Ten in ten children have parents who are older than them
As for age itself, there's also a pretty straight forward reason that we tend to pick older leaders. As people age they're generally going to find their younger selves less than desirable - naivete, gullibility, ignorance, and just generally a lack of wisdom. So I'd be terrified of having a leader in e.g. their 30s simply because I don't think they'd have anywhere near the life experience to have accumulated a reasonable base of wisdom. And I suspect as I continue to age, that 30 is going to get pushed higher and higher. Even back in Ancient Rome one could not run for Consul until you were at least 42 years old. And people likely 'grew up' much, much, faster in those times than we do now a days, simply because life was so much more testing.
Ultimately, perhaps there is a trend, but my observations simply do not match the premise of people monotonically accumulating wisdom as they age, and in fact there are certain types of gullibility that seem to increase with age, such as the willingness to disregard and disparage scientific or objective fact in favor of personal beliefs, and to prioritize social status over signals of expertise/intelligence when judging authority. And don't forget that 80%+ of successful scams are against older people.
I think there are almost definitely tradeoffs between cognitive flexibility versus cumulative lifetime experiences, and we shouldn't discount the former - just look at how utterly dysregulated tech industries are because of out-of-touch representatives who listen to elites over experts in the field.
But none of these things are going to be brought to us because of politics or politicians. They're being brought to us through technological and economic advancement. And I think the only risk we have along the way is ourselves. So at this point I couldn't care less what a politician's values are - I simply want somebody who won't get us into WW3 or bring us to the verge of it. So if you assume I'm looking for worldview alignment, my 'worldview' would come down to 'please don't screw up so badly that you cause the extinction of humanity.'
And I wish I shared your optimism about the future AI enables. Without some massive societal transformations, it's on its way to doing what all prior automation did - disproportionately benefit the oligarchy as they use it to capture more and more of the wealth of our civilization by disempowering people who have increasingly less and less leverage.
Also, I genuinely think that a WW3 might not even be top 3 of our biggest worries between the constant war against privacy and AI that would make it possible to finally realize a truly all-seeing, irreversibly authoritarian dystopian state, or even just models purpose-built to create content and adjust algorithms after end-to-end "how does this affect a person's worldviews?" training. That's basically mind-control.
Or even "only" almost all wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of those who control AI and resulting automation.
Nevermind the extremely real extinction risk.
War would definitely be a far worse short-term tragedy, but it's inherently polarizing against itself and doesn't carry the risk of insidiously bringing about a potentially irreversible dystopian state in itself.
And then he'd go on to bomb a ton of countries, sign indefinite detention without trial of anybody accused of terrorism into law, and more. And this has played out repeatedly. Similarly for the crisis of the day. Something is always an imminent threat unless some urgent action is taken over some timeline that's short enough to be scary, but long enough for most people to forget when the timeline passes and nothing happens. It all destroys political optimism and breeds cynicism.
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One of the many reasons I'm optimistic about LLMs is that the tech can't really be monopolized. Right now you can run open weight frontier level models on a $1600 'tier' video card, and that cost tier keeps going down rapidly. In the near future we're going to be running frontier models on plain old computers, if not phones. For the effects of this you need to consider how the economy will adjust in response to cognitive working being able to be automated at a price approaching $0. All that means is that the economic value of said work is also going to approach $0. It's going to radically reshape the economy in much the same way the Industrial Revolution did.
People in an agrarian society prior to the Industrial Revolution might have predicted 'super farms'. And those super farms did come to pass. But the value of agriculture (as a percent of the economy) began rapidly trending towards $0 to the point that those farms became a practically inconsequential aspect of the new structure of the economy. I expect this is what we'll also see with LLMs. The things we expect to dominate the world in the future will likely become ever less relevant. The tricky part, and trillion dollar question, is in our new economic equilibrium, what will be valued?
While AI inference is far less dependent on large scale organization than most other forms of automation, it is not intrinsically independent the way e.g. being able to get a 3D printer is - at least until they ban those on grounds of potentially facilitating gun fabrication or such.
And today's models will be relatively obsolete in the future, yet they are already enough to do a lot with. I think the acceleration theory, that is - that the head company will gain an ever increasing edge due to recursive self improvement, is a scam to draw in naive investors. The far more likely scenario, and one that seems to match current trends way better, is that LLMs have an approximate peak of capability and we're going to asymptotically approach that peak.
Even if we're ever able to achieve true AI which I think is likely impossible for LLMs, there will likely be an asymptotic peak because at some point you can't just think your way to progress, but reach a point where you need more data (observation, experiment, etc) to keep moving forward.
Even under regimes run by young people their advisors are old people.
The average age of the Constitutional Convention was 42 years old. Life expectancy of an adult[1] at that time was only about 48 years old, and the the median age of all American adults 18+ was about 30 (today it is 48).
[1]Avg life expectancy of someone from birth during this time was 37 years old.
Where did you see that? I found this article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2885717/#:~:text=20... which says that in 1790, a 20 year old American white male could expect to live to his early 60s. Interestingly, life expectancy in the US actually went down during the 19th century due to urbanization. One thing you have to watch out when you're looking at numbers like this is that they catalog remaining life expectancy. For example, the chart says "41.4" but you have to add 20 to get the total life expectancy since it's remaining lifespan at age 20.