I’ve often mocked science fiction stories set centuries in the future, yet with stable tech not much more advanced than our own, especially when they have big successful subgroups who resist innovation. I’ve also mocked stories (and actual plans) wherein some small group purposely cuts itself off from the larger world, and then expects to beat that larger world in a fair fight. (Like Captain Nemo or Bond villains.) Don’t they know that tech has consistently accelerated for at least a million years, is changing fast now, and is expected to change even faster soon? Or that it has long been the whole world that is powerful together, not small isolated parts?
"I now see that the joke is on me." Kudos being willing to admit your error.
I wonder how a sharp increase in the amount of disorder, conflict and war would affect things? My sense is that war has a positive effect on both birth rates and innovation. Of course war waged with modern weapons, particularly nukes, as a negative effect on a whole host of other things which might very well swamp any of the previously mentioned benefits.
Tracking Ukraine's demographic trends could be instructive.
This is a fairly convincing foretelling given what we know about existing dynamics, but I think what may be more convincing is that futurists are generally wrong because they cannot foretell future disruptions that shift dynamics on a dime. There will likely be some externality that shifts everything we know today to be true on its head.
Expecting unexpected externalities is the most predictable fortelling.
The mechanisms that get you from 6 to 2 children are not necessarily the same as those that get you from 2 to 1. In particular, women (and men) want 2-3 children, not 6 or 1, so we must now be in some sort of inefficient equilibrium.
More broadly, I agree with you that this is a big issue. Are you up for trying to change it? Figuring out what high fertility cultures share, and what can safely be discarded, would be a good first step.
A very reasonable caution, provided we apply it across the board, i.e. to demographic doom predictions and also to climate change doom predictions, or predictions of Peak Oil, or of the superintelligent AI apocalypse, et cetera.
I've been reading your prior columns, but I still don't understand why innovation would grind to a halt when birthrare plummets. The world had plenty of innovation in the prior 2 centuries when population was lower. Also: why would the world be so terrible if innovation was reduced?
Innovation is how standards of living rise even when human effort cannot. The only reason the labor of a generic person is worth far more per hour today (in terms of the standard of living he enjoys) than it was in 1660 is innovation, which leverages the value each hour of labor can produce. If innovation is reduced, then standards of living no longer improve at the same rate. If innovation declines while population doesn't, or even if both are falling but innovation falls faster than population -- which seems not unlikely, as innovation seems to *increase* faster than population when both are increasing -- then standards of living will decline.
No slow process can destroy our civilization. There are two many power centers, and different groups try different things until a solution diffuses itself. The same for climate change. We will overcome any trend: overpopulation, peak oil, ecological multicrisis...
On the other hand solar storms, super volcanos, nuclear war can really change the course of future towards permanent disaster.
My advice to longtermists is: ignore trends, hedge tails. But you know what? As much as yourself I do not expect much action there either...
They are in geopolitical competition. That is also fast, and dominant over slow fertility trends.
A nuclear war, a Russian invasion, an African migration tidal wave, a new Islamic jihad. Those are the catastrophic events that will determine the future, including fertility trends.
I'm a little confused as to how you think that any of those things will cause increased fertility. Not that they can't, just that it seems like that would have to be worked out. A nuclear war, well, despite novels written on such topics the natural response of the survivors would, indeed, be to increase their fertility but, at the same time, the groups that would do that the most easily, with the most cultural support, would be those who already have such beliefs at least in their repertoire... or those tho covert to such beliefs.
Well, my argument is that trends are mainly self correcting and we shall be concerned with tail risks instead. That future evolution of fertility will solver itself, and we shall devote our risk management efforts to “fast” risks, as nuclear war.
Well, I kind of thought that was the point. I thought that the original point was that the low fertility issue would solve itself, it would solve itself either by the low fertility culture, dying out, or a high fertility subculture growing up and taking it over. What other options do you see for it solving itself?
The idea that society will be dominated by the high-fertility subcultures is reductionist and assumes that the part of society one is born into is nearly perfectly correlated with the part of society one affiliates with as an adult, which is not the case. Conservative religious groups have higher fertility, but many people raised in those environments convert to more secular or liberal worldviews as adults. Parts of society that don't have high fertility compete with high-fertility parts by being more alluring. Equilibrium can continue indefinitely.
I just accessed a copy and find it unconvincing. As Stark writes,
"A number of sophisticated scholars have tried to estimate the fertility rate of the Roman Empire (Parkin 1992; Durand 1960; Russell 1958), but the fact remains that we will never have firm knowledge. What can be established is that mortality was high; thus a high fertility rate was necessary to prevent a population decline. It also seems very likely that fertility was substantially lower than needed for replacement, and, as noted above, there is substantial evidence that the Greco-Roman population did become smaller during the Christian era. Beyond these generalities, it is doubtful that we shall obtain more precise information. As for the fertility of the Christian population, the literature is empty[!]" (ebook location 14.92, last page of Ch. 5)
He goes on to say "It was for this reason that I devoted much attention to establishing that the primary causes of a population decline in the Greco-Roman world did not apply to the Christian subculture." However, he focuses on abortion, infanticide, and contraception (the last of which he says there is no evidence for) but at no point does he show that those *were* the primary causes of population decline and elides wars, famines and plagues, which of course would have affected Christian and Pagan alike. Further, in his attempt to establish that the former three causes “did not apply to the Christian subculture” he takes the words of the church fathers, who were of course eager to prove the moral superiority of their faith, as unbiased truth.
Sorry for necroposting, but he actually specifically denies that plagues and famines would have affected pagans and Christians equally. I remember him talking about how churches established networks to nurse to sick people during pandemics, and attributes greater Christian survival rates to this.
I'm not sure I see how early Christians and, say fundamentalist (for lack of a better word) Jews and Mormons with higher birth rates correlate. Maybe Mormons match your description better than other groups which are more insular, but the conditions seem bewilderingly different to me. Basic things like % of time people spend doing recreational activities, even reading...these didn't exist.
I agree that high-fertility subcultures are not going to save the world from a fertility crisis. I'm not seeing it.
It doesn't require that it be "perfectly correlated". Just correlated enough to be selected over enough generations. The defection rate among the Amish actually appears to be declining, as they undergo selection for plainness: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/boiling-off/
The percentage of Amish children who leave has been declining over the generations--not increasing. If I remember correctly, right now >90% of Amish children stay Amish.
I get most of the population de-growth arguments, and apologies if already covered, but I haven't seen the argument to counter the problem of what the consequences of future never-ending population growth are? Not from a meeting-our-needs with food/resources POV, but from a "80 or 800 billion people in rabbit hutches living a Disneyworld-esque life" POV? Aside: John Brunner wrote a bit about this (from a very 70's perspective).
Population density of Orange County CA is ~334/square mile, earth surface is ~50 million square miles; room for 16.8 trillion people if you don't count subsurface development e.g. underwater cities. As technology progresses it becomes possible to develop land; consider that the southern U.S. population is growing very fast with the advent of cheaper, more reliable power and AC. I personally think that lunar development will happen before Antarctica... vacuum just isn't that bad compared to adiabatic wind. Rockets are dumb; big mass launchers on equatorial mountains are the cheap easy way to get into orbit, which is the halfway point, in terms of energy expenditure, to the Moon, or Mars, or the Earth-Mars asteroid belt... room for quintillions of us.
Orange county looks (via Google maps) to be mainly city and suburb with a small state park and some hills/ mountains. Latter two maybe 1/3 total area of county.
There’s going to be very little viable large animal habitat and so very little of our current ecology. So I’m presuming this scenario is us giving-up on any real ‘natural’ environment as we have known in the past (other than play-parks for kidults). That should be an explicitly made point, no?
But my original point is about a commodification of life. I mentioned Disneyland (WallE) and rabbit hutches. The black mirror scenarios are innumerable with an impossibility of escape - there is nowhere to escape to. I rather suspect that even at 80bn people the diversity of lifestyle will radically reduce. We may be celebrating our radical differences in choice of coffee shop even more than we do now. City centre living satisfied me for 20 years - I’d dread it being the only thing I ever knew.
And all this is in the name of making sure we have a sufficient supply of young people for current needs?
I don’t disagree with space colonisation and exploitation. And I agree I am looking at this with from what we now have. And perhaps I have read too much eg. Houellebeqc, Brunner, Solzhenitsyn, Koestler and ofc Nietzsche to not have sufficient optimism for 80bn+++ people sharing this earth with humanity, meaningful choice, and avoidance of fragility in the system.
80 billion is 1/200th 16 trillion; my scenario was much more crowded. At 80 billion you can skip ocean surface colonization and still leave plenty of large animal habitat. At 10x our current population I'd expect lifestyle diversity to increase, not decrease.
One problem with slow growth, or even stability, is that population change is a naturally exponential process (because the change dP(t) in population at time t is proportional to population P(t)). Exponential processes are inherently...well, exponential. They explode or crash, meaning the time scale over which you observe any defined level of change tends to inherently get shorter and shorter, and it's naturally harder to construct a feedback loop that holds them to any kind of pseudo-linear behavior. Whatever the timescale of your feedback loop, the process tends to readily escape it to the short side. That's not to say it can't be done, because it is done in, say, control of chemical reactions, which also tend to be exponential, but it's definitely harder than many other control problems where there's some fixed natural timescale of change.
Man, what are you talking about? There are already 8 billion people, and we don’t have enough food, energy, water or jobs for even a third of them. Why would we want more? So that rich people can have even more choice for their servants?
It seems unlikely that the sole or more important reason for some people not having enough food, energy, et cetera is the sheer lack of the stuff -- or lack of land area from which to derive it -- and much more likely that the main problem is one of poor governance, bad distribution, inappropriate incentives, theft, idiocy, and so forth.
Reason being, your comment could easily have been made (indeed certainly was made) 100 years ago, when the world population was ~2 billion, which according to the World Bank is approximately the number of people today who live in "First World" high-income nations. For that matter, in AD 1000 the population of the entire world, a high fraction of which suffered nasty brutish short lives from all the causes you mention, was less than the population of the United States today, where you pretty much have to be not in your right mind to starve or freeze to death.
If you want to make *your* prediction of "too many people" more plausible than the umpty zillion predictions that have historically preceded it -- and all of which have turned out to be wrong -- you might need to adduce some hard evidence for the proposition.
I am surprised to hear this, given you have thought so much about the issue, and others who are very close to the AI world think it will be much faster. GPT-4 seems to be already quite close (maybe ~80 IQ human).
Are there specific frames or pieces of evidence that inform your view, beyond the obvious "Moore's Law & exponential resource cost of scaling"?
[We seem to be able to create endless service jobs for ourselves.]
[And for what it's worth, self-driving and various forms of arts have essentially been automated recently.]
The main issue though: we see in numerous AI benchmarks that most of the difficulty is about `getting on the board'; moving from low-performing human to super-human happens quite quickly
Non-general AI could still cause unemployment, just as cars unemployed lots of horses. "Essentially" automating driving doesn't appear to have actually replaced professional drivers. It could in the future, but right now it is still something planned for the future.
We already have self-driving AI. We are just not allowed to deploy it. Cruise self-driving seems to be quite safe in SF (in every article where the headline says they are in an accident, in the article body it admits they are not at fault)
It's strange how I read this and other related articles and think, "Ayn Rand may have gotten the prescriptions wrong in Atlas Shrugged, but her diagnosis seems spot on." I see more and more arguments and evidence toward the notion that people who have anything of value to contribute to society should pool their efforts with like minded individuals and GTFO of public life. I don't like this conclusion, but it seems like the natural result of a variety of terrible phenomena happening throughout society.
Perhaps small, insular groups of certain types of people can create and maintain human civilization as the rest of the world spins apart, but I'm not sure it's possible, let alone ethical or desirable.
You should read Arnold Toynbee. His civilizational cycles are out of fashion now, but he sees history as cycles of rise and fall, with a new religious consciousness spawned from each period of decay. Like Christianity out of declining Rome, but other parallels throughout history, including in Hinduism and Buddhism.
You should be more optimistic, your sort of analysis is adequate for solving this problem but ideas take time to diffuse throughout society. Also, if your predictions are correct won't the economic decline and innovation pause be an obvious red flag and spur action? Or do you predict we will just be used to living in that world and not care?
You need to start some sort of cult that has beliefs that you find acceptable, and also supports a high fertility rate. You might read this and think, what, I'm not the sort of person who starts a cult, that's silly. No, no, I think you are that sort of person. Weren't there people making t-shirts with your face on them at some conference recently? It's time to raise your ambitions and realize, instead of *joining* some lame existing cult, you could be *creating* a new and superior one.
We don’t need a cult. Just a group of people who agree on a few basics and are happy to live together on that basis, and spread that message. I mean, a “cult” the way the effective altruists are a cult. A tightly-knit social movement. But no wacky beliefs required.
The Chinese are aware of the problem. Partially because the west keeps gloating about it, while online commentators from the west generally get upset if you say the west is in difficulty.
We could perhaps solve it with egg freezing and other fertility treatments, as delayed marriage is going nowhere.
“ I fear that the sort of thoughtful dispassionate analysis that I am good at is quite inadequate to this problem.”
I love that. Do I have your permission to use it for my epitaph?
Sure.
"I now see that the joke is on me." Kudos being willing to admit your error.
I wonder how a sharp increase in the amount of disorder, conflict and war would affect things? My sense is that war has a positive effect on both birth rates and innovation. Of course war waged with modern weapons, particularly nukes, as a negative effect on a whole host of other things which might very well swamp any of the previously mentioned benefits.
Tracking Ukraine's demographic trends could be instructive.
Isn't the other choice just to work hard on AI so we are replaced by silicon descendants?
Sure, but its a long-shot.
This is a fairly convincing foretelling given what we know about existing dynamics, but I think what may be more convincing is that futurists are generally wrong because they cannot foretell future disruptions that shift dynamics on a dime. There will likely be some externality that shifts everything we know today to be true on its head.
Expecting unexpected externalities is the most predictable fortelling.
With past fertility trends having been consistent over 250 years, its not that much of a stretch to project them forward another 150 years.
The mechanisms that get you from 6 to 2 children are not necessarily the same as those that get you from 2 to 1. In particular, women (and men) want 2-3 children, not 6 or 1, so we must now be in some sort of inefficient equilibrium.
More broadly, I agree with you that this is a big issue. Are you up for trying to change it? Figuring out what high fertility cultures share, and what can safely be discarded, would be a good first step.
Really? They've been consistent for 250 years? How do you figure?
A very reasonable caution, provided we apply it across the board, i.e. to demographic doom predictions and also to climate change doom predictions, or predictions of Peak Oil, or of the superintelligent AI apocalypse, et cetera.
I've been reading your prior columns, but I still don't understand why innovation would grind to a halt when birthrare plummets. The world had plenty of innovation in the prior 2 centuries when population was lower. Also: why would the world be so terrible if innovation was reduced?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/shrinking-economies-dont-innovate
Innovation is how standards of living rise even when human effort cannot. The only reason the labor of a generic person is worth far more per hour today (in terms of the standard of living he enjoys) than it was in 1660 is innovation, which leverages the value each hour of labor can produce. If innovation is reduced, then standards of living no longer improve at the same rate. If innovation declines while population doesn't, or even if both are falling but innovation falls faster than population -- which seems not unlikely, as innovation seems to *increase* faster than population when both are increasing -- then standards of living will decline.
No slow process can destroy our civilization. There are two many power centers, and different groups try different things until a solution diffuses itself. The same for climate change. We will overcome any trend: overpopulation, peak oil, ecological multicrisis...
On the other hand solar storms, super volcanos, nuclear war can really change the course of future towards permanent disaster.
My advice to longtermists is: ignore trends, hedge tails. But you know what? As much as yourself I do not expect much action there either...
I'm not predicting extinction, but instead the rise and then dominance of groups who throw away much of what we value.
They are in geopolitical competition. That is also fast, and dominant over slow fertility trends.
A nuclear war, a Russian invasion, an African migration tidal wave, a new Islamic jihad. Those are the catastrophic events that will determine the future, including fertility trends.
I'm a little confused as to how you think that any of those things will cause increased fertility. Not that they can't, just that it seems like that would have to be worked out. A nuclear war, well, despite novels written on such topics the natural response of the survivors would, indeed, be to increase their fertility but, at the same time, the groups that would do that the most easily, with the most cultural support, would be those who already have such beliefs at least in their repertoire... or those tho covert to such beliefs.
Well, my argument is that trends are mainly self correcting and we shall be concerned with tail risks instead. That future evolution of fertility will solver itself, and we shall devote our risk management efforts to “fast” risks, as nuclear war.
Well, I kind of thought that was the point. I thought that the original point was that the low fertility issue would solve itself, it would solve itself either by the low fertility culture, dying out, or a high fertility subculture growing up and taking it over. What other options do you see for it solving itself?
The idea that society will be dominated by the high-fertility subcultures is reductionist and assumes that the part of society one is born into is nearly perfectly correlated with the part of society one affiliates with as an adult, which is not the case. Conservative religious groups have higher fertility, but many people raised in those environments convert to more secular or liberal worldviews as adults. Parts of society that don't have high fertility compete with high-fertility parts by being more alluring. Equilibrium can continue indefinitely.
And yet the Christians did in fact take over the Roman Empire mainly via doubling every 40 years over 300 years.
I see only scant and non-credible (i.e. non-scholarly) evidence that this was due to fertility rather than proselytism.
I think The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark makes this argument.
I just accessed a copy and find it unconvincing. As Stark writes,
"A number of sophisticated scholars have tried to estimate the fertility rate of the Roman Empire (Parkin 1992; Durand 1960; Russell 1958), but the fact remains that we will never have firm knowledge. What can be established is that mortality was high; thus a high fertility rate was necessary to prevent a population decline. It also seems very likely that fertility was substantially lower than needed for replacement, and, as noted above, there is substantial evidence that the Greco-Roman population did become smaller during the Christian era. Beyond these generalities, it is doubtful that we shall obtain more precise information. As for the fertility of the Christian population, the literature is empty[!]" (ebook location 14.92, last page of Ch. 5)
He goes on to say "It was for this reason that I devoted much attention to establishing that the primary causes of a population decline in the Greco-Roman world did not apply to the Christian subculture." However, he focuses on abortion, infanticide, and contraception (the last of which he says there is no evidence for) but at no point does he show that those *were* the primary causes of population decline and elides wars, famines and plagues, which of course would have affected Christian and Pagan alike. Further, in his attempt to establish that the former three causes “did not apply to the Christian subculture” he takes the words of the church fathers, who were of course eager to prove the moral superiority of their faith, as unbiased truth.
Sorry for necroposting, but he actually specifically denies that plagues and famines would have affected pagans and Christians equally. I remember him talking about how churches established networks to nurse to sick people during pandemics, and attributes greater Christian survival rates to this.
The christians took over by conversion - where's the evidence it was because the pagan population was relatively much less fertile??
I'm not sure I see how early Christians and, say fundamentalist (for lack of a better word) Jews and Mormons with higher birth rates correlate. Maybe Mormons match your description better than other groups which are more insular, but the conditions seem bewilderingly different to me. Basic things like % of time people spend doing recreational activities, even reading...these didn't exist.
I agree that high-fertility subcultures are not going to save the world from a fertility crisis. I'm not seeing it.
It doesn't require that it be "perfectly correlated". Just correlated enough to be selected over enough generations. The defection rate among the Amish actually appears to be declining, as they undergo selection for plainness: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/boiling-off/
The percentage of Amish children who leave has been declining over the generations--not increasing. If I remember correctly, right now >90% of Amish children stay Amish.
That is one interesting data point.
I get most of the population de-growth arguments, and apologies if already covered, but I haven't seen the argument to counter the problem of what the consequences of future never-ending population growth are? Not from a meeting-our-needs with food/resources POV, but from a "80 or 800 billion people in rabbit hutches living a Disneyworld-esque life" POV? Aside: John Brunner wrote a bit about this (from a very 70's perspective).
The universe is vast. We are crazy far from filling it up.
I totally get that. But the germ seed *required* for planetary expansion is tiny. What about the 80 billion sitting on earth?
Population density of Orange County CA is ~334/square mile, earth surface is ~50 million square miles; room for 16.8 trillion people if you don't count subsurface development e.g. underwater cities. As technology progresses it becomes possible to develop land; consider that the southern U.S. population is growing very fast with the advent of cheaper, more reliable power and AC. I personally think that lunar development will happen before Antarctica... vacuum just isn't that bad compared to adiabatic wind. Rockets are dumb; big mass launchers on equatorial mountains are the cheap easy way to get into orbit, which is the halfway point, in terms of energy expenditure, to the Moon, or Mars, or the Earth-Mars asteroid belt... room for quintillions of us.
Thanks.
Orange county looks (via Google maps) to be mainly city and suburb with a small state park and some hills/ mountains. Latter two maybe 1/3 total area of county.
There’s going to be very little viable large animal habitat and so very little of our current ecology. So I’m presuming this scenario is us giving-up on any real ‘natural’ environment as we have known in the past (other than play-parks for kidults). That should be an explicitly made point, no?
But my original point is about a commodification of life. I mentioned Disneyland (WallE) and rabbit hutches. The black mirror scenarios are innumerable with an impossibility of escape - there is nowhere to escape to. I rather suspect that even at 80bn people the diversity of lifestyle will radically reduce. We may be celebrating our radical differences in choice of coffee shop even more than we do now. City centre living satisfied me for 20 years - I’d dread it being the only thing I ever knew.
And all this is in the name of making sure we have a sufficient supply of young people for current needs?
I don’t disagree with space colonisation and exploitation. And I agree I am looking at this with from what we now have. And perhaps I have read too much eg. Houellebeqc, Brunner, Solzhenitsyn, Koestler and ofc Nietzsche to not have sufficient optimism for 80bn+++ people sharing this earth with humanity, meaningful choice, and avoidance of fragility in the system.
80 billion is 1/200th 16 trillion; my scenario was much more crowded. At 80 billion you can skip ocean surface colonization and still leave plenty of large animal habitat. At 10x our current population I'd expect lifestyle diversity to increase, not decrease.
Could we not, potentially, have slow growth instead of a catastrophic crash?
One problem with slow growth, or even stability, is that population change is a naturally exponential process (because the change dP(t) in population at time t is proportional to population P(t)). Exponential processes are inherently...well, exponential. They explode or crash, meaning the time scale over which you observe any defined level of change tends to inherently get shorter and shorter, and it's naturally harder to construct a feedback loop that holds them to any kind of pseudo-linear behavior. Whatever the timescale of your feedback loop, the process tends to readily escape it to the short side. That's not to say it can't be done, because it is done in, say, control of chemical reactions, which also tend to be exponential, but it's definitely harder than many other control problems where there's some fixed natural timescale of change.
Man, what are you talking about? There are already 8 billion people, and we don’t have enough food, energy, water or jobs for even a third of them. Why would we want more? So that rich people can have even more choice for their servants?
It seems unlikely that the sole or more important reason for some people not having enough food, energy, et cetera is the sheer lack of the stuff -- or lack of land area from which to derive it -- and much more likely that the main problem is one of poor governance, bad distribution, inappropriate incentives, theft, idiocy, and so forth.
Reason being, your comment could easily have been made (indeed certainly was made) 100 years ago, when the world population was ~2 billion, which according to the World Bank is approximately the number of people today who live in "First World" high-income nations. For that matter, in AD 1000 the population of the entire world, a high fraction of which suffered nasty brutish short lives from all the causes you mention, was less than the population of the United States today, where you pretty much have to be not in your right mind to starve or freeze to death.
If you want to make *your* prediction of "too many people" more plausible than the umpty zillion predictions that have historically preceded it -- and all of which have turned out to be wrong -- you might need to adduce some hard evidence for the proposition.
Robin, does your `default view' framing imply that you believe AGI is not coming for at least 40 years, and possibly hundreds?
Or do you simply mean that the `default' view is to be insulated from gameboard-flipping AI timelines?
Most likely we will not see full human level AGI before the great falling economy innovation pause.
I am surprised to hear this, given you have thought so much about the issue, and others who are very close to the AI world think it will be much faster. GPT-4 seems to be already quite close (maybe ~80 IQ human).
Are there specific frames or pieces of evidence that inform your view, beyond the obvious "Moore's Law & exponential resource cost of scaling"?
Those people "close to the AI world" are NOT very close to typical practical automation contexts.
We still aren't seeing tech-induced unemployment.
All that means is AGI doesn't exist yet.
[We seem to be able to create endless service jobs for ourselves.]
[And for what it's worth, self-driving and various forms of arts have essentially been automated recently.]
The main issue though: we see in numerous AI benchmarks that most of the difficulty is about `getting on the board'; moving from low-performing human to super-human happens quite quickly
Non-general AI could still cause unemployment, just as cars unemployed lots of horses. "Essentially" automating driving doesn't appear to have actually replaced professional drivers. It could in the future, but right now it is still something planned for the future.
We already have self-driving AI. We are just not allowed to deploy it. Cruise self-driving seems to be quite safe in SF (in every article where the headline says they are in an accident, in the article body it admits they are not at fault)
Well... big tech layoffs.
It's strange how I read this and other related articles and think, "Ayn Rand may have gotten the prescriptions wrong in Atlas Shrugged, but her diagnosis seems spot on." I see more and more arguments and evidence toward the notion that people who have anything of value to contribute to society should pool their efforts with like minded individuals and GTFO of public life. I don't like this conclusion, but it seems like the natural result of a variety of terrible phenomena happening throughout society.
Perhaps small, insular groups of certain types of people can create and maintain human civilization as the rest of the world spins apart, but I'm not sure it's possible, let alone ethical or desirable.
You should read Arnold Toynbee. His civilizational cycles are out of fashion now, but he sees history as cycles of rise and fall, with a new religious consciousness spawned from each period of decay. Like Christianity out of declining Rome, but other parallels throughout history, including in Hinduism and Buddhism.
You should be more optimistic, your sort of analysis is adequate for solving this problem but ideas take time to diffuse throughout society. Also, if your predictions are correct won't the economic decline and innovation pause be an obvious red flag and spur action? Or do you predict we will just be used to living in that world and not care?
The Greek and Roman empires declined in part due to low fertility. That spurred action, but not sufficiently effective action.
I'm not sure that was the causation order. My reading to that history suggests that low fertility followed the disorder that resulted from decline.
Our current fertility decline also had prior causes.
You need to start some sort of cult that has beliefs that you find acceptable, and also supports a high fertility rate. You might read this and think, what, I'm not the sort of person who starts a cult, that's silly. No, no, I think you are that sort of person. Weren't there people making t-shirts with your face on them at some conference recently? It's time to raise your ambitions and realize, instead of *joining* some lame existing cult, you could be *creating* a new and superior one.
The fraction of people who try to start cults that actually create long lasting cults is VERY small.
We don’t need a cult. Just a group of people who agree on a few basics and are happy to live together on that basis, and spread that message. I mean, a “cult” the way the effective altruists are a cult. A tightly-knit social movement. But no wacky beliefs required.
The fraction of people with your particular skillset is also VERY small.
I don't think his skillset is one suited to forming a long lasting cult.
capture by metaphor
is declining birth rate an iceberg or rising tide/quicksand/some other appropriate metaphor for a slow process?
if it's a slow enough process there would be pressure to innovate replacements for the missing people
The Chinese are aware of the problem. Partially because the west keeps gloating about it, while online commentators from the west generally get upset if you say the west is in difficulty.
We could perhaps solve it with egg freezing and other fertility treatments, as delayed marriage is going nowhere.