20/20 Vision

American Demographics, Dec, 1999 by Joan Raymond

Eventually, Rosen says, through the use of virtual reality and telecommunication capabilities, a surgeon's movements will be translated into computer-guided movements of high-tech robotics. Conceivably, that means a surgeon in New Hampshire could operate on a California patient in real time.

Diagnostics and treatment will also be upgraded. Physicians will have access to computer images of patients, accessed by simple scanning devices, that go beyond a 3-D visual representation. "What we have now is really nothing more than a three-dimensional picture of the body," says Rosen, referring to the Visual Human Project of the National Library of Medicine, which provides data for the testing of medical imaging algorithms. "But in the future, this data will be further refined. Treatments...will be tailored to an individual's biologic makeup."

Despite increasing uses of such medical-based technologies, Mitchell believes the one threat we have to longevity is the emergence of new drug-resistant diseases like AIDS and resistant strains of "older" diseases like tuberculosis. "These are diseases of the poor. To the degree that the population of the poor increases, it's not unlikely that we'll have epidemics that will potentially affect overall longevity in this country, despite technological innovations," she says.

Years ago, Mitchell says, she would have called these potential diseases "wild cards," but now she feels they are "certainties."

"Medicine has had a cavalier attitude toward antibiotics," she explains. "Nobody was willing to take it seriously enough, and now we have diseases that are resistant to antibiotic treatment."

While modern medicine will certainly have an impact on how long we live, we still need to consider how we live, says Ken Dychtwald, author of Age Power: How the 21st Century Will Be Ruled by the New Old (J.P. Tarcher, 1999). Currently, 40 million retirees spend an average of 43 hours a week watching television, he points out. The "new old" will need to integrate more fully into society, with opportunities created that focus on intergenerational leadership, social contribution, and productivity. Otherwise, he says, we stand the chance of creating a future in which "70 million couch-potato retirees drift through their mature years watching TV, surfing the Net, wandering through malls, and playing various games while siphoning off society's resources."

Stewart Brand, cofounder of the Global Business Network and author of The Clock of the Long Now, says the generational aspects of a continually aging population are "what's really interesting. In the future, people will know their great-great grandchildren, and hang out with them, and learn things from them. It will be a different sense of family. Maybe it will be dreadful. Maybe it will be cool."

"The bonds between immediate family generations may loosen," Brand adds, "while the overall bond among humanity's generations becomes stronger, simply because so many generations are sharing the same world - having direct experience of the `Long Us.'"