Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic. We're approaching peak global population and almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days. Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space.
How is "I disagree with this extrapolation of energy/compute needs/AI progress because it doesn't take into effect emerging restrictions and feedback loops" the same as doing my own extrapolation?
Re-read your comment it says "almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days. Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space."
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.
Worried in economic terms though, because the foundation of that is an assumption of continuing growth?
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.
> 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.
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.
I think maybe both of you are correct, in a sense - the population growth provides means (labor, competition, consumption) for increasingly extractive and unequal society.
While I tend to agree with you, I find the Japanese are incredibly innovative and they are not growing. Maybe I should look at the rate of innovation and see if that has stalled out with population growth?
Not major disruptive innovations, but the gadgets that do all kinds of little quality of life things. They have innovative solutions to so many of the small things in life. And a society where you can invent and bring to market quirky little products that do cool stuff.
I have heard this before...in what sense would adding population result in more innovation rather than having a more supportive environment for the people we already have (healthcare, education, financing, etc).
Simply more nodes for experiences to bounce through, so long as they have ways to communicate enough to copy, recombine, and incrementally improve on their activity. The more people copying, recombining, and improving on stuff, the more innovation.
Often easier to consider this in terms of competitive sports, though you could check seshatdb or something to see if it holds at scale. For example, YouTube really changed a lot with sports.
Population growth drives the competition for jobs, which encourages education as a means of achieving social status and a higher salary, which enables the research that produces knowledge. Highly unequal wealth distributions then enable wealthy individuals to spend vast amounts on moonshot projects that turn knowledge into technology. These things still happen without the population growth or inequality, just slower than when the pressure to advance is high. People without that pressure will tend to make more conservative choices about what to study or research, make fewer irrational investments, and spend less time working (because wages are higher when you're not in competition for jobs).
You figure our society is "increasingly extractive and unequal"? That may be true relative to post-WW2 America, but on a larger scale--either historically or geographically--can you really hold that modern society is more extractive and unequal than slave societies, serfdoms, and empires of the past?
Honestly, population growth has, if anything, correlated to increasingly equal and egalitarian societies.
Wealth inequality is largely irrelevant outside of limited goods like real estate. The poorest today live lives that much more closely resemble the lives of the wealthiest of today than was the case even 100 years ago. Access (to resources, shelter, entertainment, etc) inequality is far lower than in the past. Social inequality is lower than ever before. 50-60 years ago the US was still de jure racially segregated in many places.
Huh, I was thinking a bit more of this video [0], but I suppose there is an immanence/machinic element to molochy capitalism that I may have gotten from Deleuze and Guattari
I think you're over focusing on the decision making. If there were few of us, building replacements for our engines would be more economical than bombing our neighbors to influence gas prices. Even if its just one maniac who decided the bombs were necessary, they did so against a background that would encourage other behavior if we had fewer people.
> If there were few of us, building replacements for our engines would be more economical than bombing our neighbors to influence gas prices.
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.
I don't know what you mean. Of course we could have, but we didn't. We didn't because building 10,000 electric cars vs 10,000 bombs is a no brainer, but building 500,000,000 cars vs the same 10,000 bombs is a different kind of problem (i.e. a politically difficult one if your constituents aren't keen on factory work).
- World population in 1967 was around 3.5 billion people, less than half of our current population
- 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?
> Why did we need more bombs when there were less people
Bombs don't really scale with #people do they? I'm not a military expert of any kind but I would expect the number of bombs required to end humanity is really more a function of how much landmass people occupy?
Eg if you have a nuclear bomb that levels a city block it does not matter if 100 people live there or 10000, it pretty much just kills everyone there?
The number of nuclear weapons needed is more a function of reliability and accuracy than of population density. The older delivery platforms were much less accurate. That doesn't matter for targeting entire cities but it matters a lot when targeting hardened military sites that might survive a near miss. Now accuracy is much better so fewer weapons are needed to achieve the same deterrence effect.
I feel like we agree: The amount of force necessary to be an effective bully is independent of population.
And its pretty obvious that the amount of oil necessary to run an economy is population dependent.
So one is a constant and the other is a function with positive slope. The lines cross at some point. To the left of that point you get investment in renewables, to the right of it you get war. Therefore whether or not war occurs is population dependent, since its a choice between the two.
I mean, this is all given some totally awful blend of shortsightedness and cruelty. But that does seem to be the blend our leaders are using these days.
Plenty of examples of conflicts and wars without scarcity. Greed is deeply ingrained in humans and leaders are willing to sacrifice a lot just to gain more, even though they are objectively well off.
1. Wars are fewer than before, we are killing fewer people per capita
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.
"i assure you". Provides no tangible evidence. Ecosystem breakdown is much more of a tangible societal risk than whatever those infantile LLMs are at this time. Like it or not (unless you are a bot), you need to eat, have access to clean water. Not a huge challenge right now if you live in the western world. Not so much already in other areas on this planet. I smell hints of technosolutionism in your answer and I don't like it a bit. We won't SaaS our way out of the ecological mess we're creating.
> 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
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?
I’d like to compare the standard of living for the median person in your hypothetical situation where sea level rises.
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
Yikes, might need to send you back to the books to see what happens when a large number of people are displaced all at once.
Look at America/Trump right now with economic immigrants alone. This caused half the country to go "Yea, locking up people in cages and letting losers with guns shoot whoever they want while supporting an authoritarian regime is perfectly ok". Just what do you think it's going to look like when the numbers are 10x that from inside the country alone (a huge amount of the population lives close to the ocean).
Advanced technology has nothing to do with wealth equality and with the costs of making said technology it may be even further reverse correlated in the future.
I know this is HN, but this is such a technocratic view. “Technology is both our savior and the only risk we need to be concerned with.” Even the AI risk you outlined is exceptionally narrow. Even without AI, we still face significant nuclear technological risk.
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.
Per Claude, if you use Chinese prices for the metals (especially tungsten) Simon still wins from 1980-2026. If you use US prices, Ehrlich wins. Copper is the only metal with a market price above the 1980 value, but tungsten is export-controlled by China, so much more expensive in the West.
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 know this is HN, but this is such a technocratic view.
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.
"we have more people, more intelligence and more technology created thereby."
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 ...).
While housing may be specifically costlier today, overall people have much more to spend, even in the Netherlands after accounting for inflation.
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
While they regret it, it doesn't mean that they could have done nothing at the same time. Quite often in life you have to choose between many bad choices and no good ones.
> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution
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.
> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution?
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.
> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution?
England had high population density concentrated in towns, trade with different cultures, high demand for labor after they banned slavery, a tradition of craftsmanship and invention, and a class of people who had a secure income but couldn't grow it easily. All of these factors came together at a time when modern science was becoming established.
India at the time had a rigid social hierarchy where it just wasn't possible to move up no matter how rich you got, and everyone was used to that so there was no real attempt to change things. China's population was high but too evenly distributed and they never had as much cultural diversity as Europe.
> there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries ... where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable
Worse quality of life for you. I would take a cramped studio in the most notorious neighborhood over a nice house in a village where nothing ever happens. Boredom would kill me. If it was up to me I would have everyone live in cities and leave the countryside for agriculture with workers coming there on month long shifts as needed. And I think there are more like us.
Economist Julian Simon was an energy advisor to the US government and said that if we use all the energy in the Sun there may be other stars out there.
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?
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.
Depends what timeframe you're talking about. As stars burn they get hotter, and eventually bigger. So yes, climate change will eventually end humanity though this would be the later scale.
>smaller global population surviving
This is just an unfound assumption on your part. Passenger pigeons went from billions of birds to extinct in less than a century. There are hundreds of different scenarios around climate change and disease evolution alone that could wipe us pretty quickly and a rapidly falling population would make it worse quickly as things like new medicines could not be developed quickly enough, or more technology couldn't be created fast enough (unless we have full AGI working on itself, but then you have alignment being its own problem).
Passenger pigeons did not have the capacity to alter their environment.
I simply find it unlikely that any amount of climate change (beyond the eventual death of our sun) will result in the complete elimination of humanity.
Yes, there are many likely bad scenarios that would drastically reduce the population.
The easy scenario to imagine where humans become extinct due to climate change is the scarcity of resources that will lead to the drastically reduced population will cause full on nuclear war to secure those scarce resources. Given our history I actually find it quite plausible. "If I can't have it nobody will."
Forever? I mean we'll probably be long gone by the time this happens but eventually changes to the nature of the sun will strip us of our atmosphere. That too will be climate change.
What sort of non-climate-threat do you suppose will take us out?
2. A big change in the climate will end humanity one day. I am skeptical it will be human caused climate change. Much higher probability it comes from asteroid or another exogenous event. The climate has always been dynamic, and it has been much more dynamic in the distant past.
> 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
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?
"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"
I highly doubt that if we don't do ANYTHING about emissions. Much of world's agriculture depends on predictable weather. If world's big bread baskets get disrupted badly enough, food prices will rise so much that starvation becomes a big problem in much of the world. Rich people may be OK, others not so much.
Sure, you can mitigate some of the impact with technology, but probably not enough, at least not fast enough.
Have you thought about what kind of world we're leaving behind for the next generation? What's left of this "growth" will be captured by people who are currently alive.
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.
> Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.
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!
Sure, but that wasn't the premise. Young people (< age 55) today have a far smaller share of current total wealth than young people did of total wealth in 1940.
And until 1940, each generation accumulated a greater share of value than the generation before. Post-1940, each subsequent generation has a smaller and smaller slice of the pie.
>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
I mean, yeah. If there were no people, there would be no wars.
How does a declining population where one worker has to support multiple retirees solve any of that, though? All these degrowth arguments fail to address the age pyramid question, which is the fundamental reason economists are warning against population decline.
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").
It’s typical leftist pseudo-rebellion. Lofty words, with just enough of an argument to convince the average college student that it’s a good idea.
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.
The issue is not so much the decreasing population but that fact that its aging too fast and the proportion of productive working age people will continue to shrink.
> But we can!
Unless we get robots to replace nurses etc. in retirement homes no we can't...
Earth is going to have a different climate there is no doubt about it. More akin to the times where Greenland was actually green.
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.
I am worried in terms of "holy shit, humanity is literally going extinct".
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.
A simplistic explanation is that previous high fertility rates were based on subjugation of the female populations. As that has relaxed women have decided not to have as many, or even any, children.
I don't know why, but quite a lot of men I know and even more that I read about seem to be obsessed with wanting kids more than any stereotypical chick brimming with estrogens would. They would totally divorce their wives if they hadn't given them children. I don't know how many of them dream of becoming a patriarch like them biblical people or something, but this is what it is /shrug
What my original comment said was that we have a global fertility crisis, not due to social changes (although these also play a role), but because biologically a lot of people simply can not have children any more (or it's a lot more difficult than it used to be).
Responding that women's emancipation is the cause for very real global health issues was the non-sequitur here.
Your claim that total fertility rate being sub replacement rate mostly due to biological inability to have children is not seen in any data I have seen.
All the trends correspond directly to women’s emancipation (although men also probably want fewer children).
I am well aware that this is not a mainstream view (yet), but the rate of decline in fertility in the past 20 years is not something that can be explained through social changes alone. Even in Afghanistan fertility has taken a nosedive and the social situation for women there has definitely not improved.
- Imagine you dug a hole 1 mile deep and 1 mile wide. How many humans do you think you could fit into it? The answer is about 60 billion, many times the current global population.
- 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.'
> And as the former die off, and the latter grow - we'll eventually see population growth resume.
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.
Immigration is largely irrelevant at the current rates of decline for many reasons. A simple one, and without any controversy, is plain old numerics. A shared fertility rate of 1 will trend towards you losing approximately 2.5% of your population per year, compounding. This is why Japan's current deterioration will be seen as the 'good ole days' in the future - they're currently "only" losing about 0.5% per year. So after 80 years, a single human lifetime, your population declines by 87%.
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.
The problem is rates never stay the same. What you say is correct, if nothing changes. But things do change (for one, population is decreasing).
Let me put it another way, if a pandemic would reduce the world population by 50%, what do you think birth rates would do?
Now, if your argument is "it will soon be a shitty time to be old and it will last for a while", with that I do fully agree. The old people of today have it much easier than the old people in 30 years. But people in 80 years might have enough (resources, space, etc.) to start making children again at different rates.
I would say we will live and see, but doubt it is the case for that long periods...
You can't even assume that Amish population growth will remain constant! See e.g. https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-.... We also don't know what will happen to Amish retention as the population grows, or what will happen if the population spreads into previously non-Amish areas -- it's just really hard to predict what's going to happen multiple decades in the future.
In general I don't disagree, but more because of the rest of society than the Amish. Every country that's entered into fertility crisis has basically started freaking out and none are anywhere near the worst of it yet. It's only the countries that will be in fertility crisis, but aren't there yet that still have some people think it just comes down to being kind of like now, but with fewer people. I think there's no way the status quo simply continues on. The country to keep an eye on will be China. They're having a catastrophic fertility crisis, have long-term oriented leadership, and have a strong precedent for some fairly batshit means to 'adjust' fertility.
There's also the issue that I don't think I'm a snowflake. Fertility has become a big issue for me and is part of the reason I now have children - not as many as I'd like, but infinitely more than I was thinking about having not that long ago. I've come to view it as a core social responsibility since cultures/societies literally cannot exist without people having enough babies, and I think more people are coming to see it this way as well.
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population
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!
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population
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.
I don't think there has ever been a period of time when economic growth has been decoupled from population growth. If you look at the curves, they're basically the same. So that's a bit of a problem.
Climate change being caused by too many people is oversimplifying. We have had 40 years of inaction by most world leaders with the power to do something. The global economy is run by terrible, cynical, self-interested people. We could be powered by solar, wind and nuclear by now.
> Super-polluting plumes were also seen in the US, the largest detected in 2025 occurring in Texas and leaking 5.5 tonnes of methane per hour, equivalent to running about a million fuel-guzzling SUVs.
Very aptly put wrt population.
It boils down to misplaced values.
A lot of decisions like led lights have to do with ignoring the value of human wellness.
Even near sight is a privilege and a luxury, yet it's abused by small font on paper for the non trivial literature.
If you're comparing the decline of hundreds of millions of people, economic disasters, entire countries disappearing - with that of small fonts, I think you need some perspective.
> 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.
Framing the issue of elder care in population decline as a financial one misses the mark, I think. I think it'll be more about not having enough people wanting to work in elder care.
The techbros who publicly fret about population decline are worried about white population decline. Population decline in the West is easily managed by letting more non-Western people in. It's not like Germany/UK/US/France have a monopoly on intelligence and hard work.
Globally small economies outside the West don't depend on continuous growth, and a "soft landing" where population declines but gradually and possibly asymptotically is not a threat to the economy.
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population
Absolutely not. We have the technology to feed multiples of the population, house everybody, and give all modern comforts to everybody. The reason why it is not happening is that the economic system needs to induce artificial scarcity to profit.
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population
Except they aren't. This is the old Malthusian claim and it has been debunked time and again.
> Wars
Historically, war has been on a downward trajectory for a long time, certainly when measured by the violence and death any given person is likely to experience. Most war is not about the scarcity of resources. It is usually about power, the desire to dominate others, greed, and other intangibles, and of course defending oneself from such actors.
> migration
Like war, this claim is reducible to the one about limited resources, because "overpopulation" (whatever that means) per se is not a cause of anything. People generally migrate because somewhere else looks better in some way, usually because the destination is economically better developed and have better institutions. This has nothing to do with absolute resources, but with the standard of living in their home country relative to the standard elsewhere. Refugees and so on are a very small percentage of any global migration.
> resource depletion
This claim begins with a current understanding of the available resources. What we have found instead is that with more people, we have more resourcefulness and discovery. Farming is an excellent example. Innovation in agriculture tracks population growth. Today, we have more food than any of our ancestors would have dreamed of. We waste enormous amounts of food.
> hunger, water scarcity
Famine is nonexistent in the developed world and almost completely absent everywhere else. Most hunger is a matter of resource misallocation, not because there isn't enough to go around.
> we can finally see a way to a possible future without scarcity
This misunderstands scarcity, as if it were some fixed piece of pie on the table before us. According to this simplistic understanding, yeah, sure, you'll have to slice up that pie into thinner and thinner pieces until eventually everyone gets close to nothing. But this is not how things work. In practice, the more people there are, the more labor and ingenuity there is that scales non-linearly (including those caused by agglomeration effects and specialization). People will not only find new pies, but they will find things other than pies, or ways to replenish the supply in a renewable way.
> The economic engine will never be more powerful than it is now
Bold claim. History does not support it. Population contraction doesn't have to last forever and we can't know how economies will unfold.
> where growth isn't purely consumptive
I will say here that consumerism is a real problem, because it is not only wasteful in a number of ways, but it entrenches a habit of thinking that consumption is the purpose of life rather than a means to support it. Look at where the most consumption and waste occurs and you'll find it doesn't align with population density as a simplistic account of human beings would suggest.
What population contraction might achieve in the interim is that it may force a course correction. People are very stubborn and easily attached to bad habits, to the point that entire economic and political orders are reshaped and become dependent on those bad habits to function, entering into a vicious cycle that entrenches these very habits and bakes them into a common cultural sensibility of what is normative. We have refused to wean ourselves off the drug of consumerism, which I claim is one of the primary, fundamental, and underlying ideological and cultural causes and drivers of population contraction because the imperatives of consumption conflict with having children. As a result, we suffer the self-destructive consequences, and these consequences may very well force us into abandoning consumerism because it will have been made impossible to sustain. Time will tell.
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?
The parent was implying that if one prediction of disaster is false, then they are all false. So don't worry about anything. More of a head in sand approach to navigation.
Ah I see. So you're advocate that one pays attention to all possible disasters because one or more might come true, so be super vigilant all the time for all possible disasters.
>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.
We have structured our global financial system around young people paying taxes to pay for the costs of the retired generations. Population decline is a real problem we will soon be facing head on.
Well structuring the global financial system is one thing, but we really need assume very little about finance. If someone is retired they aren't working, so almost by definition others still working must provide for them.
It's not taxes that's the problem, you can't magically solve the problem by storing cash or gold under your bed.
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.
History is the process of oil getting into everything. The financial system is a structure for distributing surplus energy founded on growth resulting from accessing a material which can do 500 people's worth of work in a single barrel.
No, this is not the case at the moment. The previous generation HAS paid lots of taxes, social insurance and retirement in order to pay for themselves. So let's not make up fantasies here.
Now will this be true going forward? Not sure, that's where you can argue.
Ultimately, old people need help with ~everything. A stack of dollar bills cannot care for you; it can only be used to pay other people to care for you.
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.
I wonder how that got started. Seems like someone must have gotten a free ride in the beginning. It must have seemed like a great idea to those who initially benefitted because they never had to pay in.
Wonder if we can convince the paperclip maximizer to raise its standards of living and get a graduate degree, thereby delaying the age at which it decides to make paperclips or discourage it altogether, all the while rising costs and social isolation make it unlikely to reach replacement levels
Assuming zero other outside knowledge, this can be fine heuristic. But we do have ways of independently evaluating each risk on its merits.
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.
The way I think of it: a world in which the apocalypse happens looks just like one in which it doesn’t, right up to that point where it starts to fall apart.
Or in joke form: an optimist falls out of a skyscraper window. As he plummets past the 10th floor he thinks: so far, so good!
Worrying is necessary, just as important as making progress. The overpopulation worries made big progress in birth controls which is primary reason of this current population. If not for that, one can argue that we could have a different world right now. I personally think we are already downplaying climate risk by a lot and we shouldn't be downplaying the risk of AI as well.
Population decline is only a concern for pyramid scheme economics boosters, and is sold to the public based upon fear mongering nonsense that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. In many ways population decline could be a panacea.
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.
One of the major contributor to global population decline is one-child policy of china, which is a direct result of such type of predictions (not saying its a correct one, but a reverse self-fulfilling one).
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.
> One of the major contributor to global population decline is one-child policy of china,
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.
Of course. But this time, the world will really end, because the thousands of historical examples of extrapolation being hilariously wrong never apply to the future.
Since when were concerns about superintelligence based on extrapolations from data? The addition of data is a newcomer to that concern. Most of its history it was criticized as pure theory.
> ... and almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days.
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.
How does a thought experiment which deliberately simplifies things beyond all reason show that most predictions are too simplistic? You might as well take that Jensen Huang joke going around with a graph showing infinite mistresses within a few years as an example.
The problem with a sudden collapse of birthrates in most of the industrialised world is the instability it will cause. A bunch of large countries have seen their birthrates drop from 3+ per female to <2 per female, in some cases as low as 0.9-1.2. At the same countries there are a bunch of countries, typically poorer countries in terms of GDP per capita, that still have fast growing populations. This causes a massive pressure for mass migrations from very different cultures, as well as strong generational imbalances. Ideally most of the world would gravitate towards stable 2.1 replacement rates, or not too far from it.
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.
> Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space.
Perhaps you would also believe that a devastating financial crash is better for humanity if it leads to having super intelligence in space and abundance.
Maybe you should look at places such as Japan to see what a nation in decline looks like.
After all, this is the HN bubble showing their naivety with the rest of the world.
However, everybody who disagreed with the prediction when it was made was quite extremely wrong for many years. Even when you know something has to eventually flatten, it can be difficult to foretell when.
I read about this paper in a great book called "More Everything Forever", by Adam Becker, which outlines the faulty assumptions baked into the apocalyptic/utopian tech ideologies that have a good percentage of silicon valley mistaking a sigmoidal curve for an exponential.
> "Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic"
IMO the actual mechanism is people ignore non-itineraries and assume that trends will continue upwards at the same exponential rate with no down force. Often at the start of a trend it hasn't triggered or hit against the hard limits, for example Moore's law hitting quantum mechanics.
It's so common I wish there was a pithy "logical fallacy" name for it, almost every extrapolation suffers from it, from superintelligence to housing prices and the stock market.
Overpopulation was a big topic in the early 1970's, with competing dire predictions.
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.
Blade Runner is a very interesting exception, while depopulation has become common in speculative fiction these days having it as part of something from the 80s was pretty rare. I don't know when the overpopulation/depopulation switch flipped in fiction, but I think it was pretty recently.
Blade Runner the movie looks anything except depopulated. Well, excluding the vast empty building where Deckard lives. The city is enormous and literally blowing up gigantic amounts of energy and pollution; the streets are packed with people, languages, and clutter of all types (a PKD obsession). In some ways it is fully within the overpopulation zeitgeist of the times.
Busy everywhere but also downtown is full of empty buildings and you still need to commute from Glendale even if you're an LA detective running down replicants.
Isaac Asimov's Daneel Olivaw series of books had the overpopulated Earth alright, but it also had spacer colonies on distant planets that very much kept their populations at a sensible level and were magnificently wealthy in comparison because of it (and robots).
there's a short story, which i think is Asimov's, about a probe reaching earth. and it only detects two life forms in a fully automated planetary extraction mechanism. And those two are forever occupied trying to struggle the remaining half from one another.
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.
> If you haven't watched it, Soylent Green with Edward G Robinson and Charlton Heston is an illustration of this (no spoilers please!)
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.
> Blade Runner where Earth's population is declining because of off-world colonization and replicants are created for labor
The Expanse series (James SA Corey) makes a rather different prediction about the effects of plentiful (or at least mostly sufficient) food coupled with a decreased need for human labor.
In that story, in the future there are far more people than jobs (only on Earth--not so for off-world settlements). As a result, most Earthers are effectively on welfare, including many people who want to have a job. With little or nothing else to do, they start having more children, which results in the population of Earth increasing to ~30 billion.
TLDW: People in the past had more kids more often because of high mortality rate and having a care-taker (mother) at home.
With child mortality being lower, plus women entering the workforce and enjoying a higher standard of living, most people won't want to have more than ~2 children. They want to spend their money on having a higher quality life rather than subsistance and survival.
So big it seems it resonated so well well into the 21st century and in everyone that cannot or refuses to procreate. I'm quite sure not so many became anti-natalist overnight, so it must've been some other reason to restrain so good as to have so many nation's population decline. Cannot be only the theory that lux brings reduction of babies born.
What about the Claude outage though? Millions wept.
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.
The lead author did some interesting work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_von_Foerster . I enjoyed this paper, it starts serious then goes a bit tongue-in-cheek (at least I interpret it like that). It would interesting to plot data from 1960 to now on their Figure 1 to see where the model diverges.
As a biologist, in year 1 you learn why the world is not overgrown with bacteria that double every 30 mins. Restrictions. From there follow niches, evolution through natural selection on population levels working on existing variation and more slowly on new variation. Evolutionary arms races, etc.
Anyway the question: "Why is there no Darwinian devil?" Is a nice starter for getting into biology. 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. I hope we don't tear down our own niche at some point (we already started that of course, I know, I know)...
Agree. Humans are atypically successful because we don't simply adapt to existing environments... we actively "transform" (destroy) environments to suit ourselves.
I suspect there would be no lawn as such, because a population of infinity would create a singularity wherein everything exists and / or ceases to exist. Possibly creating something new, but who knows?
Apparently today would've also been his 115th birthday! I sometimes wonder what he would have thought about (*gesturing broadly at everything*) all this.
I enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek, dry writing style of the paper already. The fact that he chose his own birthday as doomsday shows even more that he had a great sense of humor.
That title bothered me too. If a trend continues, that means it would be exactly as much "approaching infinity" in 2026 as it was in 1960. It would also be exactly as finite in 2026 as it was in 1960.
That's incorrect. They did fit the population growth to a hyperbolic curve, which predicts (predicted) an infinite population in finite time: a singularity. It hyperbolic growth does not approach infinity, it actually reaches it.
Of course a singularity can't happen in reality, so this paper was in jest. (And in fact population growth stopped fitting a hyperbolic curve shortly after it came out.)
That did seem strange to me until I realized they were just describing a vertical asymptote. It doesn't make sense for such a thing to exist when the x axis is a time, but I think it's meant to be tongue in cheek and preposterous.
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"
Highly recommend "When We Cease to Understand the World" by Labatut, a lot of it concerns the different strains of apocalyptic thinking among the early 20th century scientists.
The fact that they arrived at a Friday the 13th as doomsday tells me there was likely some bias and possibly magical thinking in there, like the universe is somehow poetic.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 37.9 ms ] threadnull 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.
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.
To me it feels like their most rapid period of innovation was post World War II as the population was growing very rapidly.
Often easier to consider this in terms of competitive sports, though you could check seshatdb or something to see if it holds at scale. For example, YouTube really changed a lot with sports.
Honestly, population growth has, if anything, correlated to increasingly equal and egalitarian societies.
To be clear, I am agreeing with you.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8
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?
Bombs don't really scale with #people do they? I'm not a military expert of any kind but I would expect the number of bombs required to end humanity is really more a function of how much landmass people occupy?
Eg if you have a nuclear bomb that levels a city block it does not matter if 100 people live there or 10000, it pretty much just kills everyone there?
And its pretty obvious that the amount of oil necessary to run an economy is population dependent.
So one is a constant and the other is a function with positive slope. The lines cross at some point. To the left of that point you get investment in renewables, to the right of it you get war. Therefore whether or not war occurs is population dependent, since its a choice between the two.
I mean, this is all given some totally awful blend of shortsightedness and cruelty. But that does seem to be the blend our leaders are using these days.
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.
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
Look at America/Trump right now with economic immigrants alone. This caused half the country to go "Yea, locking up people in cages and letting losers with guns shoot whoever they want while supporting an authoritarian regime is perfectly ok". Just what do you think it's going to look like when the numbers are 10x that from inside the country alone (a huge amount of the population lives close to the ocean).
Advanced technology has nothing to do with wealth equality and with the costs of making said technology it may be even further reverse correlated in the future.
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.
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 ...).
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
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 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.
England had high population density concentrated in towns, trade with different cultures, high demand for labor after they banned slavery, a tradition of craftsmanship and invention, and a class of people who had a secure income but couldn't grow it easily. All of these factors came together at a time when modern science was becoming established.
India at the time had a rigid social hierarchy where it just wasn't possible to move up no matter how rich you got, and everyone was used to that so there was no real attempt to change things. China's population was high but too evenly distributed and they never had as much cultural diversity as Europe.
> there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries ... where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable
Worse quality of life for you. I would take a cramped studio in the most notorious neighborhood over a nice house in a village where nothing ever happens. Boredom would kill me. If it was up to me I would have everyone live in cities and leave the countryside for agriculture with workers coming there on month long shifts as needed. And I think there are more like us.
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
What makes you think this? Even in the worst case scenarios, I can imagine a smaller global population surviving in what remains.
>smaller global population surviving
This is just an unfound assumption on your part. Passenger pigeons went from billions of birds to extinct in less than a century. There are hundreds of different scenarios around climate change and disease evolution alone that could wipe us pretty quickly and a rapidly falling population would make it worse quickly as things like new medicines could not be developed quickly enough, or more technology couldn't be created fast enough (unless we have full AGI working on itself, but then you have alignment being its own problem).
I simply find it unlikely that any amount of climate change (beyond the eventual death of our sun) will result in the complete elimination of humanity.
Yes, there are many likely bad scenarios that would drastically reduce the population.
What sort of non-climate-threat do you suppose will take us out?
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?
I highly doubt that if we don't do ANYTHING about emissions. Much of world's agriculture depends on predictable weather. If world's big bread baskets get disrupted badly enough, food prices will rise so much that starvation becomes a big problem in much of the world. Rich people may be OK, others not so much.
Sure, you can mitigate some of the impact with technology, but probably not enough, at least not fast enough.
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.
Sure, but that wasn't the premise. Young people (< age 55) today have a far smaller share of current total wealth than young people did of total wealth in 1940.
And until 1940, each generation accumulated a greater share of value than the generation before. Post-1940, each subsequent generation has a smaller and smaller slice of the pie.
Isn't the thing that we should optimize for is human living standards improve and happiness increases?
The former (share of wealth) is a metric, while the latter (living standard and happiness) is outcome.
I know that for me, the outcome is what's important.
I mean, yeah. If there were no people, there would be no wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend
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.
> But we can!
Unless we get robots to replace nurses etc. in retirement homes no we can't...
Too many kids - big problems.
Too many folks in retirement homes - bigger problems.
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.
grapes absolutely do not require a mediterranean climate, they grow in places as cold as USDA zone 3
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.
Responding that women's emancipation is the cause for very real global health issues was the non-sequitur here.
All the trends correspond directly to women’s emancipation (although men also probably want fewer children).
- 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.
Let me put it another way, if a pandemic would reduce the world population by 50%, what do you think birth rates would do?
Now, if your argument is "it will soon be a shitty time to be old and it will last for a while", with that I do fully agree. The old people of today have it much easier than the old people in 30 years. But people in 80 years might have enough (resources, space, etc.) to start making children again at different rates.
I would say we will live and see, but doubt it is the case for that long periods...
There's also the issue that I don't think I'm a snowflake. Fertility has become a big issue for me and is part of the reason I now have children - not as many as I'd like, but infinitely more than I was thinking about having not that long ago. I've come to view it as a core social responsibility since cultures/societies literally cannot exist without people having enough babies, and I think more people are coming to see it this way as well.
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!
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.
This has nothing to do with "too many people":
> Private jets emitted more climate pollution than all flights departing Heathrow Airport in 2023
https://theicct.org/pr-air-and-ghg-pollution-from-private-je...
or this
> US will rescind policy targeting oil and gas industry methane leaks
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/epa-says-will-soon-...
or this
> Super-polluting plumes were also seen in the US, the largest detected in 2025 occurring in Texas and leaking 5.5 tonnes of methane per hour, equivalent to running about a million fuel-guzzling SUVs.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/revealed...
Which people do you propose should not exist?
The techbros who publicly fret about population decline are worried about white population decline. Population decline in the West is easily managed by letting more non-Western people in. It's not like Germany/UK/US/France have a monopoly on intelligence and hard work.
Globally small economies outside the West don't depend on continuous growth, and a "soft landing" where population declines but gradually and possibly asymptotically is not a threat to the economy.
Absolutely not. We have the technology to feed multiples of the population, house everybody, and give all modern comforts to everybody. The reason why it is not happening is that the economic system needs to induce artificial scarcity to profit.
Except they aren't. This is the old Malthusian claim and it has been debunked time and again.
> Wars
Historically, war has been on a downward trajectory for a long time, certainly when measured by the violence and death any given person is likely to experience. Most war is not about the scarcity of resources. It is usually about power, the desire to dominate others, greed, and other intangibles, and of course defending oneself from such actors.
> migration
Like war, this claim is reducible to the one about limited resources, because "overpopulation" (whatever that means) per se is not a cause of anything. People generally migrate because somewhere else looks better in some way, usually because the destination is economically better developed and have better institutions. This has nothing to do with absolute resources, but with the standard of living in their home country relative to the standard elsewhere. Refugees and so on are a very small percentage of any global migration.
> resource depletion
This claim begins with a current understanding of the available resources. What we have found instead is that with more people, we have more resourcefulness and discovery. Farming is an excellent example. Innovation in agriculture tracks population growth. Today, we have more food than any of our ancestors would have dreamed of. We waste enormous amounts of food.
> hunger, water scarcity
Famine is nonexistent in the developed world and almost completely absent everywhere else. Most hunger is a matter of resource misallocation, not because there isn't enough to go around.
> we can finally see a way to a possible future without scarcity
This misunderstands scarcity, as if it were some fixed piece of pie on the table before us. According to this simplistic understanding, yeah, sure, you'll have to slice up that pie into thinner and thinner pieces until eventually everyone gets close to nothing. But this is not how things work. In practice, the more people there are, the more labor and ingenuity there is that scales non-linearly (including those caused by agglomeration effects and specialization). People will not only find new pies, but they will find things other than pies, or ways to replenish the supply in a renewable way.
> The economic engine will never be more powerful than it is now
Bold claim. History does not support it. Population contraction doesn't have to last forever and we can't know how economies will unfold.
> where growth isn't purely consumptive
I will say here that consumerism is a real problem, because it is not only wasteful in a number of ways, but it entrenches a habit of thinking that consumption is the purpose of life rather than a means to support it. Look at where the most consumption and waste occurs and you'll find it doesn't align with population density as a simplistic account of human beings would suggest.
What population contraction might achieve in the interim is that it may force a course correction. People are very stubborn and easily attached to bad habits, to the point that entire economic and political orders are reshaped and become dependent on those bad habits to function, entering into a vicious cycle that entrenches these very habits and bakes them into a common cultural sensibility of what is normative. We have refused to wean ourselves off the drug of consumerism, which I claim is one of the primary, fundamental, and underlying ideological and cultural causes and drivers of population contraction because the imperatives of consumption conflict with having children. As a result, we suffer the self-destructive consequences, and these consequences may very well force us into abandoning consumerism because it will have been made impossible to sustain. Time will tell.
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.
I have it, I acquired it to balance the paranoia
Its awesome.
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.
>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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna#Influence
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.
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.
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.
Or in joke form: an optimist falls out of a skyscraper window. As he plummets past the 10th floor he thinks: so far, so good!
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps you would also believe that a devastating financial crash is better for humanity if it leads to having super intelligence in space and abundance.
Maybe you should look at places such as Japan to see what a nation in decline looks like.
After all, this is the HN bubble showing their naivety with the rest of the world.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541619595
IMO the actual mechanism is people ignore non-itineraries and assume that trends will continue upwards at the same exponential rate with no down force. Often at the start of a trend it hasn't triggered or hit against the hard limits, for example Moore's law hitting quantum mechanics.
It's so common I wish there was a pithy "logical fallacy" name for it, almost every extrapolation suffers from it, from superintelligence to housing prices and the stock market.
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.
Busy everywhere but also downtown is full of empty buildings and you still need to commute from Glendale even if you're an LA detective running down replicants.
Ads are talking up off world colonies in Texas.
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.
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.
The Expanse series (James SA Corey) makes a rather different prediction about the effects of plentiful (or at least mostly sufficient) food coupled with a decreased need for human labor.
In that story, in the future there are far more people than jobs (only on Earth--not so for off-world settlements). As a result, most Earthers are effectively on welfare, including many people who want to have a job. With little or nothing else to do, they start having more children, which results in the population of Earth increasing to ~30 billion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
TLDW: People in the past had more kids more often because of high mortality rate and having a care-taker (mother) at home.
With child mortality being lower, plus women entering the workforce and enjoying a higher standard of living, most people won't want to have more than ~2 children. They want to spend their money on having a higher quality life rather than subsistance and survival.
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.
reads the last paragraph
Oh. Wait...
Anyway the question: "Why is there no Darwinian devil?" Is a nice starter for getting into biology. 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. I hope we don't tear down our own niche at some point (we already started that of course, I know, I know)...
Does a population of infinity suggest “get off my lawn” no longer works?
Black hole made of humans, what a thought.
Of course a singularity can't happen in reality, so this paper was in jest. (And in fact population growth stopped fitting a hyperbolic curve shortly after it came out.)
Narrator: it didn't
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.