One of the most disruptive consequences of disruptive healthcare innovation is increased longevity, the extension of the human life span to 100 or more years. We're thinking about dedicating the third day of the Health IC Summit in January to the impact and opportunities of Life Extension. I've been spending a lot of time this month trying to separate the real applications from the wide-eyed fanaticisms. One of the best things I've heard is a 2 hour seminar by Ken Dychtwald, the pioneering author of Age Wave and other studies of the aging of America and the world.
Sponsored last December by the brilliant Long Now Foundation that thinks in terms of the next 10,000 years, The Consequences of Human Life Extension is a brilliant and wide-ranging discourse on the social, political and commercial implications of longer life. Dychtwald is a great speaker, a platinum performer on the corporate conference circuit, and in this talk he riffs on big questions about the quality, purpose, cost and intergenerational equity of longer life. One of his key points ponders the prevalence of Alzheimers Disease:
The dementia rate among the 85-and-over population in the world right now is 47% ... So now, we come up with a breakthrough so that nobody has heart disease. Fabulous. Except you're going to create 20 million demented people.
Start listening after the un-miked Q&A warmup, about 13 minutes after the introduction by host Stewart Brand. Long Now posts both Ogg Vorbis Format and conventional MP3 Format.
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