Some day, I think medical science will effectively cure aging. We'll replace or rejuvinate worn out parts, regulate our genes, cure diseases. Human lifespans are on an upward slope, and the dawning age of genetics promises to steepen it.
So what would you do differently if you expected to live to 200 or 2,000 years old? Does it make sense to retire at 30 and hope for a few hundred years of leisure time after that? Would you continue working, just for the challenge and opportunity to be part of something? Would you seek additional income, so as to be able to increase your future spending? Is it even possible to have a SWR that applies over centuries of changing economic forces? Would we even still recognize the idea of corporate profitability in a post-scarcity world, where robots help us meet every human need and no one lives in poverty? (And if not, does this suggest that today's paper wealth is entirely predicated on the continued existence of the impoverished?)
I suspect that I would be LESS likely to seek early retirement, if I thought I had hundreds of years of life left. Part of the motivation to leave the rat race comes from that awareness of our own mortality, that thought that we have a limited amount of time left, coupled with a desire to enjoy it on own terms, rather than punching someone else's clock.
Without the certainty of short human lifespans, does the notion of retirement even make sense anymore? If your body and mind don't wear out, what's the reason for retirement? Can we have a world full of billions of unemployed people living off of their invested assets, not contributing to society's forward progress, not innovating or discovering or building? What happens if these "retired" folks are still doing those things in their free time, but not for money, because AI/robots have provided us with such abundance that "money" is kind of an arbitrary and outdated concept? Does the pace of progress slow, if we're only advancing humanity as a collective retirement hobby? What about the people who just want to watch tv forever?
We're all very focused on capital markets here. We invest our money in financial instruments like stocks and bonds, but these are all relatively recent inventions in the history of human economies. It wouldn't surprise me if 1000 years from now future investors considered fractional representative ownership of public companies to be kind of quaint, the way we think of a castle's treasure vault as a less-than-ideal way to store wealth. Even real estate isn't a long term safe bet, as it has historically been taken away or given away at various points in time. So how do you invest for a 1000 year plus time horizon?
