Comment by ben_w

> A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you.

Way to misread what I wrote.

A subsidence farmer necessarily spends their lives doing as much work as they can eat food, because the energy to do the work is that food.

Their work cycle was arranged differently than ours, with harvest season being longer days because letting crops spoil in the fields meant starvation come winter, and winter hours being mostly limited by sunlight and moonlight because artificial illumination was far too expensive.

> 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.

And? Those workers got those rights, past tense. The fact they got them is a big part of why less than half of the living population in OECD nations needs to work today: their efforts 200-100 years ago are why it is taxes paying for schools and pensions, not the largesse of lords limited to almshouses.

If we suddenly get an anti-aging treatment that has us all live 200 years*, all the governments can trivially handle this just by adjusting pension ages.

* somehow without any of the other things implied by the tech that can make such treatments; add those things in and you have to ask "why only 200?" and "what else can this tech do?" and this is all about AI having been a big contributor to some bio research, so there's a lot of "what else" already and we don't even have the anti-aging treatment yet.