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Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

maartenboudry.be

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Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#71

Post by rich_sasha »

I never thought about it this way, but perhaps what we're seeing is the "lower classes" becoming extinct. I say this with no pleasure.

We're in a world where low productivity jobs are rapidly being replaced by robots, operated by the society's richest. These aren't different species, of course, but the effect is the same. The newly-low-productivity jobs do not provide enough to afford offspring in the new reality, and only the fewer, elite humans can afford them. They will breed smart, well educated and endowed, if spoilt and brattish offspring, who will, perhaps, continue to thrive.

It sounds brutal and Darwinistic, but at the same time we're angsting about what humans will do post-AI. Well, perhaps the answer is, they won't be born.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#72

Post by silverquiet »

timmg wrote: post #22
philips wrote: post #4

The article is heavy on criticism of population decline and light on an argument of why it is so bad. As a parent in the USA I also don’t buy the argument that it is all education and birth control driving these changes. Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. And for others climate anxiety makes them question the future.

> Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. I can't speak for your friends. But I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else". Some people literally can't afford children. But those in the middle class (or better) in the US certainly can . It would just take money away from other parts of their lifestyle: the…

A luxury lifestyle is cheaper than a child. The last estimates I’ve seen are around $300K (and that was before the recent bouts of inflation) to raise a kid and that didn’t include college. So that’s like a Lamborghini, right? Or a lot of fancy vacations. And that’s just one kid; you might get some economies of scale with more, but the marginal costs are there too.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#73

Post by tonis2 »

helpfulContrib wrote: post #19
tonis2 wrote: post #5

"The more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found." Has not been true so far, I wonder at what population amount, will this start working ?

Of course its true - we wouldn't have gotten to the moon, or been able to build world-encompassing highway and Internet systems, without the critical mass of people who built our academic and industrial institutions. To see the nature of your fallacy, just look out at your universities and wonder how they will operate, as effectively as they have so far, with half the staff. And then, that staff halves again in 10 ye…

A Lot of academics already today are just trying to keep their job, and don't keep up with innovative teaching methods, they don't record their lectures, cause who would pay them if there's a video about it ?

So in reality we would be fine, if we focus on doing the job not keeping the job.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#74

Post by jaybrendansmith »

DandyDev wrote: post #27

This article reinforces my knee-jerk dislike of philosophy. This article - like many works produced by philosophers - provides some contrarian ideas with zero evidence to back them up. I think it confuses causation and correlation by claiming that having more people, faster population growth, leads to finding solutions to major problems humanity deals with faster. I don’t buy that. In fact, I’d say our inventiveness…

Exactly this. I look at the evidence provided here around how much farming land it takes to sustain each person I think that we got lucky. Through research we figured out how to sustain all these people with less land, without which by now we would have mass starvation and famine. But I also think that here in the US, we have less humans per square km than just about any other country, and we're doing just fine, in fact, we are contributing more than our share of new research and tech. There's no correlation here, let along causation.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#75

Post by bamboozled »

Zetobal wrote: post #68
bamboozled wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mention climate change, the article isn't about climate change. There is nothing in there about population control. I think you read the first paragraph, got outraged and commented angrily.

No, it's just that they are more correlated than your now-deleted "if we just go nuclear it's all going to be fine" fever dream comment.

I repeat, the article isn't about climate change.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#76

Post by ChatGTP »

gklitz wrote: post #48
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #25

I've spent an awful lot of time in both Croatia and Japan, and the problem looks more or less the same in both places. Croatia has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people to other EU countries that offer higher salaries, or to Zagreb if they can't find a job in Denmark or Germany. Japan has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people from sma…

> if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese This is never going to happen going from the firsthand accounts I have heard from non-ethnically Japanese people who are by all accounts Japanese. As in born and raised in Japan, Japanese as first language, Japanese culture, norms etc. Japanese society is simply too racist or xenophobic at its core. If you…

They won't have a choice at some stage. The population is declining so rapidly, and they're struggling so hard economically they are, whether they like it or not,importing more and more immigrants and the truth is, they can be as racist as they like but it only worked when they had the clout to get away with it. It's less and less viable for them to continue on this trajectory. People might never be "accepted" but the face of Japan itself will likely be different in the future simply because they've failed to embrace change properly.

Visit Japan now and there are more and more Americans, Australian, Indian and Chinese working, buying property and setting up businesses there.

I'm not really celebrating any of this, I just don't see how an old and tired population can continue to put so much energy into xenophobia when literally one of the only things between them and China are the US military having a base on Okinawa.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#77

Post by thriftwy »

rich_sasha wrote: post #71

I never thought about it this way, but perhaps what we're seeing is the "lower classes" becoming extinct. I say this with no pleasure. We're in a world where low productivity jobs are rapidly being replaced by robots, operated by the society's richest. These aren't different species, of course, but the effect is the same. The newly-low-productivity jobs do not provide enough to afford offspring in the new reality, an…

Many of the countries claimed they are service sector dominated, until they understood that service sector jobs are basically menial, low income positions doing things that do not scale. There is proliferation of those. I can't imagine most of service sector workers ever buying a home, raising kids or having pension savings (unless they pivot to other occupations). Unless they are recent immigrants and have much lower expectations, and even then. The economy is inherently negative to that, since their direct customers are often other service sector workers, who can't just pay more for the services.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#78

Post by thriftwy »

ChatGTP wrote: post #76
gklitz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese This is never going to happen going from the firsthand accounts I have heard from non-ethnically Japanese people who are by all accounts Japanese. As in born and raised in Japan, Japanese as first language, Japanese culture, norms etc. Japanese society is simply too racist or xenophobic at its core. If you…

They won't have a choice at some stage. The population is declining so rapidly, and they're struggling so hard economically they are, whether they like it or not,importing more and more immigrants and the truth is, they can be as racist as they like but it only worked when they had the clout to get away with it. It's less and less viable for them to continue on this trajectory. People might never be "accepted" but th…

China will very soon have exactly the same "old and tired" problems. What are they going to do, beat each other with clutches while being accompanied by their drip lines? And why?

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#79

Post by thriftwy »

ang_cire wrote: post #53
singularity2001 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than genetic minimum population numbers, there should be civilization minimum population numbers, and I'd suspect modern technology would allow for a few hundred(?) million people to hold up the same standard of living and progress.

Barring an apocalyptic scenario, Earth is never going to see populations dip back below 2 billion, and honestly probably never even below 5. It's not even declining now, it's just [growing YoY at 0.8% instead of 1.2%]( https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... ). That's the "decline".

Why? Why do you assume that people ever start procreating, when they are below replacement most everywhere? When does it stop? Why do you assume it does?

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#80

Post by defrost »

thriftwy wrote: post #79
ang_cire wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barring an apocalyptic scenario, Earth is never going to see populations dip back below 2 billion, and honestly probably never even below 5. It's not even declining now, it's just [growing YoY at 0.8% instead of 1.2%]( https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... ). That's the "decline".

Why? Why do you assume that people ever start procreating, when they are below replacement most everywhere? When does it stop? Why do you assume it does?

There's a lot to be learnt from looking at population dynamics of other species; animals and plants elsewhere on the planet, particulaly those on islands and other constrained by resource environs.

It's more plausible to assume our population peaks, as predicted, then falls, and then levels out and stabilises | oscillates.

It'd be odd for it to peak and then plummet to zero from 10 or 11 billion.

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