"She runs through the fields of daisies
Yeah it's just a shame that they eat their own babies
Who cares, cause the air is free
When you get there will you kiss the dead for me"
Acid Bath - Scream of the Butterfly
In The Robots of Dawn Asimov's protagonist (hailing from an overcrowded Earth) levels a strange accusation against a planet where humans are universally wealthy, healthy and live to four hundred with a population density of one per hundreds of square kilometers, attended by slews of robots. It's the old Brave New World chestnut about losing the human spirit, somehow always intertwined with human misery. Their longevity has made them risk-averse and complacement, y'see. Naughty-naughty, how dare you not shuffle off your mortal coil at the appointed time.
You could pick many contrasting viewpoints, but my own mind recalls a fairly obscure 1994 text titled Necroville by one Ian McDonald. While hardly a masterpiece (its plot is... not much of one) it does seem underappreciated as a set of vignettes on human adjustment to rebirth or immortality. For, y'see, nanotech can recreate the dead. Endlessly. From there you of course immediately run into the discontinuity / ship of Theseus / Star Trek transporter argument, but also an entire tirade of human stupidity misusing such technothaumaturgy. Because of course a simian savanna brain is entirely built around the mindless animalistic rush to combat rivals, procreate and elevate one's progeny in social rank before yourself expiring around thirty or forty. Aggression, thrill-seeking, philoprogenitiveness, subsistence, mating rituals and contests, sadism and masochism and humanitarianism (a.k.a. favor-currying) are all thrown off their rails by removing the (pun intended) deadline.
But more to the point, McDonald manages to convey that the driving force of the new society is none of that individual, existential struggle to come to grips with an extended (or duplicated/extended) existence, but the economic exploitation of this new development. Asimov missed or ignored that it's how you're treated by the mindless infinite glut of others and otherness out there which determines the quality of your life, destroying any personal growth regardless of your personal quality or how long you have to develop it. A 400-year-old (or a 400-times reborn techno-zombie) is no less intrinsically disposable than a 40 or 4-year-old, depending on the interest others develop in murdering you after you've outlived your usefulness to them, and it turns out resurrection (here likened to longevity) by providing a convenient workforce actually amplifies disposability. Not just for the dead themselves but the planet as a whole. No matter how long you prolong your mental development, how many facets of existence you delve and transcend, how bodhisattva-like you manage to grow, nobody cares about you except insomuch as you can be exploited for their own instinctive power-mongering.
What's that you're asking? Does this discussion have anything to do with current political arguments about baby boomer medical costs? I'm sure I don't know what you mean.
P.S. As Necroville was purchased for me by my grandmother and great-aunt on the same rainy day as the other author's short story collection, I can't help but note Robert Sheckley also hinted at the resurrection/disposability issue in Immortality Inc.
(And apropos of nothing, using nanotech to make plains-apes seems just the worst possible use of post-human technology.)
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