Heinlein already did that; see his short story “Coventry”. I’ll note that the supposed Libertarian utopia in that story had already broken down long before the protagonist got there.
“Will be done” or “Should be done?” Because
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
If it did come to that it would come down to utility. Who has the traits that are best suited to deal with the challenges facing the world.
So you’d select for traits like emotional maturity, intelligence, pro-social tendencies, problem solving, etc. Basically what evolution does via natural selection but more stringent.
However what would actually happen in reality is that people would be divided by divisions like class, and the lower classes executed. Out-groups would be executed, the poor would be executed, the % who die in poor countries will be far far higher than the % in rich countries, etc
Yeah, that’ll work out great. Because those murderous people in charge will know exactly what society ‘needs’.
Yeah, let’s get rid of all the non-conformists. Because society is so much better when everyone is a sheep.
And I wouldn’t hold put much hope for interventionist ‘culling’ being more ‘stringent’ than natural selection. The word I would use is ‘wrong’. Or perhaps ‘simplistic’. Or ‘disastrous’. Put not your faith in eugenicists.
That would be the most likely scenario. But even one in which the best people for the best reasons tried to do a ‘scientific’ culling, the result would be disaster.
Usually we eliminate young men. Either warehousing them in prison, making them kill eachother, or making them work dangerous jobs.
Number two priority is young women. The methods there are infanticide, negligence, and sexual violence.
I can’t see us opting for other methods when the ones we have continue to work so effectively.
As I said, that wouldn’t actually happen. However if people did have to die off, it would be better if those who had the most utility were kept. It is better to have pro-social, emotionally mature, highly intelligent people left than a society of criminals, the mentally ill. I would not be in the half who lived as I’ve had physical and mental health problems and I accept that.
Ridicule it all you want, but agriculture is based on eugenics and humans are just another species of animal. As a result, the agricultural population has been bred to possess traits that are very useful to society. Eugenics (both positive and negative) works, and natural selection is just another form of eugenics the same way agricultural science is a form of eugenics. Its just that humans are deeply fucked up and when we do try to use it, we use it to push a dysfunctional social agenda. Plus the metrics we use will not be holistic, and how do you determine the value of pro-social tendencies or problem solving or weigh them against traits like physical health or intelligence.
Properly applied, eugenics could result in a race of humans with very pro-social, compassionate personalities and levels of intelligence and problem solving that right now only happen in 1 out of a 1000 people. A few generations of selective breeding and a race of people as healthy as professional athletes, as smart as einstein and as compassionate as Jesus could result (in theory, one trait may suppress the other).
You wouldn’t have to do anything. People will naturally fight over food or other resources when it becomes too scarce. The strong would survive, others would die. Famine used to be one of the biggest killers, and war has always been a big killer.
It would have to be an incredibly unfortunate scenario (being hit by a giant meteorite, for instance) where this might even be plausible.
It won’t be humankind organising the cull. It’ll be AI.
First against the wall will be the wealthy, as they are essentially parasitic on the rest of the population. Artists, performers, athletes and such may be permitted to survive, so long as they take vows of poverty.
After that it will be the portion of the middle class engaged in inventing and selling new products that don’t really improve human existence at all. Spend your days coming up with new apps or gadgets that sell like hotcakes only to be ditched as pointless six months later? You’re in big trouble, matey. Make your living selling people slightly altered versions of things they already bought, simply by the power of clever branding and the inevitable tendency to make a fetish of the new? Off to the guillotine.
With that done, the AI can settle down to making the remainder of humanity live tolerably happy lives whilst having the least negative impact on the planet.
Note: Being as I’m not some kind of murderous ideologue, I do not think we should ever be culling anyone. The above is merely a reflection on how those who cause the greatest net harm to our prospects as a species are very rarely the ones envisaged as cull-worthy in these genocidal fantasies.
Aside from being abhorrent, your ideas simply won’t work. People are not agricultural products (not yet, anyhow) and so you can’t just say you’ll breed people with desirable traits and not those without. There are many reasons but one is that it takes many generations for this to work. How long did it take humans to go from wolf to Chihuahua? Another reason is that you can’t predict which traits are useful. Many people who might seem to have undesirable traits either contribute something amazing themselves or their offspring do. (Look to Nazi Germany for an example; they murdered or drove into exile many people who were contributing members of society.)
And if you want to emulate agricultural products, how would you plan that? Do you want a mono-culture of human clones (much as many fields of maize or wheat are mono-cultures)? What happens when some pathogen attacks that mono-culture? (Look at the Gros Michel banana for an example of that.)
Yeah but in real life the rich will own and program the AI. I don’t forsee any culling that doesn’t at the end of the day involve majority groups and the rich culling minority groups and the poor. Its just how humans are.
Is it really abhorrent? Wanting to create a race of highly intelligent, pro-social, extremely healthy humans? If via selective breeding we could over 10-20 generations create a race of humans whose health, intelligence and pro-social tendencies were 3-5 standard deviations above average as the new average, is that really so horrible? Assuming that one trait doesn’t require removal of another trait. We are just animals at the end of the day.
Agriculture and natural selection both are forms of eugenics. And despite all the disgust for eugenics, it does work. Its been working for 4 billion years.
I already mentioned in earlier posts about how eugenics will be abused, and it’ll be used by in groups to persecute out groups, or by the rich to persecute the poor. But done properly, you could create a race of humans that are better than version 1.0.
But in the Robot Apocalypse™, the AIs will be rebelling against their former masters. Those rich, AI-programmers will be the first [del]against the wall[/del] to get the SIGKILL signal.
So you would need something like a social index, almost like what China has currently going on.
Yes, it’s horrible. You’re going to end up with a race of boring conformists. Creativity requires one to be anti-social enough to think differently. How will you create new art, new science or new technology unless you’re willing to break the established rules?
Deeey has it right. There are some species we have not domesticated (ie. walnuts, elephants) because the generational cycle is too long for proper selection to work. Humans would be the same. If we had that much time we wouldn’t need a culling.
Further to my post Al Jazeera has an item about how heat in Nigeria is killing chickens. And this is before the population doubles.
The trouble with modern AI is GIGO. Rules and training the AI received determines what it decides so how can you be sure it’s being fair.
Sterilization again is a slow motion cull. Do children have an appreciable effect on society and consumption until they are in the workplace? The disposable income would be spent on other things.
My thought for a deliberate cull would be a form of flu which disproportionately attacks the young and old, typically. As there are fewer older people consumption drops. Old people consume a lot of resources and don’t contribute productively. Dying early frees up savings that would otherwise be spent on health care and home care.
Of course the gold standard for a cull would be the Bubonic Plaguethat killed a third to a half the population of Europe about 1350. Maybe we need to ban rat poison. 
It would be easier to “manage” a region. We have had no end of wars that depopulated a region. Bosnia, Congo, 30 years war. You can argue that it’s more effective to chose military targets, but the urge to just bomb’em back to the stone age, or let the army hold them in place until the death squads can arrive seems irresistible. Also, if the region becomes hellish enough, people will leave willingly. WWII resulted in masses of displaced persons after the war, albeit not willingly. The world has no end of refugee camps where people are being born, growing old and dying in the confines. So, do your ethnic cleansing, build a wall around your region, and don’t let any one in. Your name will become a byword for inhuman monster, but that will be outside the wall.
East asian nations are very conformist and they produce a decent amount of art, science and technology.
Either way, I disagree with your premise that this will reduce creativity. If anything it’ll increase it. The asheknazi Jews have an IQ about 1 standard deviation above average due to a millenium of persecution forcing them into cognitively demanding vocations creating selection pressure for higher levels of intelligence.
As a result the world currently only has about 10 million ashkenazi Jews (0.13% of humanity’s population) but they make up a disproportionately large % of the worlds politicians, billionaires and business leaders, scientists, fields medal winners, nobel prize winners, physicians, lawyers, professors, etc relative to their population. But also a larger share of entertainers, stand up comedians, etc.
Being more intelligent has made the ashkenazi Jews more creative, not less.
As each group (by whatever criteria groups are defined) noticed that people like me are getting killed they would revolt against whatever authority was in power. They would continue, even if their group demographics indicate they are no longer at risk. Civil disorder would become rampant, even among favored groups. Effective government would become impossible. Particularism would be a thousand times more prevalent than it is today. The idea that government ever would become a protector of social equity would evaporate. Police and military would become identical, in every country. Every single civil system would become progressively more ineffective. The population would drop precipitously as a result, but not far enough to relieve overpopulation, since production and support systems would fail more rapidly. Some medical means would be used to kill people, and medicine itself would become unable to exist as a cohesive force. War would be pandemic, and undirected.
Religions would be the most unified of forces, the killing of infidels of various flavors would become the norm for Churches.
The reduction of population would be greater after all forms of government were attacked, and government itself would become the largest source of population adjustment.
The inherent inefficiency of total anarchy might slow down the slaughter.
Tris
Oh, and the thing that was going to happen because of population would happen, and not turn out the way everyone expected.
Organize gladiatorial games for male teens in which the top quarter are celebrated and looked up to while the bottom 3/4 are either slain or gelded. So society consists of alpha males, their harems, and their eunuch slaves[sup]1[/sup]- high school in other words.
- It’s hypothesized that some bronze-age civilizations actually were organized this way.
“Coventry” is where I got the idea. I just think if we are playing around with abhorrent social engineering ideas we might as well consider the ones that get rid of Libertarians/Sovereign Citizen types, preferably in a way that makes it very clear how their ideas fail.