Indeed by 2016 the leading cause of death in England and Wales was no longer heart disease, but Alzheimer’s and dementia – a significant shift. Already the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, it is reasonable to expect that elderly dementia will become increasingly prevalent as life expectancy improves (already in 2013 it was forecast that the global rate of dementia would triple by 2050). Given the economic cost of the condition already – \$818 billion in 2015 – it is clear that between squeezed public finances and a shrinking workforce relative to the elderly population, major change is inevitable.
Part of the reason why is that the challenges of ageing and healthcare are exponential.
Similar to how Moore ’s Law has meant extraordinary progress in digital technology, there is an exponential function between age-related medical conditions and the progression of years. This means ageing is a far greater issue than even pessimists might initially presume: the chances of sufering Alzheimer’s roughly doubles between the ages of seventy and seventy-five, and doubles again between seventy-five and eighty. For progressively older societies, with ever-larger concentrations of the ‘oldest old’, this poses an unprecedented challenge. Even if we can mitigate or potentially cure things like cancer, heart disease and stroke, the sheer accumulation of conditions like Alzheimer’s would ultimately prove too much to manage.
But here, as with the other crises of technological unemployment, climate change and resource scarcity, the Third
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