My whole life people have been saying that the human population is exploding, and we’re all going to die. Now they’re saying that the population is dropping, and we’re all going to die. I really don’t know what people want at this point. For the population to remain static? Not going to happen - nothing is ever static in nature.
FWIW my read is that “people” would be happiest with a stable to slightly decreasing birth rate. Rapid, from a generations perspective, change down is what is potentially destabilizing, especially fewer young at the same time that older and potentially less productive or even assistance requiring numbers increase.
That’s a not “we all gonna die!” level of concern, but it is a concern for a healthy economy. Unless other things change …
Ecologically and from a humanitarian and resource availability point of view, the ever increasing population is a bad thing. At the same time, declining population is a bad thing because we haven’t come up with an economic system that works in such a scenario. That’s the long and short of it IMO. Concerns about groups of people out-breeding others, or whole countries “dying off” seem to be just nationalistic/supremacist/racist fear mongering.
So return to this. Assume birth rate is inexorably going to drop, nothing realistic to do to impact that. For discussion assume it increasingly becomes more global and the option of addressing the worker shortfall domestically with immigration of younger workers becomes a no go.
What other things might change that might be of significance to the impact either way?
Obviously the possibility of AI dramatically altering per capita productivity would offset.
There have been years of talk of potential breakthroughs in longevity research … possibly major shifts in both life and healthspan. If healthspan more than lifespan might increase years of productivity? Or not. If lifespan more than healthspan might increase the demands the elderly place on a shrinking working age population.
A new pandemic could wipe out a bunch of us not so young folk? Much more than Covid did. The dismantling of monitoring and response systems makes that something not crazy to think could happen any time.
Any others?
Far more than AI what would be needed is a robotics revolution. AIs may make decent “fake” brains, and especially task-specific “fake” brains. And right here in the now or immediate future.
But a shrinking human populace (and especially an aging shrinking populace, as you pointed out) will need “fake” arms & legs to perform the labor the AIs may decide needs doing.
Right now humanoid robots are far heavier and more power-hungry than humans. Certainly there are many activities (e.g. in factories) where humanoid form might be handy as an interim step to replace the human workers without retooling the assembly line. But a more holist approach would then retool the factory to where humanoid form is an obstacle, not a benefit.
But there are many activities where roughly human form and roughly human mobility will be near prerequisites to the work. And that’s a tall order mechanically, even if we could endow the machine with a near-human-equivalent silicon brain.
Pulled this out to IMHO as its own possibly interesting discussion …
It’s the nature of humankind that were all going to die.
I get that, but those are the only options - the population will either be growing, or shrinking. It will never be stable.
Just like any other population of organisms on Earth, really. The number of raccoons in the forest near your house is either larger than it was 5 years ago, or it’s smaller than it was 5 years ago. Same with every other species of animal, vegetable or bacteria. Nature is constantly in flux.
Yes, that’s trivially true on a moment to moment basis. But neither a growth or shrinkage trend need be eternal.
There are lots of examples of predator / prey populations that “breathe”. For awhile one goes up, then back down. While the other first goes down, then up. Lather rinse repeat.
The AIs tell me there’s about 8.28B people on Earth today. If that number slowly oscillated between e.g. 8.0B & 9.0B over the course of a century-ish while continuing to cycle for millennia, that would be not ever be strictly static, but fully static enough that neither civilizational economic collapse nor universal starvation would be necessary results.
Extrapolating any trend to it’s “logical conclusion” usually results in an illogical conclusion instead.
I agree. Which is why the fact that we, as a species, may be starting our downswing right now doesn’t really worry me.
Sure. In fact we probably should be actively trying to downsize the population. The actual carrying capacity of the Earth may not be 8-9 billion people, it could in fact be way less, and we’ve only seen it grow so big because we’re using up non-renewable resources.
The point I was making earlier is that the ecological and economical factors are in opposition to one another, hence why growing population can be bad at the same time as declining population can be bad. The problems of declining population are almost entirely economic, because the best system we’ve come up with so far requires constant growth, which may not be possible with a declining population (or at least it’s a lot harder). Pensions dry up, there’s not enough young people to support the old people, shifting healthcare burdens, declining real estate values, concentration of population and wealth etc. If we can restructure our economies to work in such a paradigm, then great, but so far we haven’t.
As with the recent discussions / digressions in another thread abut the meaning of “Peak Oil”, all the harm comes in if the rate of change in whatever key variable begins to exceed the max practical change rate of whatever depends on it. That’s when “breathing” turns into boom or bust crises. The “comfortable” rate of change is less, but a little discomfort is a useful prod to action. Extreme discomfort leads to lawlessness, violence, breakdown, and all the rest.
With “Peak Oil” the entire posited crisis was supply cratering and hence prices exploding faster than supply side discovery, exploration, production, or demand side efficiency gains or replacement with alternate energy tech could keep up.
Generally trends in [whatever] carry the seeds of their own reversal. Assuming they don’t break something structural on the way down / up.
Given the long lead times involved in human generations, and the lack of suitable substitutes for humans, some overshoot is pretty well inevitable. Arguably our current numbers are a significant overshoot to the high side, and stopping at more like (total zero thought WAG) 5B would have been better. But if 5B is a decent long term (millennia) number, what does our upcoming low-side overshoot look like now? And does anyone alive today have a real dog in that fight, or are we just borrowing our great^3 grandkids’ problems in even discussing this?
I have no good answers, but I suspect I’ve outlined the playing field where they’ll be found.
Trying to get back to birthrates …
Interesting cite over here:
My summary of the article cited in that post:
A study found that the advent of smartphones in 2007 just cratered teen and barely-20 pregnancies in the USA. While having much smaller effects in the older cohorts. Now, 20 years later, the effects remain strong in the now-young cohort but somewhat diminished in the then-young, now late child-rearing age cohort.
Meta-point: Teen pregnancies are were, and have always been, a meaningful fraction of total pregnancies. Achieving replacement fertility without significant teen pregnancy is very difficult and perhaps impossible absent coercive means.
Naw, a slow decline, unless taken for a looooong time is good for the Earth.
Slightly decreasing is good.
What minimum population is necessary to support our current level of technology? I’ve heard the factoid that the machines that make our latest and most advanced computer chips are so high-tech that there is exactly one factory on the planet that can make those chip-makers; in the Netherlands iirc. Could that one factory continue to exist in a world of only three billion people instead of eight billion? (Assuming all three billion lived in developed world economies).
I read somewhere that about half what the current population is- about 4 billion.
We could certainly tot up the headcount of people who’re subsistence farmers and such; just barely on the periphery of the technological modern money-based economy. They’re effectively not part of it now, so their absence would hardly be felt.
But …
Let’s take that 4B number as legit. Just for simplicity; I’m not taking a position pro- or con- on the number’s accuracy.
To get from 8B to 4B without disruption, we need to ensure all the shrinkage is in the economic non-participants. If instead we shrank proportionally, so the end state is 2B subsistence farmers and 2B modern economy people, well that won’t work. Because the 4B number needs them all to be fully participative members of the money economy.
Said another way, who gets in the lifeboats and who is left to drown is a big question. Not too far from the question of who gets a share of the supposed cornucopia of AI-generated goods and services in a post-scarcity world. Everyone? Or just a few?
That seems like an out of date figure. I could believe that like 50 years ago. But the number of people required to keep farming, manufacturing, infrastructure, etc running seems much lower than that nowadays. And is dropping consistently as more and more things are automated.
But that’s it. If we keep the population the same or grow, then we end up in that zero sum game eventually. But if the population falls naturally through birth rates that’s not the case. It’s not without its potential crisis, but theoretically it can just end up with fewer people with the same, or better standard of living. If we keep growing that’s not the case, sooner or later you do end up in that “who gets a lifeboat” situation
As long as the decline is not rapid, yes. A slow decline is okay.