Assume for a moment that radical life extension has become possible. That instead of living a piddling 80 years you will live 2000 years. What will happen?
I will draw on my own life and the nonlinearities that appear after living sufficiently long. With the nonlinear effects of experience we gain intuition and skills that border on magic. Talent is one thing. Directly talent is another.
Comparatively speaking I feel that today relatively speaking to when I was 20 years old I can now think my way through brick walls. Now extend that principle to imagine yourself with an age of 1000 years with the body of a 30 year old. Having lived sufficient time imagine how many questions will have been put to rest in your mind. Your mind can now quickly weed through byzantine life choices by simply excluding the implausible combinations due to the experience that tells you when impracticalities arise. Anything ranging from lovers questions to corporate decision making. ( not that I think corporations will exist in the same form under this analysis )
Because of the accumulated risk of high risk individuals the law of large numbers will weed out the violent. The length of life will mandate whole new regimes of living due to the repetition that will eventually occur and prompt individuals to develop new forms. Living will at last be a full on art form.
Now imagine a population where only the few born recently would have youthful ignorance. The rest will run under the new regime of these principles.
I fully expect life extension to occur. There is absolutely too much money to be made in it.
But wait. This is just the beginning. Radical intelligence enhancement will enhance our minds by factors of 10,000 according to Ray Kurzeil. I tend to believe that sooner or later his prediction surely will be born out in reality.
Intelligence augmentation by such a large factor will surely carry a huge nonlinearity of its own.
I think the only way to put it in words to express how we would in our current condition understand is “gods”. We will be gods. Not of the Abraham type but of the Greek type. Not Zeus but more like Mercury with special powers. Of course once we are in such amplified states we won’t think we are gods. Same as now we’ll understand we have limitations. But in terms of our current language…..we will be gods.
