Failure to do so will force millions of older people, many of them poorer and with lower life expectancies, to work for longer or face another year trapped in unemployed limbo.
The increase in life expectancy means we are all going to be expected to work longer in order to make our pensions go further.
"When the instrument is properly set," Dad explains with the kind of cockeyed thinking rampant throughout the novel, "it provides an estimate of your life expectancy and starts to work backward to zero".
The UTUAT items were applied to measure Learning Expectancy (that the agents would help them learn), Effort Expectancy (that the agents were easy to work with), and Attitudes toward technology (that they like the agents in general).
The 1999 UN Human Development Report, published last week, looks at life expectancy, wealth, literacy and educational prospects to work out how good - or bad - life is for 174 countries.
Crucially, as life expectancy rises citizens would get the message that they need to work longer as available annuity rates at a given age decline.
It takes time to work out who you are and, thanks to longer life expectancies, there's now time to be who you are.
Not everyone; people in their 20s, 30s and 40s might have to work for longer before they get their state pension, in line with improving life expectancy.
Those of us fortunate enough to have enjoyed free university education have four times the wealth of those who went out to work at 15 to help pay for us, not to mention our considerably better life expectancy.
They have a life expectancy of about 38 more years, to about 2050, and I have no reason to think that they plan to work anywhere else in their lives.
