ABSTRACT
Anders Sandberg brings his long-term perspective of human prospects from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and asks whether civilizational failure is an inevitability of “old age.” Using databases of empires and civilizations, he attempts to fit these data to probability models in order to ascertain whether failure rate increases with age. He adds comparative insights to his analysis by presenting similar studies on whether aging occurs in complex systems such as firms, organizations, software code, and the extinction age of biological species.
