I try to understand this worrying mindset but it still seems like short-term thinking. Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it. So we (as in, human civilization) short-term think our way into rationalizing that it'll be ok because technology will provide a solution and we don't need to make any real changes.
Now the population trend looks like it's about to reverse and we can finally see a way to a possible future without scarcity, and we short-term think that into being a problem because we might find it difficult to afford to care for our elderly anymore. But we can! The economic engine will never be more powerful than it is now: so exploit it, use it to solve the pain of population contraction while we adjust our economic and productive structures so they can serve us effectively in a world where growth isn't purely consumptive.
I'm sure this is all hopelessly naive.
Any evidence for these assumed causal relationships? Wars have been waged by small numbers of people in the past and today, migration in such general terms has always been inherent to humans, resources are depleted by mass-consumption of a tiny fraction of the global population, and hunger is caused by not distributing available food to those who need it.
These problems are hence mostly political. Again, only a tiny fraction of the global population has any significance in the relevant decisions.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of human motivation. We could do the more economical thing right now but we don't. We could have done it decades ago when there were much fewer people on the planet but we didn't. No change in the population level will alter this.
- The U.S. nuclear arsenal peaked at 31,000 warheads in the same year 1967
Why did we need more bombs when there were less people? Why was there a greater perceived threat when there were less people in the world to fight over resources? Why would reducing our population level by half cause a change in our behaviour when these factors seem to be independent?
They believe that poverty is the root cause of most human problems. For example, some of the worst despots in history, got there, escaping grinding poverty, in their youth.
When you are skint, your priorities change, and things like labor laws, ecology, and species diversity, are non-starters.
It also doesn't help, to have rich people, dancing around, showing off their wealth. That tends to breed resentment (see "war").
Probably comes from the only real solutions to poverty, are transferring portions of wealth from richer people, to poorer.
That type of discussion won't really happen, in the Halls of Power, because...
...those folks are richer, so they look for any solution that doesn't involve them, having to divest anything.
Firstly, political decisions are never made by a single person. Even the most brutal dictator needs to be enabled by his environment.
Secondly, most powerful people have always been as far away from poverty as possible. For dictators, corrupt presidents and oligarchs, growing up in a wealthy environment seems the most unifying factor among the people in such positions. They are also the ones that cause wars, poverty, starvation.
Effective leaders now how to move and sway both groups. If you sway only one group, you offend the other.
There will be a group that yearns to learn, and another that chooses a simpler life.
A group that wishes to push to the sky, and another that wishes to tend to the Earth.
Who is more right? Who should exist? Politics and War....
What happens when someone powerful chooses to give it back to the people? When a King decides to share?
To empower the man plowing the field and elevate his status. Do you think the man that was happy plowing the field will suddenly be happy running a business? If his society crumbles around him, would he still be happy?
Will the once happy plower see the good deed of his King? Or will he look for another leader, one who will return his life to something he considers normal?
Genghis Khan [1: approximately 10 to 15 million deaths during his 1206 to 1227 reign, or roughly 2.5% to 4.2% of the 360 to 400 million global human population] and his family were abandoned by his clan following his father's death by poisoning. Joseph Stalin [2: approximately 6 to 9 million deaths during his 1924 to 1953 rule, or roughly 0.2% to 0.5% of the 2.0 to 2.5 billion global human population] grew up in an impoverished family with an abusive father. Hong Xiuquan [3: approximately 20 to 30 million deaths during his 1850 to 1864 rule, or roughly 1.6% to 2.4% of the 1.25 billion global human population] was raised in a poor peasant family that sacrificed heavily for his education; his repeated failures in the imperial civil service exams triggered a psychological breakdown prior to his path. Adolf Hitler [4: approximately 17 million direct regime murder victims, or 35 to 40 million including all European WWII war deaths during his 1933 to 1945 rule, or roughly 0.7% to 1.7% of the 2.3 billion global human population] grew up lower middle class; his father's death in 1903, his mother's in 1907, and two rejections from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts left him impoverished by 1909 prior to his pursuits. Pol Pot [5: approximately 1.7 to 2.2 million deaths during his 1975 to 1979 rule, or roughly 0.04% to 0.05% of the 4.1 billion global human population, and 22% to 28% of Cambodia's population] came from a prosperous, royally connected family and lost his government scholarship in Paris after failing his exams. Mao Zedong [6: approximately 30 to 45 million deaths from the Great Leap Forward famine alone during his 1949 to 1976 rule, or roughly 1.0% to 1.5% of the 3.0 billion global human population] grew up in a prosperous farming and grain-dealing household under a strict father who had built the family's wealth from poverty, but who pulled him out of school at about 13 to work the farm and later cut off his allowance.
Evidence & Sources via latest Gemini model then grounded with Fable
1. Genghis Khan [Active Rule: 1206 to 1227]: Isolating Genghis Khan's personal campaigns [Northern China against the Jin, Western Xia, and Central Asia or Khwarazmia] from later 13th century conquests under Ögedei, Hulagu, and Kublai Khan suggests a rough estimate of 10 to 15 million deaths [an approximation drawing on census comparisons by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones in Atlas of World Population History, 1978, and historian John Man's Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection, 2004] out of a global population of approximately 360 to 400 million. 2. Joseph Stalin [Active Rule: 1924 to 1953]: Post-Soviet archival studies by historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010) and demographic historian Stephen Wheatcroft support 6 to 9 million direct and policy-induced deaths [executions, Gulag mortality, forced deportations, and the 1932 to 1933 Soviet famines] within his tenure, against a global population of approximately 2.0 to 2.5 billion [per U.S. Census Bureau historical estimates]. Older, pre-archival estimates run higher. 3. Hong Xiuquan [Active Rule: 1850 to 1864]: Sinologists Jonathan Spence (God's Chinese Son, 1996) and Ho Ping-ti estimate 20 to 30 million war, disease, and famine deaths during the Taiping Rebellion up to Hong's death and the fall of Nanjing in 1864, out of a global population of approximately 1.25 billion. 4. Adolf Hitler [Active Rule: 1933 to 1945]: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates total approximately 17 million civilians and prisoners of war murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Including European theater WWII military and civilian war deaths up to Germany's surrender in May 1945 brings the total to approximately 35 to 40 million out of the 2.3 billion global population in 1940. 5. Pol Pot [Active Rule: 1975 to 1979]: Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program estimates about 1.7 million deaths from execution, starvation, and forced labor during the Khmer Rouge's 1975 to 1979 rule, and most scholarly estimates fall between 1.7 and 2.2 million. Demographer Patrick Heuveline's reconstructions allow a wider range of roughly 1.2 to 3.4 million excess deaths. This is out of a 4.1 billion global population in 1976 [roughly 22% to 28% of Cambodia's 7.8 million population]. 6. Mao Zedong [Active Rule: 1949 to 1976]: Demographic reconstructions of the Great Leap Forward famine [1958 to 1962] by demographer Judith Banister [30 million], journalist Yang Jisheng (Tombstone, 2012, 36 million), and historian Frank Dikötter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010, at least 45 million) place famine excess deaths at 30 to 45 million out of a 3.0 billion global population in 1960. Deaths from the early 1950s campaigns and the Cultural Revolution [1966 to 1976] would add several million more. The account of his father's treatment comes largely from Mao's own 1936 interviews with journalist Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937).
- If you dropped a human on a random spot on this planet, even if we just assume land, the median number of people within a mile would be exactly 0.
I think the second thought experiment is quite informative because it's easy to lose track of the reality when we mostly travel from packed city to packed city. But these cities, and the pathways that connect them, make up a negligible percent of the Earth. China is smaller than the US, and has pretty rough geography, yet was food self sufficient with a population upwards of a billion. They only became food dependent as their economy expanded and they replaced farms with iPhone factories, metaphorically speaking at least.
Finally, population growth in the longrun will always be determined by the groups with high fertility. It's never longrun stable unless everybody has the same fertility rate. So for instance the Amish today maintain a fertility rate of around 6. This is why there are now hundreds of thousands of them, and within a few decades they'll number in the millions. As highly educated, highly secular, high income individuals remove themselves from the gene pool, they'll simply be replaced by Amish. And as the former die off, and the latter grow - we'll eventually see population growth resume.
One last point. Fertility rates also determine age ratios within a society. Low fertility = most people are elderly, high fertility = most people are young. So it's not only economic collapse due to fewer people, but you create societies where there's a much greater social cost (due to elderly care), and far fewer people to take care of them. South Korea is a great example of this. If they don't fix their fertility rate, they'll collapse as a nation within the lifespan of some people alive today. 'Breaking News 2094 - North Korea successfully invades South Korea with one tank.'
Previously (centuries ago) most of the people were like the latter group. And things changed. I would not bet that a group can remain completely unchanged in the next tens to hundreds of years. There is of course a chance, but don't think it is as clear cut as you make it sound.
> Fertility rates also determine age ratios within a society
Plus immigration. Some like and accept that, some hate it and don't like it, we will see how it plays out, but there are more things involved than just fertility rates.
There simply are not enough people to replace this sort of decline, even if you just grab anybody regardless of skills, education, or even the ability to speak your language - which is not exactly a great recipe for a healthy country. Like if 60% of the world, by population, is losing 80% of their population over that timeframe, that'd be a global population decline of 48% with only 40% of people in the rest of the world. You'd need all of them and then a good chunk of their babies too, and that's for less than one human lifetime of change.
I'd say immigration is just kicking the can, but it scarcely even counts as that given how little of an effect it can have even at theoretically absurd levels.
It's not just people across the world having less children, all fertility indicators have plummeted in the last 40 years across the world. People simply can not have more children, even if they wanted to.
We have a genuine public health crisis and we don't really know the cause.
Except of course the problems caused by insufficient population. That is: insufficient production of food, lack of infrastructure, scientific research for mitigations of climate change...
Of course these are not really caused by "insufficient population", in just the same way your problems are not really caused by "excessive population". If you push a magic button labelled "give me all the benefits of a small population and none of the downsides" then every problem is going to look like an overpopulation problem!
That does not make much sense as this is a relative limitation. If you have twice as many people you also need twice as much food. If the manpower is the problem of food availability (which it isn't really, but let's say it is) then you need to increase the fraction of people working on it, not just the absolute number.
In contrast, emissions have an absolute effect on the climate. Twice as many people doesn't mean we get to emit twice as much for the same effect. The carbon budget is per planet, not per person.
2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc
3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years and will continue reducing thanks to technological progress
In fact, I'd say contrary to you that a lot of problems are solved because of over population - we have more people, more intelligence and more technology created thereby.
There's a guy called Paul Ehrlich who prophesied end of days in very similar ways to you. He mainly blamed overpopulation and resource use and predicted something similar to a world catastrophe in 2000's. Many times. Nothing happened.
Unless we have an AI x-risk event, I assure you that people will be more prosperous 100 years from now and you'd prefer to live then than today.
I'm also very wary of this rhetoric that population is the cause of all problems. This rhetoric is very popular in certain circles and is anti-human inherently.
Edit: more lore on Paul Ehrlich: he had a bet with an economist Julian Simon that the price of metals would go up because of scarcity. His logic was that the population would increase with limited supply of raw metals. Simon OTOH bet that it would go down because of technological progress - more people would have more intelligence combined and find better ways to extract metal. Simon won btw.
If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution? I'm not even a believer that general intelligence brings out more technology creation, we've had rising university attendance in the west since the 70s but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century.
I do agree that some of the overpopulation rhetoric is anti-human but at the same time there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries like Netherlands/South Korea/Israel where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable. There's also some goods which have become increasingly expensive because of a higher population like hardwood where technology can do only so much (of course there's ersatz goods). If somehow the whole world were to live more like Americans and the population would grow even more you would increasingly see more products where tech can only do so much (e.g. copper, real red meat, fish ...).
There is a case to be made that the opposite is true. Labour scarcity in Western Europe meant significantly higher wages than in China which made investment into automation more profitable.
This is the case almost everywhere in the world.
On the topic of why China or India didn’t bring many innovations: I fundamentally don’t believe in blank slate theory. But I do believe that China is better off with higher population. I also hear that China regrets its one child policy. Good to understand the reason behind this
This sounds like asking: 'Why did I get heads when I flipped a coin? Why didn’t I get tails?'. Innovation happened everywhere (examples: printing technologies developed way before in China than in Europe, Arab numerals and others)
> but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century.
Not sure anybody can make an honest comparison. Sure, maybe that’s your opinion, but without some thorough analysis, I think it’s just an opinion.
As far as the bet goes, the wager was for a decade and Simon may have won (depending on what market used) if extended to 2026. So, like with much investing, Ehrlich may have gotten the directionality correct but the wrong timing.
I think directionally Ehrlich was quite wrong, given that he expected widespread and crippling shortages before 2000, with a much lower population than we actually have, and there's no sign of such shortages being inevitable. In particular, we are opening new extractable oil sources and switching to solar fast enough that pure market actions seem on track to where we'll be leaving cheap oil in the ground in a couple decades absent AI X-risk, and this is after we politically killed the previous tech that would have produced this result earlier: widespread fission.
I really don't understand how after these last 30 years were the Internet freedom dream became as well an en-masse surveillance and mind-control nightmare, there are still people with such a blind faith in technology and technologists that will save us all. I mean, in general I think we move 1.3 steps forward and 1 step back, so we do advance, but if we were just a bit let careless we could move the whole 1.3 steps forward without going back.
2. Sooner or later, climate change will end humanity. It has been responsible for nearly every other extinction, it would be silly to think ours will be different. It's really just about whether it's sooner or whether it's later.
3. The Ogallala aquifer will eventually reach a level where it's not economical to tap in to for agricultural purposes. Probably within our lifetime. Meanwhile, snow in the Rockys is increasingly rain in the Rockys, which means the rivers don't flow steady, but just corral floods down to the oceans. What technology is going to replace all of that water?
What makes you think this? Even in the worst case scenarios, I can imagine a smaller global population surviving in what remains.
That is a very specific version of "better off". There are many versions for which this is quite obviously not true. Anybody who wants to take a walk in pristine nature in Europe or large parts of NA needs to travel far to even have a chance of doing something resembling this. Not important you might say, well, that's your personal value judgement. Liberal democracies might also just be a temporary glitch and we're all back to dictatorships 100 years from now and I don't know how that would make us "better off" necessarily. Though that's not very related to overpopulation necessarily.
Even for your metric, life expectency has been stagnating in substantial areas. It's not a given that tech will solve that.
> 3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years
US water aquifers are approaching irreversible depletion, so I'd be careful with such statements.
> he had a bet with an economist Julian Simon that the price of metals would go up because of scarcity
Have you looked at the price of gold over the last decades?
Overall maybe, even if 2 or 3 C more in the average temperature can be hard to bear in summer in some places or require much more energy to cool us, which means that we won't be as adapted to those places as we used to be.
In some spots of the world, tough luck. I would like to see (actually I don't) what happens if the sea rises a few meters. Will the people in the north east of Italy and China build coastal dams and raise river beds or let those regions go underwater and migrate somewhere else? There are certainly some areas of the USA that will go underwater too (Florida? NYC?)
And what if the Gulf Stream really stops and Western Europe gets the same climate of the regions of the USA and Canada at the same latitudes?
In 100 years our technology would be so advanced that people would be much much more prosperous. Ok sure a few cities drown but people move and adapt.
I still hold ground on the fact that people will be more prosperous in 100 years with sea level rising - in the sense that a person would prefer to live then rather than now
Some places are going to lose their sources of drinking water and others will face deadly heat. Either way millions of people are going to get displaced every year.
As Prof. Bartlet wondered, would you base US energy policy on the plan to go and get another Star and drag it back to the Solar system?
Talk: Arithmetic, Population and Energy from 20+ years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY
I'm reasonably extrapolating much like most economists would.
Also here's my other bet: even the WORST areas in the planet would see prosperity and better living conditions in 100 years compared to today. That's how it has always been, unless you come up with tail risks due to climate change which I don't personally buy.
There will be enough food for people to live there, yes. But agricultural yield is expected to go down by ~20% or so if emissions continue. And people sitting in worse spots are not just going to sit there and wait for the flood and die. There will be wars about who gets the resources from the new best places.
2) Development of internal combustion motors and their application in agricolture.
Trad econ has as much predictive value as fantasy football.
even if the tail risks do happen like ice sheet melting, it is over 1000s of years before it truly makes an impact. And even then the impact is minor in grand scale of things.
You could always find some looney model that predicts the world would end if we don’t control emission. Agree to disagree on that.
> But we can!
Unless we get robots to replace nurses etc. in retirement homes no we can't...
I agree with your overall point, but this is a bit too simplistic. Even with just 10% of the current population, if we'd build as many AI data centers that we are doing today and beyond and power them all with coal and oil, climate change would not end up much different.
How many we are is a substantial factor, but how we behave also is.
Or are you proposing we make sure all age groups degrow at the same rate? Because that's the one way to make population decline actually work for us (for some values of "us").
Their only practical goal is to give the government more power and to force you to pay more taxes. Don’t try to find any more rationality in it than that.
I mean, yeah. If there were no people, there would be no wars.
Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.
That requires growth.
The next generation, the ones that are supposed to benefit from this, will be left paying the bill and dealing with the fallout. Forget about growth, mere stagnation will feel like a dream outcome when the systems we took for granted start collapsing - food and water shortages, mass migrations of people who used to prop up lifestyles of rich countries. Natural disasters that increase to the point where you're stuck in a perpetual cycle of rebuilding and trying to mitigate the next one.
Those people won't thank us for our "enlightened" pursuit of growth, they'll talk about our abject arrogance and ignorance in disbelief.
This phenomenon stopped a long time ago in the USA - with each successive generation since the 1940s, wealth has concentrated further in older generations.
Of course that's largely because the supply of various asset classes (i.e. housing) ceased to grow at their previous rates, so prices have skyrocketed, and the capital gains accumulate to the older generations who own the most property.
People today are MUCH better off on just about every dimension than in the 1940s!
You'd rather go live in the 1940s? Or do you think someone living in the 1940s wouldn't rather live today?
He never said living standards were better in the 40s.
I wouldn't be too worried about it, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it and it is over sensationalized.
Just enjoy the warmer winters and more tropical summers. And I definitely wouldn't stop whole economic progress only because Toronto got a bit longer vegetation period and less rain.
It's a boon for the northern hemisphere countries, now we start to get all these vineyards that were previously thought to be a mediterranean luxury. Winters are milder and more tolerable. Summers are luxuriously tropical. Palm trees can be grown in the backyard and olives.
More often than not when I look upon the weather radar, I pray for it to get warmer just a little bit more. There are still too many cold, merciless nights but it is getting better, albeit slowly.
grapes absolutely do not require a mediterranean climate, they grow in places as cold as USDA zone 3
End interest payments to banks from central banks.
Levy a micropercentage Tobin tax on all forex transactions.
End Citizens United and make penalties for political corruption much harsher.
For example.
By making retirement unfeasible until you are 80? That might be tricky...
Now will this be true going forward? Not sure, that's where you can argue.
If there are insufficient quantities of younger people to care for all the old people, no amount of money causes the system to work. Quality of life will go down.
Unless we figure out how to get the robots to do it.
If you increase demand for labour (more people getting old needing more care, more doctors) and reduce supply for labour (fewer people working), then the cost of labour will skyrocket.
Put 5 billionaires on an island and 1 carer. How much will the carer charge to care for an hour. They auction their time, and the bidding starts at £1m an hour.
IMO 1.9 or even 1.7 wouldn't be something to worry too much about (many economists would disagree). But going even below there, and adjusting very fast is worrisome. It guarantees a socioeconomic shock.
Put another way, if you adopted this posture at the dawn of nuclear weapons you would be wrong to do so. Yes, you would be wrong to have done do even though we haven't had a nuclear exchange (yet). The risk is there. Arguing solely on the basis that it hasn't happened to date is like a gambler asserting he was 'right' when he bets the farm in Roulette and wins.
There are some caveats to the above but, unless you are prepared to assert no risk could be catastrophic, it is the correct posture.
Roulette is a finite game. Life is an infinite game.
That is because these nations want those industrialised benefits remaining limited to populations of certain language, certain nationality, certain skin colour, certain ancestry, etc – i.e., ignoring few rare exceptions and nuances it can be just summed as a "certain race" – as uncouth as it sounds, or "not very civilised talk" like.
null hypothesis extrapolation from past data
The only other point you made (and then violated) was "don't extrapolate too simply from past examples". Your simple extrapolation / reasoning by analogy was "we're at peak population when projections pointed towards population explosion, therefore we won't hit superintelligence."
Had you used clear analysis, reasoning, or argumentation rather than just baseless extrapolation (peak population, therefore superintelligence can't happen), I wouldn't have chuckled at your self-contradicting comment.
"In the past, the US government has always been able to take on more debt even when people projected it would run out, therefore we'll always be able to have more intelligence until we reach super-intelligence" is the same (and equally invalid reasoning) you presented.
"Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic. [...] Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space."
I am about as worried about data centers in space as I am about jetpacks disrupting the flying car market.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
Is there an opposite phrase for this? Where someone is never worried? Even though there are disasters all around him.
>As a result of the novel's success, the adjective "Pollyannaish" and the noun "Pollyannaism"[2] became popular terms for a personality type characterised by irrepressible optimism evident in the face of even the most adverse or discouraging of circumstances. It is sometimes used pejoratively, referring to someone whose optimism is excessive to the point of naïveté or refusing to accept the facts of an unfortunate situation.
Isn’t this catastrophizing? I’m trying to think of an example where there are disasters all around someone that precludes them from navigating it. Do you have an example?
From Voltaire's Candide. Doc Pangloss was always happy as the world was burning around himself.
Yup because governments are always ever more indebted and their only out of the public debt --which they never ever intended to repay-- was through inflation due to unlimited growth.
That's why they're worried. Population decline, if it's not too abrupt, ain't necessarily a bad thing: less pollution, work for everybody, more housing for everybody, etc.
But our entire lives we've been hammered with messages we don't ever dare to question anymore like "2% to 3% inflation is good".
That's why Europe is desperately importing tens of millions in a few years from the third world and the fourth world: desperate politicians, who want to continue running their public deficits scam, do believe they'll compensate people "not having enough kids" by bringing massively people from Africa and the Middle East and India into Europe. They do believe this shall allow them to keep the ponzi (pensions / 2% to 3% inflation / public debt / etc.) running.
The population explosion, on the other hand...well we've already baked in extremely severe consequences, and people are learning that when you have more vying for the same, there are consequences.
One is a legitimate, extremely severe problem that is going to cause enormous harm to humanity. The other is fake.
I guess if global warming is fixed in the future, you will also come up and say huh, those predictions about global warming are too simplistic, we are fine.
Yes, one of the stupidest policy decisions in human history. China will start having massive demographic issues than they would have otherwise but in hindsight it just shifted them by a couple of decades.
If you haven't watched it, Soylent Green with Edward G Robinson and Charlton Heston is an illustration of this (no spoilers please!) It was based on Harry Harrison's novel Make Room, Make Room where population growth was out of control, and human life was worth so little that the police used mechanical scoops to clear rioters from the streets.
And then on the other side, we have Blade Runner where Earth's population is declining because of off-world colonization and replicants are created for labor.
If you wish to avoid spoilers, do not watch the trailer. I remember talking to my kids about the movie and then watching the trailer, and it gives away pretty much 100% of the movie.
The West was in no way contributing to "overpopulation". It was other areas of the globe that were causing problems.
I recently read Niven's ringworld (1970). All the intelligent species had overpopulation problems, dealing with it in different ways. It was just a given that it was an inevitable consequence of an advanced species.
It was really jarring to consider it. I'm old enough to remember the (now recognised as disastrous) one child policy of China but even so the way it was presented as "of course there have to be population controls" actually took me out of the narrative.
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
interesting, that even in 1960 some were thinking about that "there may be a fixed date of end of the world" - usually you would think those thoughts are exclusive to whatever religion, no: This 66 years ago, a time when there was already enough scientific breakthrough to reflect wisely on the idea of "a fixed end date for end of world"
:)
I think this can be taken 2 ways.
1) This is more an instance of "see clickbait was a thing in 1960"
2) There have always been and will always be people that believe that. See 2012 or a random person on the Las Vegas strip preaching it.
Villains of the first order!
Anyway, the question: "Why is there no Darwinian devil?" Is a nice starter for starting to understand the enormous variation found in our biosphere. Of course, we are as close to a Darwinian devil as any species ever came because we make our own niche by tearing other's down. Resistance is futile. Of course, tearing other's down will also tear our own niche down because they are all connected, at least, our old niche is. Can we build a new one fast enough? Or should we stop tearing our niche down?
We don't have the evolutionary intelligence to manage a planetary ecosystem without destroying it through overconsumption.
Intelligence is partly about scope. The smarter you are, the wider your predictive horizon.
Humans are semi-smart - good at small/medium problems, not smart enough to understand, build and maintain very complex multimodal systems with many moving parts.
Ecosystems we dependon for survival are shrinking, becoming I hospitable to life or straight up disappearing.
(Emphasis mine)
The unreality of frictionless perfectly spherical cows strikes again...
Also, check out that lovely vintage emdash use!
Narrator: it didn't
Not as bad as when Character.ai changed its models / went under though. I hope the people that developed parasocial relationships with LLMs ended up alright.
Does a population of infinity suggest “get off my lawn” no longer works?
Black hole made of humans, what a thought.