I head incubation projects for a social good incubator run by Steve Levitt at UChicago. I also publish the Engineering Innovation Newsletter on Substack.
If I could make wishes come true, I’d be president of MIT or run the NSF. But my tier 2 dream would be to help run a large academic lab or applied R&D lab one day.
https://freaktakes.substack.com/s/engineering-innovation
I wonder if another way to think about a piece of this problem is “how do we expand one’s scientific/creative productivity peak.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I want to live 200 years as much as anybody here. So I want us to push for that also!
But it also does seem like a majority of our most progress-inducing ideas are not just coming from a severe minority of people, but happening in a severely limited age range of those people’s lives. Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, etc. all have been known to be susceptible to this problem.
So, I could imagine a world where we extend lifespans without really expanding this productivity peak at all. And, there could be some good in that. But I’d also be quite interested if a piece of longevity focused on expanding our productivity peak. Under certain assumptions, I could see that doing just as much or more good for progress even if our life expectancy stayed fixed.
Thoughts?