A panel session titled "What If You Are Still Alive in 2100?" was held at the World Economic Forum's 2016 meeting last week. I point this out as an indicator of the degree to which the idea of treating aging to greatly extend healthy life spans is percolating into the broader mainstream, with ever more people recognizing both the great opportunity for individuals, as well as the fact that existing institutions of entitlement and wealth transfer fall apart when people live in good health for decades longer than is presently the case. In effect those systems have already failed, are already terrible, fragile, and unethical, and already represent considerable economic risk, but those involved have few incentives to take anything but the most damaging path of ignoring the problem:

It's clear the idea of pushing people out of work at 60 is already behind the times. If we're working longer, we're going to need to keep on learning. So economists think there'll be a shift among people at an older age from a notion of leisure to a notion of recreation. In an elongated life, there will be new life stages. The idea of leisure, work, and retirement will be turned on its head. Individuals will take their own individual paths and have the capacity to transform themselves. The UK government predicts that a child born today will live to 85. That's "obviously ridiculous" but there's a clear reason why governments are sticking to these kinds of estimates, rather than extending life expectancy forecasts to nearer 100. "The reason why they are doing that is that all our pension schemes would go under water and would look more and more like a Ponzi scheme." Corporations and individuals need to realize employees need to work into their 70s and mid-70s - and they'll have to save.