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We don't need to solve aging, we just need to automate enough work that good living standards can be maintained despite a shrinking and aging population. Like does it really matter if the seniors at a nursing home get their food cooked by a sweaty 16 year old vs a (possibly even higher and more consistent quality) automated cooking machine? Does it really matter if the medical treatment and analysis they get is done by (possibly even higher and more consistent quality) machines and not extensive human labor?
Not really.
In many sectors "build another machine" is already far more efficient than throwing another human laborer in (to the point some run lights out/near lights out), so birthrates and youth stop mattering for them as much. As we automate more and more, this will become increasingly true of the general economy.
That would be nice but I'll believe it when I see it.
I cleverly used examples that we already have (at least to some degree).
Automated food production? Already the case for many steps and products, both at the farms themselves, and in preparing/packaging/etc. Combine this with self driving trucks (self driving cars are already looking better than humans like with Waymo, probably not too long for the trucking industry to start getting more automated) and even stuff like drone deliveries from store to house, and maybe in 20-30 years there will barely be any humans involved in getting food from the fields to your home. Heck, you might not even be a part of that process, COVID has made grocery deliveries really cheap and I use them from time to time and that's with human drivers still not the drones yet.
Medical care? Ok sure a lot of it will remain human, patients will want a human doctor to talk to and a human nurse to look after them but automation is already here and getting better. In all sorts of ways even. Like I got a sleep study recently and all the devices they put on me could read my pulse, detect my breathing, etc without a human monitor. And an auto generated report from what I can tell! Yes a human was there to set it up and look over it, and an expert looked the results and the report but it was mostly technology.
Heck technology even makes a lot of things possible that wouldn't be before. Consider the sleep study again and how they had constant monitoring of my pulse and breathing and oxygen levels. A human doctor, even if they taped their end of a stethoscope to me and listened all night long wouldn't be able to record with nearly as much accuracy as the machine can.
Now of course, automation still has a long way to go. But given the miracles we have already achieved and the amazing standards of living we already get from it, I don't think we should be so doubtful.
Heck one of the only reasons why automation hasn't already solved the crisis is that our living standards keep ratcheting up to match the increase in productivity. Like we're at the point where internet is being considered a basic human right despite most not even having it ~30-40 years ago. Imagine going back to the 1980s and telling people the Internet will be considered a human right. Many would be like "whats the internet?". That's how much we've ratcheted.
You realise of course that even with these inventions we're falling further behind, as does the derivative and in some places even the second order derivative.
The scale of the improvements are not commensurate with the worsening dependency ratios.
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True. I have more faith in the Chinese having the will and the ingenuity to actually accomplish this but the current meta in the West is awash with so much inefficiency and stupidity that it cannot last without alterations.
I'm sure a better scalable approach to eldercare exists but the current trajectory seems ill equipped to arrive there
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