From an interview with Edward Jung, CTO of Intellectual Ventures:
Dec 22, 2011. MTR - Another big problem, whose solution is harder to imagine, has to do with
the world's aging population. One piece of this problem is that today
the longer people live, the higher their medical costs. Our entire
medical system was based around treating acute conditions.
The other
piece is that, concomitantly, developed nations tend to have a
nongrowing base of workers. So as your aging population grows and your
birthrates go down (which is generally true of most developed
economies), you're going to hit an economic wall where you don't have a
lot of people generating your tax-base revenue—and yet you have a lot of
people consuming more.
Fundamentally, biological organisms develop along the S-curve; while renewal of the species occurs through children. The previous generation of healthcare technology was created to extend life till the flat portion of the curve. As we try to extend it [life] further into the future and reduce the number of children, we have to come up with a radically different biology.
tags: problem, health, care, s-curve
