Edward Moore asks

From a reader email:

This hypothetical question just popped into my head and after mulling it over for a while it occurred to me that it’s really a great stagnation question.

“Would you trade your last five years of life to always have the best personal technology provided to you (iPhones, iPads, google glass, whatever implantable, wearable things are coming) if the consequence of not making the trade was that you were limited to basic desktop technology for the rest of your life?”  The decision must be made now and is binding.  Right now I think I would make the trade because I would hate to miss out on all the things that are coming.  I think I would have said no in 1995.  Does that make me a great stagnation skeptic?

I love your blog.

Go for the years, I say.  But at “six months” it is a tougher call…and perhaps Ed is a younger man than I am.  I certainly would advise an eighty-year-old to take the years, or for that matter the six months.