by Michael S. James, Contributing Writer
Does the traditional American life and career trajectory still make sense as people live longer in the AI age?
In a new series of videos, CWI Works speaks with Mitchell Stevens, co-director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, to explore what longer lives and rapid technological change mean for the way we learn and build careers, and why mentoring and lifelong education may matter more than ever.
“If the future of work experts are even 30% correct in their projections about how much turbulence there’s going to be in labor markets,” Stevens says, “then it’s really essential that we begin to equip people with the capacity to make transitions, substantial transitions, across different kinds of work at different stages in their lives.
“Even without a technological revolution,” he says, “100-year lives would test the limit of that [existing] strategy of thinking about school and work. With the specter of artificial intelligence, we can anticipate a lot more change in the workplace, a lot more change in the character of the economy, simultaneously with lengthening lifespans. So it provides an obligation, but also an opportunity to sort of rethink those rhythms and cadences.”
Rethinking the Traditional American Life Plan
We’re not yet quite to where 100-year lives are common, but we’re getting closer. The average life expectancy at birth in the United States has been rising for decades – from 47.3 in 1900 to 79 in 2024.
“When the Social Security Act was brought into existence in the 1930s, there was a very small minority of the population even reached the age of 65,” Stevens says, “so it made sense politically and fiscally to imagine some sort of pension after the age of 65 as a way of supporting a small minority of the population.”
Years later, the average U.S. lifespan exceeded 65. More recently, the Social Security retirement age rose to 67. Nevertheless, the average U.S. life has kept mostly the same pattern from then until now.
“We still imagine that the first quarter of life is primarily about school,” Stevens says. “The second and third quarters of life are primarily about something called a career, which is presumed to be a singular arc, ideally of accumulating mobility and wealth as one moves through it. And then [there is] a period called retirement, which is associated ideally, if you’re lucky, with rest and pleasure.”
Should that still hold?
“I think we’re limited substantially by our imaginations that are shaped by 20th century conceptions of education and work, rather than proactively rethinking what those architectures could look like in our time,” Stevens says.
Making Lifelong Learning a Reality
For instance, he asks: “Is the best way to ensure that young people navigate into mature adulthood to send them off to residential campuses with a bunch of other 18, 19, and 20-year-olds and … hope that everything comes out okay in the end?
“What if we imagined a world in which the ideal trajectory was for someone to graduate from high school, engage in paid work for some period of time, and then enter post-secondary education?” he asks. “In certain affluent precincts of our country, that idea is heretical even though less-privileged young people do it all the time. But it might be a more responsible way of enabling young people to navigate the transition to adulthood.”
Such a rethink might reframe the idea of college away from being strictly a place for 18- to 22-year-olds. Could the answer be lifelong education, a trend already well underway?
“A 20th century human capital strategy was organized around getting as many people into through and out of four-year college by the age of 25 as possible,” Stevens says. “What if we took that same amount of investment, but pulled it out over the arc of lengthening lives and presumed that technological platforms would provide a good portion of that?”
Building Careers That Adapt to Longer Lives
Another question: Does our youth-focused work culture still make sense when people are living longer?
Could we, for instance, “organize the cadence and timetable of work so that we don’t oblige people to make their most intense investments in their careers in their 20s and 30s at precisely the same time when they’re also starting families?” Stevens wonders. “It may be possible to … make a better care infrastructure for people across the entire arc of these lengthening lives.”
Speaking of that lengthening arc: Today’s careers are not like yesterdays, when someone went to work for a company and stayed there for 40 years. So that also changes things.
“Rather than thinking about job transitions as fates, prepare for them as sort of normal features of the life course,” Stevens says. “The more affluent, privileged precincts of our society have already done that. People in Silicon Valley have multiple careers. They take sabbaticals in their 40s and 50s, right? So the most affluent among us have sort of renegotiated their relationship with work. But I think it’s absolutely possible to create social policies and employment practices that can provide some measure of that resilience across a larger population. And frankly, we’re just gonna have to do that if we’re gonna enjoy economic prosperity and civic vitality in the AI era.”
Reimagining Retirement and What Comes Next
Even further along the career path, should we think differently about retirement?
Stevens, who recently turned 60, notes: “Virtually every fiber of my culture tells me that at the age of 60, I’m supposed to be, quote, thinking about retirement, unquote. Right? I don’t have alternate narratives ready to hand for me to make sense of the next 10 or 20 years of my life, independent of the question of retirement. And so there’s just a great deal of cultural work that needs to be done to enable people to reimagine longer lives.”
The Power of Multigenerational Workplaces and Mentoring
Once we apply such reimagination to the office, we find ourselves with a situation much like we have now: multi-generational workplaces containing people freshly out of an age-segmented education system alongside working professionals at various career stages.
“Age integration provides enormous benefits when it’s done well,” Stevens says. “This is why junior attorneys are routinely commingled with their senior partners. This is how medical residencies are structured, social work and student teaching residencies. Apprenticeships of wide variety are premised on the idea that cross-generational mentoring is an essential feature of coming into expertise. But that clashes with our schooled society systems that presume that different ages need to be treated or managed somehow independently of each other. That’s a tension that we’ve long held and long had to manage. But I think the imperative of AI, again, sort of creates even more incentive for us to talk back against that presumption of age segregation, and encourage and lubricate cross-generational mentoring relationships.”
Dive deeper into Stevens’ thoughts about how longer lives might affect careers in a three-part video series, which you can find at the CWI Works Longevity Workforce Outlook resource page.