It’s a bit of a clickbait-y headline, but thought I’d share this here as a reference for folks who are thinking about their long-term financial plans.
It’s a bit of a clickbait-y headline, but thought I’d share this here as a reference for folks who are thinking about their long-term financial plans.
Food scarcity has been used as an argument before, it lead to WW2 among other things. And yet, technological advances have kept increasing crop yields several-fold, leading to a population increase that wouldn’t’ve been possible otherwise. There is still food scarcity… for some, while in other places populations keep growing.
Technically, “overpopulation” is at worst a self-correcting issue: it just leads to excess deaths.
Pollution and climate change will lead to more of that, and in an ideal world we’d like to fix it all… but unless we get (cheap) fusion energy soon, to enable climate correction on a massive scale (terraforming)… what we should remember is that, once upon a time, all of humanity was made up of about 10,000 individuals, and we seem to all descend from a single female individual (mitochondrial Eve).
I bet with current knowledge and technologies, humanity could afford to lose 99.999% individuals, and the remaining million would still be better off than those primordial 10 thousand. Society is not likely to collapse.
As a likely part of those 99.999%, we can try and fight that fate, but realistically, what can most of us do anyway? I can play the lotto, and if I win donate most of it to research (and hopefully not some scammer), but otherwise, what else?
Do you think those billions of people will die quietly? Do you think the global supply chains will survive such massive civil unrest? Do you think supermarkets will be able to keep shelves stocked? How will cheap electronics, cars, produce, etc. be available if the exploitable labor sources of poor countries are in chaos?
The global society we live in today will collapse.
Those billions of people, will go with a “boom”, that for sure. As to who will cause that “boom”… I’m less sure, but it seems likely that some military might have a hand. They might call them “special anti-riot operations”, since “extermination” has a bad ring to it.
Supply chains are getting more automated by the day, from the robots of 20 years ago, to the AIs of 10 years ago, to the potentially AGIs of maybe right now. Supermarkets, cheap electronics, cars, produce, etc. wouldn’t be needed in the same amounts with a much reduced population, meaning a much lower production could still meet demand, with no need of exploitable human labor, just some even more exploitable robot labor would be enough.
The global society we live in today, thanks to technology capable of replacing everyone, can contract a lot without actually collapsing. Maybe not all the way to “0”, like some doomsayers propose, but surely a million sounds like a viable number.
There’s a line of thinking that if we backslide far enough (i.e. lose the Internet, lose electronics, and lose electricity generation), there’s no coming back to this point. The industrial revolution wouldn’t have happened without easy-to-extract coal and oil. Today’s reserves require a fairly high level of technological advancement to access.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that humanity is going to hit that point of no return.