Human lifespan hasn't increased very much. Life expectancy at birth has increased significantly due to reductions in childhood disease and accidental death, but life expectancy at 50 and 60 have barely moved over the last 100 years. People have a much higher chance of making it to old age, but all the issues you cited will still hit them once they get there.
I registered copyrights for software I wrote when I was a 12 y/o kid (a kid who was interested in intellectual property law, to be sure, but still a kid). It wasn't that difficult.
That would get expensive fast for anyone remotely prolific. Not every work needs protection, and it's impossible to know which does before it becomes commercially interesting.
I can't imagine, under a hypothetical copyright regime requiring registration that enacted today, anyone would be mailing in paper copies of "Form TX" like I did in 1989. There would absolutely be a more streamlined method of registration.
I made about $75k when my last company IPOed. I had worked there for 2 years before and had a relatively junior salary and not many options. I had a range of options at different strike prices, they averaged out to about 100% gain, but some were more and some were less.
People who had been there long had both lower option prices and more options and made quite a bit.
My experience hiring lots of engineers is that people with comp-sci or other stem degrees are on average much more successful at software engineering. Yes, there are great self-taught and code-schooled engineers, but on average they are less successful. Plus even the great ones seem to get started later with their careers instead of getting hired straight out of college like comp-sci majors.
I imagine it will also be difficult to network and build relationships in the industry without attending a 4 year school unless you are very outgoing. Who you know is often more important than what you know.
My take is that WHAT you do and WHERE you do it are much less important than WHO you do it with. Building strong family, friend, and romantic relationships is all that matters.
