Apologies to Mr Kurzweil, but I think the reality on the ground is that the cost of research into keeping an aging population alive is a raised risk of Armageddon. The political tendencies in older age demographics is bad, the politicians surviving so many decades after a first to leadership position is bad, the billionaires living long enough to find whacky ideas or even directly manipulate politics instead of gifting money to charities is catastrophic, etc.
It has always been true throughout history in every country that political engagement skews heavily toward the old and the rich. I don’t know how to fix it, but thankfully Kurzweil is a hack and was wrong about most things and deserves no apologies; life expectancy might have increased a little since 2001 but human longevity isn’t really budging at all, so there is very little increased risk of a geriatric Armageddon.
I have special beef with Kurzweil’s life expectancy BS because he misrepresents facts in his essays. His famous “Law of Accelerating Returns” essay has an incredible number of misleading plots and conflated arguments, but the life expectancy graph at the bottom is a pure lie, and Kurzweil knows it. It conflates life expectancy with longevity, and it left out data from before 1840 and from between 1940 and 2000 that he already had. If you include that known data and explain what longevity is, it ruins his plot and his argument, but he wanted to pretend there’s a trend that doesn’t exist so he intentionally left it out. https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-acceleratin...
It's popular to talk about unintended consequences, and site the most egregious, but everything has unintended consequences on top of its intended consequences. The world without all of the billionaire attempts to make a good legacy for themselves would in fact include a lot less interesting things.
Actually I believe a not small part of what's happening now is boomer politicians who have been in power too long realizing their time is coming to an end one way or another, and they are refusing to give it up to the younger generations. Trump and Putin in particular have every reason to be as unreasonable as possible if they believe either way there is no future for them if they stop.
These people should not expect to be alive in 10 years so if a trick for getting a few more months at the top means their country is nuked in 10-30 years, whatever.
