[Author’s note: the following was researched with the help of various LLMs, but the content was written by me.]
When I retired in October 2022, my wife and I put considerable thought and planning into guessing our life expectancy, and therefore our estate, investments, and finances to ensure that we could afford to live comfortably for our remaining years.
All of that planning occurred in 2021 and 2022, as I approached my retirement date.
But shortly after I retired, OpenAI launched ChatGPT 3.5, and then in early 2023, ChatGPT 4.0.
Since then, A.I. and its many LLMs, iterations, apps, platforms, systems, tools, and mind-bending new technologies have rapidly appeared on the scene. The impact of A.I. is now the number one challenge facing human civilization, more than climate change, war, nuclear threats, pandemics, wealth inequality, political divisions and upheaval, and social injustice — because A.I. will have a direct impact on all those aspects of our humanity, and many others.
For better or worse, and often for both, A.I. is the universal technology that will touch or dramatically alter forever everything we know.
This directly affects me and all other retirees — and anyone planning retirement, no matter your stage in life. Two major factors have me now rethinking all my assumptions about the rest of my days.
- Profound advances in health care and medical science possible with A.I. throw all my life expectancy assumptions out the window.
- Significant changes and risks to our financial systems and institutions, caused by A.I., have me deeply concerned about my assets and estate.
Let me unpack each of those.
Starting with medical science and aging, here are some of the advances that will likely add 10, 15, or more years to my life and retirement plan:
- More and better tools for personal health management, including extensive personalization for diet, medication, health assessment, interventions for serious health problems, and much more intelligent, customized health management.
- Intelligent medical assistance, knowledge, and tools for professionals in all specialties.
- New drugs and new treatments.The developments here are happening rapidly.
- More effective interventions in emergent situations.
- Better patient and personal tracking, analysis, and biometrics to avoid emergencies and customize treatments, lifestyle, etc.
- Integration and analysis of massive quantities of data across large populations to identify treatment opportunities and further extend life expectancy. This allows extraction of insights, trends, causes, and correlations never before possible.
- Better laboratory tools to understand disease structures, causes, and cures.
- Potential reduction or elimination of harmful environmental and lifestyle factors, like toxins, stress, fat, sugar, etc.
- Better education for individual health management.
- Genetic analysis to identify potential health risks and even genetic modifications that bring us into the realm of science fiction, with its associated gnarly moral issues.
- Entirely new technologies like senolytics and longevity medicine.
- Dramatic new age-reversal technologies and methods, especially from the billionaires developing A.I. For example, cryo-technology, cyborgs, cellular and genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.
On that subject of the billionaires, consider what will matter to them, where they’ll invest their fortunes, how they’ll apply the best technologies from their companies, teams, and top research.
Could there be a higher priority for them, after the profit motive? And is the primary objective of their profit motive to live longer?
As A.I. advances and becomes far more intelligent than we are, these are the financial risks and opportunities that we’ll face in the near future:
- Powerful new investment and money management tools that significantly increase returns on investments.
- A complex and dramatic mix of upheavals, displacements, and gains with jobs, the job market, skills, compensation, and productivity.
- Total redfinition of the concepts and traditional models of value, needs, solutions, and the entire capitalist system of creating value and experiencing needs.
- Profound redistribution of wealth, the creation of new billionaires, and the resulting affects our social fabric.
- The potential for complex and highly disruptive financial and monetary instruments that humans cannot understand, and therefore risk creating market chaos.
- Vast opportunity for misinformation and manufactured financial crises, manipulating markets, and disrupting currencies.
- All of AI’s nasty unknown unknowns as unintended consequences.
- Missing or wildly faulty, ham-fisted, clumsy, and uninformed regulation and attempted controls by any government anywhere.
- Algorithmic trading volatility, where the really smart guys with the most money win big.
- Unfair competitive and market advantages through algorithmic asymmetry.
- Social unrest, war, political chaos, and many other non-financial causes that disrupt financial systems and markets.
What does this mean for me personally — and potentially, anyone considering the two-part life equation of ‘how long will I live?’ and therefore ‘how much money will I need to sustain the lifestyle I want until I die?’
Here’s what I’m working on:
- I need to create income sources and other non-monetary assets that could provide income sources, such as connections, a robust network, new skills, and an ongoing commitment to stay current with the technology and its social and financial implications — and new opportunities.
- I am considering how to reinvest the significant equity I possess and have access to, such as my career in research and the man-machine relationship, my existing financial assets, and my general outlook on the mystery and abundance of life.
- I need to accept and be willing to adjust to the reality that my current financial portfolio is likely not sufficient, despite the years of planning that I put into it before the launch of this massive phase of AI technology.
- I’m committed to tracking and utilizing new medical technologies and health science and learning all I can about both the length of quality of whatever time I have left.
- Perhaps most importantly, in addition to enhancing my financial position to sustain me for possibly many years longer, I must consider how to live a creative, coherent, vital, engaged, useful, and meaningful life into my 100s and possibly longer. That’s one of the most healthful choices I can make. And I welcome that.
One of the big questions of the AI explosion is, ‘How will this impact me? When will I feel any real effects of this new Age of Machines?’
Here’s the first one: rethink the rest of your life, because it may last longer than you think, and the assets you put away to sustain that will face much more serious risks, for a much longer time. Yay!
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I’m Bob Berry — researcher, speaker, writer, and innovator on the art of compelling experience.bob@itstheusers.com / LinkedIn