Let's hope solving aging is beyond the grasp of even the smartest AI. No surer way to end up in a world full of calcified ideas than having lot of calcified humans clinging to power and enforcing their ways on younger generations.
Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.
> The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.
Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.
To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosaurs as big, scaly lizards, myself included. That's what we were taught, that's what all of our culture showed us, that's what our museums contained. It was the pervasive view for well over a hundred years before we were even born. But now we know that many of them had feathers! This is an uncontroversial fact, but almost everyone currently over the age of 30 is wrong about it, and everyone under the age of 30 has the (currently believed to be) correct view!
Now think about how many other facts we were taught 30+ years ago. Which do we now know are wrong? What cultural beliefs did we learn growing up, that are now outdated and believed to be harmful? What systems do we need to have to update those beliefs? Given current evidence, will those systems actually work? Relearning information and modifying your lifelong habits is really, really hard compared to children learning new information. I don't think the vast majority of people would put in the effort. I think science and culture would stagnate. Death is the process by which we give power to younger people, who have better information to work with than we did. Death is how we make cultural and scientific progress.
While this is something I feel strongly about, I also understand your point of view. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think the folks working in longevity fields really need to think about and address these problems before they open Pandora's Box and eliminate natural death. I'm not convinced their work is good for humanity.
Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.