dmocsny@UCENG.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) (03/22/89)
Recent discussion has considered the dangers inherent in a population of aging minds: that such a culture might lose its vitality, its flexibility, its power to innovate. I believe this fear is an example of "linear thinking," i.e., predicting the outcome of technological advance by attempting to narrowly insert it into our present reality, instead of considering its wider implications. Young children are well-known to have language-learning abilities far superior to those of adults. Young-adult scientists are said to be generally more creative and innovative than than their older peers (though notable and important exceptions exist). If a person's propensity to learn is inversely proportional to the amount of knowledge they already have, then a society of immortals would probably be doomed. On the other hand, if the propensity to learn has a biochemical basis, and this basis has nothing to do with the amount of past learning, then a society of immortals could escape fossilization by discovering how to foster the propensity to learn. My hunch is that the mental rigidity we associate with aging is not a result of accumulating knowledge. Rather, I think it may be the result of some kind of cellular damage due to aging, similar to the cellular damage that causes loss of function in other organs. For example, when I was a child I could have learned to speak several languages much more easily than I can now. My loss of language-learning ability can't have much to do with how well I speak (american) english. Cultural factors may also motivate people to learn only as much as necessary. The general technological advance will change these. For example, our extremely low level of automation forces an enormous division of labor in our economy. People must spend several years developing highly specialized skills, and then they often monotonously apply these skills for the rest of their careers. The short-term payoff for learning something new is usually less than the short-term payoff for continuing to exercise an old skill. As we transfer more of our specialized skills to computers and robots, human learning ability will become more valuable. We must also consider the possibility of automating (or greatly facilitating) the processes of learning and discovery. If a society of immortals could manage this (and I don't see that as being much harder than the problem of realizing immortality), then that society would probably never fossilize. Face it, today learning is often a real pain. We simply have not had either the means or the will to make recorded human knowledge transparently available to everyone. What's worse, much human knowledge (i.e., skills) is not recorded at all, but only available to people who can find an expert to train them. If learning becomes easy and fun, people will be happy to do it for its entertainment value alone. Dan Mocsny dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu