass to the best compounders of the early generations and will become increasingly concentrated there, all things equal. In a rapidly growing singularity economy, however, this effect could well be dwarfed by much higher growth rates of the economy compared to the interest rate – i.e. in the reverse of picketty, we could have g » r for a long period.

Improved financial technology also encourages greater concentration and accumulation of wealth. If you read past biographies of e.g. 18th and 19th century industrialists, a very common theme is for family wealth to be destroyed a series of bad investments in the newly created industrial sector and the early days of financial tchnology where all investments were high risk, it was impossible to index, and there were strong adverse selection effects⁷. Today, financial instruments have matured substantially and ‘bad investments’ which zero out the initial capital are fairly easy to avoid in aggregate. For instance, indexing is an extremely safe ‘fire and forget’ strategy which at minimum will cause capital to grow roughly with the rate of general economic growth with little risks except extreme tail risk (This is one of the core insights of modern portfolio theory which was only invented in the 50s and only became practical for the average person in the 80s) Such a strategy can enable wealth to be maintained across long and increasing time horizons compared to the early days of finance with little effort or judgement required. This will further entrench the advantages of incumbents.

As time goes on in a world of increasingly aged beings, we should expect greater and greater rigidity to set in. Individual minds will be able to accumulate resources and control over thousand or million year timescales which will push asset prices in specific locations to incredible highs and also mean that ‘younger’ agents will require exceptionally long times to ‘catch up’, which, again, is not the worst in a world with essentially immortal agents. Like we might expect a world where anybody over a thousand is effectively a billionaire compared to an ever growing population of much younger agents but then working and compounding for a few thousand years until that is corrected is relatively normal, just an extended version of today where older people are considerably richer and younger people spend much of their time accumulating assets whhile working to prop up house and stock prices, which are held primarily by the old, through their consumption and economic activity. The transition from this world to this new equilibrium will be an incredible boon for anybody who has acquired assets of any sort prior to widespread anti-aging, which will, again, be primarily the first forever generation.

The world will change much more slowly as there will be little turnover of people at the top of institutions. The primary mechanism of change will not be that institutions themselves change but that slowly existing institutions become irrelevant and diminished vs new ones which are built from scratch and are created to fill new niches. While in some industries (such as tech) this happens relatively quickly, but still over the course of decades, in the case of other institutions such as governments, universities, and this can take centuries.

At a personal, or mind-specific, level, adaptability and ability for self-renewal will become the paramount traits as well as very long horizon action and coherence. Even if it might be changing slower, the world will still be changing dramatically every generation and those older will have to be able to maintain the cognitive flexibility to adapt to and thrive with these changes. Today this rarely happens, even though the old often have the most capital and the most experience and connections to capitalize upon, their cognitive flexibility and high opportunity and switching costs prevent them from taking advantage of new opportunities, ceding them to the young. The fact of innate cognitive flexibility diminishing with age would, presumably, be solved by anti-aging technology, however the opportunity costs would stay real as would the challenge of unlearning old experiences and patterns of success when the fundamentals underlying them changed. Minds that are able to successfully navigate these trade-offs will become increasingly powerful over time. Over the longest time horizons adaptability is everything.

At the same time there is a necessary balance to make between understanding the eternal fundamentals and the contingent, and correctly distinguishing which is which. It is unclear to what extent this is an inherent cognitive trait vs part of the actual underlying hardware (or a bit of both) but certainly we would need to become minds which can both remember and recall extremely long experiences as necessary while maintaining a core of flexibility and plasticity which can underpin continued learning and growth. Related to this is the necessity to be able to sustain indefinite periods of curiosity and generation of novelty. It is unclear if humans minds can do this naturally even without the declining fluid intelligence caused by neuronal aging. Empirically it seems that some do and some don’t, and that this is deeply related to intellectual curiosity and a level of cognitive flexibility which seems mostly innaate. If there is some process by which minds naturally gain rigidity and lose plasticity as they learn more, then that will become a fundamental problem and bottleneck and those agents which can avoid this will have strong long term advantages, even potentially while being under a short term disadvantage. Similar to economic compounding, mental compounding might be a thing with very similar effects.