fbenario wrote:And yet life expectancy continues to rise, continuing its unabated upward slope.
According to whom?
My ancestral hometown was famous for producing centenarians. My great-grandfather lived to 105, grandfather 93 and father 80.
Intelligent Machines
Bill Gates: How we’ll invent the future
The thinking behind this year’s list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies began with the plow.
by Bill Gates February 27, 2019
I was honored when MIT Technology Review invited me to be the first guest curator of its 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Narrowing down the list was difficult. I wanted to choose things that not only will create headlines in 2019 but captured this moment in technological history—which got me thinking about how innovation has evolved over time.
My mind went to—of all things—the plow. Plows are an excellent embodiment of the history of innovation. Humans have been using them since 4000 BCE, when Mesopotamian farmers aerated soil with sharpened sticks. We’ve been slowly tinkering with and improving them ever since, and today’s plows are technological marvels.
…
Put another way, the plow improves our quantity of life, and lab-grown meat improves our quality of life. For most of human history, we’ve put most of our innovative capacity into the former. And our efforts have paid off: worldwide life expectancy rose from 34 years in 1913 to 60 in 1973 and has reached 71 today.
…
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6129 ... he-future/
34?!

I can only speak on my personal experience of course. I have no way of knowing what worldwide life expectancy was in 1913 or how reliable such statistics could be (especially coming from a shyster like Bill "Global Warming" Gates). I guess "we'll" invent the future by distorting the past.
“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
― George Orwell, 1984