Official Actuarial Projections Trending Upward
Long term projections of life span continue to trend upward as the actuaries revise their opinions on biotechnology - but I believe they still fail to account for potential revolutionary advances in medicine that lie ahead. The level of uncertainty at least is fairly well grasped now within the actuarial industry, but for various political reasons it is only slowly seeping into official projections: "In the first official projection of its kind, the Department for Work and Pensions today forecasts that almost a fifth of Britons will celebrate their 100th birthday. Of the 17 per cent of the population who will become centenarians, about three million are under the age of 16, and 5.5 million are aged between 16 and 50. In total, about half a million people a year will be celebrating their 100th birthday by 2066, compared with about 10,000 now. Nearly 8,000 of them will reach their 110th birthday. ... Predicting the rate of increase of life expectancy used to be much easier because the rate of increase did not vary much. But some areas of biotechnology are increasingly driven by the same kinds of advances that make computer power increase so rapidly. ... It is difficult to look down the road 20 years and guess every way that biological manipulations will speed up by orders of magnitude or which treatments will become very easy as a consequence. But it seems reasonable to expect that in the 21st century we will experience a revolution in biotechnology in par with the revolution in computer technology that began in the middle of the 20th century and continues to this day." Retirement as an institution will radically change, and those countries that practice the iniquity of forcing people out of work at a certain age will also have to change.