World population declining?

In My Humble Opinion
81

I literally study the history of technological progress and the resulting disruptions.

In the past, technology balanced the loss of jobs by hand workers by making goods cheaper and faster and getting them to new audiences who could not afford them previously.

Before I started concentrating on this history I, too, believed that disruptive technologies would continue to provide new opportunities that would create a balance to or even an upgrade from what is lost.

I’m far less certain of this today. It’s harder to see where the hundreds of millions of new jobs will be coming from. The only expanding industry is the service industry and employers are trying out robots (in the most all-encompassing sense of automated mechanisms) and AI (in the larger sense of not needing a human to answer) because humans are difficult and unreliable. New audiences are also hard to come by. China has created a consumer middle class larger than the population of the U.S. in a couple of decades, and India is striving for that. That’s remarkable, but it comes with a huge cost in energy and shipping and mining and ecological devastation, all of which the developed countries are trying desperately to tamp down.

The technological gains of the past were dependent on the mindless rape of the planet and the exploitation of the workers at the bottom. So are those of the present. Can those of the future be prevented from similar destruction while at the same time lifting up billions of people during a period of climate change and pandemics? In the short term, the answer is no. In the long term, maybe some miracle of nanotechnology could change everything or there could be a breakthrough in fusion that gives endless cheap energy. Neither is around the corner.

If you have a vision of how and where these new jobs will come from I’d love to hear about it. Any good news would be welcome.

82

My WAG is that it will be jobs that people don’t consider work today. Essentially, providing entertainment and content or skills via augmented reality will be a thing, at least it’s possible (I don’t have any more of a crystal ball than anyone else). If things like 3D printing at home become a thing, you could get folks making all sorts of content. Then you have things like hybrid teams using humans and AI together.

Bottom line is that labor that is sitting around unused is going to get used to doing something. Someone is going to see a way to use that labor, or the labor itself is going to find stuff to do on its own because it’s too valuable a resource to just leave lying around idle and people like money. It will also inevitably be something that, today, we either can’t imagine or don’t consider to be real work. Your study of history should demonstrate one thing…that people, historians included, are horrible at predicting the future because they tend to try and extrapolate what they know into the future…and it simply doesn’t work that way past a certain point because of that disruptive and unanticipated technology.

I think there will always be a need for human labor in the mix. It’s just not going to be what we think of as labor today.

83

Absolutely. It’s always easier to see jobs disappearing that try to imagine what new jobs will appear.
To have a good idea of which jobs will appear in the next 10 years (or even which niche jobs will become major employers) means trying to predict future markets and innovation. (which in itself would be a pretty lucrative job :slight_smile: )

But in general it doesn’t make sense for innovation to make people materially worse off. The reason that shoe-making machines can put cobblers out of business, is because they can make shoes cheaper than humans, to the point that virtually everyone can buy and throw away shoes regularly*. Were it the case that only the elites could afford machine-made shoes then there would still be a job for humans – to make shoes for the non-elites.

The only stable situations are adequate employment or our needs being met without needing to work.

* Yeah quality shoes might still be best made by humans, but the market has spoken: most people prefer to buy many cheap shoes than one or two quality pairs. Which ecologically is not good, but that’s another topic.

Having said all this I think some opinions upthread, not yours XT, were a bit blase about the whole thing. The reality is, there is going to be pain for millions of people as economies transition. And countries with a weak social safety net, and a culture that highly disparages hand outs, are not well-placed.

84

I totally agree that some discoveries utterly blindsided people. X-rays - the notion that you could see inside of solid things - are probably the best example. Their announcement both captivated and terrified people.

Flight, on the other hand, was predicted for thousands of years. Hot air balloons were ubiquitous before powered heavier-than-air flight was invented. The early airplanes were disappointing: clumsy, slow, dangerous, loud. Most of those faults were engineered out, but the superfast airplanes we could technologically make produce sonic booms, a flaw that no one realized would be as debilitating as it became.

Jobs are also ubiquitous. They need to be produced by the billions world-wide. Entertainment is unlikely to create those numbers: Sites from YouTube to OnlyFans allow new talents to monetize themselves, but only a tiny percentage make real money and those creators appear to be faddish and short-lived.

An old vaudeville joke has A going up to B and saying, “Here’s the three dollars I owe you.” B then says to C, “Hey, here’s the three dollars I owe you.” That allows C to meet up with A and announce, “Here’s the three dollars I owe you.” All three are happy because their debts are satisfied but the total sum of money is unchanged. That’s a parable for a world in which people exchange entertainment rather than product, even product in the form of services. As an economic base, entertainment is non-scalable.

My personal solution to the mess is to train millions of people to undo the environmental spoilage of the past two hundred years and mitigate the coming climate change effects. Doing so would create a reservoir of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs along with highly skilled planners and managers. Bringing the world back to near baseline couldn’t be done before the end of the century, so it would provide lifetime opportunities. It would require trillions of dollars, but would show obvious and immediate gains so sane governments could sell it to their constituents. Who knows what new technologies and science would come out of such a worldwide effort, yet some are certain to arise. Think of the ways that technology leaped ahead because of wars.

As in the past, more bodies would be needed for the work than are available for low-end in westernized countries. But now we’re back to needing to allow epic levels of immigration. Worse, our history in such governmentally supplied work is dismal. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) gave young men a dollar a day, life-saving money in the 30s. Yet that money was capped deliberately low and their work was shunted into reforestation and park building because all the people not in the CCC saw them as competitors for more traditional jobs, in much the same way that workers yell about prison labor today.

Unlike many, I think that technology can provide a successful future. The only obstacle is the human race. Them I don’t know what to do with.

85

30-40 years ago the prediction would be closer to zero jobs in those fields, however, so I think making such a prediction today is unfounded. We simply don’t know. There are channels that are dedicated to watching people play games…and several of those channels are both popular and lucrative. And, of course, I’m using a technology we have today to make a prediction on what MIGHT be popular in the future. Also, there is more than just entertainment potential here…as I briefly mentioned, there are all sorts of possibilities wrt selling knowledge or know-how using something like AR, or designing something that can be a microtransaction using 3D printing or other things. I think that teaming up AI with humans is another avenue that could potentially create whole new avenues for jobs. Space is another potential for vast amounts of labor being needed, even if it’s virtual presence and oversight type stuff.

Simply…I don’t think that you, or I, or anyone are really good at predicting what future jobs will or won’t be. I think there will be jobs, that we aren’t headed towards some sort of dystopia where there are a few rich people and everyone else is unemployed. This has always been the worry for those who think technology is going to cause permanent unemployment. That said, I think it’s pretty obvious there will be huge disruptions and plenty of people who are going to lose jobs as their jobs basically go away. I can see a time when we simply don’t have a need for a lot of people in the fast-food industry, or as store check-out clerks, or myriad other soul-crushing jobs. And people will worry about the loss of those jobs, and fight the changes (we have seen that for some time now in fact)…and in the end, 50 or 100 years from now, those folks will look back on it and scratch their heads just like we do for the people who fought things like child labor laws, or fought to halt mass production and industrialization and mechanization.

I think humans will always be necessary in the loop for any process. I just don’t see AI ever getting to the point where we want to simply turn it loose unsupervised to do its thing and kick back to enjoy the bounty. Of course, if we ever do get to that point then this discussion will be moot, as ‘work’ will mean something completely different in any case…maybe all the basics will be taken care of by the huge automated manufacturing, people will have all of the necessities including all the bio-enhancements and tech they need for their basic standard of living, and it will be experiences or entertainment that is the major industries of that age. If you think about it, someone 100 years ago looking at today would be similarly baffled as to what WE do for a living and what we think of as a basic standard of living, where that ‘basic’ is better than even the top 1% lived in many respects.

86

All these things are going to be segments of the job market, no doubt, but they are not going to solve the problem. If everyone becomes a content creator, who is going to watch and pay for all that content?
We’ve made considerable movement in this direction already. It has never been so easy to publish a book in the history of the world, but the average book sells something like 60 copies. (Not positive, definitely under 200).
Good players make money playing sports, bad players don’t. The question is not how the talented will survive - they’ll do just fine - but how the masses will survive.
I think the future is in service jobs. A Roomba doesn’t quite replace a house cleaner. The question is how to make those jobs pay a living wage.

87

China just announced its first real population decline in six decades, ending 2022 with deaths exceeding births by 850,000. This happened earlier than demographers expected and India may already have surpassed China in population.

Prospects for a rebound look grim. In a country of about 10 million annual births, the number of women in the 25-35 age group fell by four million.

88

It’s weird because when I was growing up, the predictions were for mass famine and overpopulation, so this sort of thing seems in some ways a good thing.

89

When you (and I) were toddlers, tens of millions of us were dying of starvation.

While some children grow up to be evil dictators who contribute to world hunger, more grow up to become environmentalists who clean up air pollution, or agricultural scientists who find ways to grow more food on less land with lower energy input.

It is impossible to estimate an ideal world population, but the environment has gotten much better during our lifetime. Global warming is serious, and it is going to take a lot of people to overcome it as we have overcome past environmental challenges.

This book I recommend describes one such challenge that has been overcome in most of the world — deadly smog:

Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the [1952] Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City

90

I could not disagree more strongly with either of these statements.

91

That’s why they had that one-child policy.

I think that in some ways it is a good thing – except:

for one, if the human population comes down gradually, we can buy both ourselves and a lot of other species some resource room with minimal disruption; but if it comes down suddenly and drastically, there’s going to be a huge amount of societal disruption and a good bit of actual damage, because there won’t be enough younger people to support the older population as we become unable to do it ourselves – and because socially disrupted humans often react by screwing up things in additional directions.

and for two, we’ve managed to get ourselves into a world economy that takes it for granted that Everything Should Expand By Some Percent Every Year Forever. I don’t, myself, think this is a theory that’s going to keep working forever; but part of what’s been holding it up is that the population has been expanding every year. Again, any sudden crash is liable to get nasty.

Parts of it have, and parts of it have gotten worse. It may not help to have cleaned up the river if the river becomes uninhabitable for its native species due to heat.

92

How many rivers in the last 20 years have caught fire because of pollution? Why is it that nobody anymore talks about the dangers of acid rain? How dirty is the air now compared to 50 years ago?

93

China’s population has officially dropped this year. Apparently Chinese officials assumed that people would be eager to have children when they repealed the one child policy, but that did not happen.

94

I’m with you!

But I do have concerns about how we will manage this decline.

The good:

  1. Less competition for raw materials and fuel
  2. From a business perspective, consumers over time will have more disposble income, and therefore more options.
  3. While I doubt that we will ever see a true post scarcity economy, consumers will have more choices about various aspects of their lives, such as where to live, interests and hobbies to pursue, job/career opportunites, etc.

The bad:

  1. Foreknowledge that the population will shrink might lead to a deflationary, “depressive” trend (in the economic sense) that will stifle investment, business, and research. Manufacturers cut back on their targets and transportation companies cut back their schedules, resulting in widespread layoffs.

  2. To handle these issues will take a greater degree of central planning and government intervention that most people are likely willing to accept. For example, it will be extremely difficult to tell Acme Jet Products to cut back on production so Apex Rocket Sleds, in another region or country, can take in enough orders to survive.

95

You are just thinking of the United States. The ecological tragedies are accelerating and are worldwide. Our trajectory as a global species is absolutely dire and believing otherwise means ignoring almost everything we can measure.

Plenty of scientists have put their minds to estimating an optimal human population. Optimal for the planet.
Here’s one estimate: a little more than a billion. There’s a long long impossibly long way to go before that could happen.

96

That’s an estimate. Others go up to a trillion. With a “t”.

Anybody can make a case for any optimal population. Yes, we take scientists’ cases more seriously. But there are still scientists who refute global warming entirely. Nothing any single scientist says should be "the** answer. It is really and truly impossible to estimate an optimal population. Technology changes. The definition of “optimal” changes.

Not that stops people from saying stuff. Hundreds - thousands? - of scientists have made pronouncements. Maybe some are right. We’ll never know.

97

Even if you just think about the United States, the spate of wildfires we’ve seen in the West in the past few years are due in large part to climate change. Much worse than burning rivers.

98

Just having more people isn’t going to guarantee a solution. I think fewer children, all of whom get educated and get opportunities to the level of their ability, will do better. How many geniuses have we lost to childhood diseases or to poverty?
While we might not have the London smog, the level of particulates in China and India is pretty bad. California on the other hand is much better, but we pay for it in terms of gas prices.

99

I no longer talk to climate change deniers or those who say “oh, scientists still disagree”, which is the same damn thing. Bye.

100

The US isn’t very far from having negative natural growth (births minus deaths) itself, especially with the spike in Covid-related deaths. We’ll probably reach that point soon as boomers, the first group to be part of four million annual births, reach natural ends of life and birth rates continue to fall.

If I get to a pc later I’ll try to link to the data but I think 2022 was the first year where net immigration exceeded natural growth here. Immigration will be a key, maybe the key issue of the decades to come.

I don’t know whether this thread or a new one is most appropriate for discussing optimal population levels (and the journey to them) but it is a fantastic subject in and of itself. I’ m trying to imagine a US with 25% of its current population.