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.
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?
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. Intimidation and transportation scale differently. At different scales, different decisions are more likely.
- 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?
I have family that has worked to fight corruption and poverty, for decades.
They believe that poverty is the root cause of most human problems. For example, some of the worst despots in history, got there, escaping grinding poverty, in their youth.
When you are skint, your priorities change, and things like labor laws, ecology, and species diversity, are non-starters.
It also doesn't help, to have rich people, dancing around, showing off their wealth. That tends to breed resentment (see "war").
Poverty is the default state of the world and is definitionally the absence of resources to solve problems. I’m not surprised that if you’re struggling to eat, you’re not going to have surplus energy to be concerned with longer-term problems, but this doesn’t seem especially insightful to me, and further, would lead me to invest in net-GDP-positive actions as opposed to poverty- or inequality-reducing ones so that there are more resources to bring to bear to longer-term and larger-scale problems.
> Probably comes from the only real solutions to poverty, are transferring portions of wealth from richer people, to poorer.
What a strange conclusion. Why is that the only real solution? How much wealth was transferred from rich to poor during 1870 to 1950 in the US (when most of the US population was freed from poverty)? What was the mechanism that transferred the wealth?
Where and when did this wealth transfer reduce poverty, what are the historical examples of this solution working?
This is a good example of where the conversation goes, when the subject comes up.
The issue is not with resource transfer, but of resource hogging.
History also shows a fairly regular cadence of what happens, when an elite minority starts accumulating all the resources for themselves, to the detriment of most.
This is an uncomfortable truth for HN where a large number of participants believe themselves to be the next Elon Musk. They're not temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they are millionaires that are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. Speaking of re-allocation of wealth is the scariest thing you could say around here :) Keep doing it anyway.
The majority of wars are fought over control of territory, not resentment, and the aggressor is almost always either on equal footing or more powerful than the victim. The leaders of a nation won't start a war if they think they could lose it so they must have some materially founded belief that their nation can over power the other (a stronger economy, a more powerful military, a technological advantage). Resentment can be used as a rhetorical tool to motivate hatred of an enemy and to justify an already planned war but it's not the instigating factor.
does your family promote free market capitalism? Can you cite a economic system that has raised more people out of poverty than free markets? I'm open minded here, but all my research has shown that free markets combined with new land to expand to is historically the best way to eliminate poverty.
I do believe that poverty can be (psychologically) traumatising, potentially resulting in abusive behaviour by those affected. However, I don't see that most human-made catastrophes are caused by such individuals.
Firstly, political decisions are never made by a single person. Even the most brutal dictator needs to be enabled by his environment.
Secondly, most powerful people have always been as far away from poverty as possible. For dictators, corrupt presidents and oligarchs, growing up in a wealthy environment seems the most unifying factor among the people in such positions. They are also the ones that cause wars, poverty, starvation.
Life is about struggle and satisfaction. Some are content to plow fields, and some want to rule nations.
Effective leaders now how to move and sway both groups. If you sway only one group, you offend the other.
There will be a group that yearns to learn, and another that chooses a simpler life.
A group that wishes to push to the sky, and another that wishes to tend to the Earth.
Who is more right? Who should exist? Politics and War....
What happens when someone powerful chooses to give it back to the people? When a King decides to share?
To empower the man plowing the field and elevate his status. Do you think the man that was happy plowing the field will suddenly be happy running a business? If his society crumbles around him, would he still be happy?
Will the once happy plower see the good deed of his King? Or will he look for another leader, one who will return his life to something he considers normal?
I think poverty and its threat to personal wellbeing (and the power dynamics surrounding it) are indeed a large driver. Looking back in history…
Genghis Khan [1: approximately 10 to 15 million deaths during his 1206 to 1227 reign, or roughly 2.5% to 4.2% of the 360 to 400 million global human population] and his family were abandoned by his clan following his father's death by poisoning. Joseph Stalin [2: approximately 6 to 9 million deaths during his 1924 to 1953 rule, or roughly 0.2% to 0.5% of the 2.0 to 2.5 billion global human population] grew up in an impoverished family with an abusive father. Hong Xiuquan [3: approximately 20 to 30 million deaths during his 1850 to 1864 rule, or roughly 1.6% to 2.4% of the 1.25 billion global human population] was raised in a poor peasant family that sacrificed heavily for his education; his repeated failures in the imperial civil service exams triggered a psychological breakdown prior to his path. Adolf Hitler [4: approximately 17 million direct regime murder victims, or 35 to 40 million including all European WWII war deaths during his 1933 to 1945 rule, or roughly 0.7% to 1.7% of the 2.3 billion global human population] grew up lower middle class; his father's death in 1903, his mother's in 1907, and two rejections from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts left him impoverished by 1909 prior to his pursuits. Pol Pot [5: approximately 1.7 to 2.2 million deaths during his 1975 to 1979 rule, or roughly 0.04% to 0.05% of the 4.1 billion global human population, and 22% to 28% of Cambodia's population] came from a prosperous, royally connected family and lost his government scholarship in Paris after failing his exams. Mao Zedong [6: approximately 30 to 45 million deaths from the Great Leap Forward famine alone during his 1949 to 1976 rule, or roughly 1.0% to 1.5% of the 3.0 billion global human population] grew up in a prosperous farming and grain-dealing household under a strict father who had built the family's wealth from poverty, but who pulled him out of school at about 13 to work the farm and later cut off his allowance.
Evidence & Sources via latest Gemini model then grounded with Fable
1. Genghis Khan [Active Rule: 1206 to 1227]: Isolating Genghis Khan's personal campaigns [Northern China against the Jin, Western Xia, and Central Asia or Khwarazmia] from later 13th century conquests under Ögedei, Hulagu, and Kublai Khan suggests a rough estimate of 10 to 15 million deaths [an approximation drawing on census comparisons by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones in Atlas of World Population History, 1978, and historian John Man's Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection, 2004] out of a global population of approximately 360 to 400 million.
2. Joseph Stalin [Active Rule: 1924 to 1953]: Post-Soviet archival studies by historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010) and demographic historian Stephen Wheatcroft support 6 to 9 million direct and policy-induced deaths [executions, Gulag mortality, forced deportations, and the 1932 to 1933 Soviet famines] within his tenure, against a global population of approximately 2.0 to 2.5 billion [per U.S. Census Bureau historical estimates]. Older, pre-archival estimates run higher.
3. Hong Xiuquan [Active Rule: 1850 to 1864]: Sinologists Jonathan Spence (God's Chinese Son, 1996) and Ho Ping-ti estimate 20 to 30 million war, disease, and famine deaths during the Taiping Rebellion up to Hong's death and the fall of Nanjing in 1864, out of a global population of approximately 1.25 billion.
4. Adolf Hitler [Active Rule: 1933 to 1945]: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates total approximately 17 million civilians and prisoners of war murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Including European theater WWII military and civilian war deaths up to Germany's surrender in May 1945 brings the total to approximately 35 to 40 million out of the 2.3 billion global population in 1940.
5. Pol Pot [Active Rule: 1975 to 1979]: Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program estimates about 1.7 million deaths from execution, starvation, and forced labor during the Khmer Rouge's 1975 to 1979 rule, and most scholarly estimates fall between 1.7 and 2.2 million. Demographer Patrick Heuveline's reconstructions allow a wider range of roughly 1.2 to 3.4 million excess deaths. This is out of a 4.1 billion global population in 1976 [roughly 22% to 28% of Cambodia's 7.8 million population].
6. Mao Zedong [Active Rule: 1949 to 1976]: Demographic reconstructions of the Great Leap Forward famine [1958 to 1962] by demographer Judith Banister [30 million], journalist Yang Jisheng (Tombstone, 2012, 36 million), and historian Frank Dikötter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010, at least 45 million) place famine excess deaths at 30 to 45 million out of a 3.0 billion global population in 1960. Deaths from the early 1950s campaigns and the Cultural Revolution [1966 to 1976] would add several million more. The account of his father's treatment comes largely from Mao's own 1936 interviews with journalist Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937).
> Genghis Khan [1: approximately 10 to 15 million deaths
You aren't doing the error bars on that quantity justice. There is not sufficient information from that era to get an accurate death toll. It could be 3 million or 30 million.
This was gathered from other research. Totally agree that it’s a wide range of estimates with lots of unknowns as you very well pointed out given the lack of dependable evidence and records from that period. Today’s DNA legacy is an interesting one.
- 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.'
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Often less, and it's more "expensive" to them in a no-contraceptives world because men don't get pregnant, and they (historically?) also had an unfavorable "workload/child" burden compared to the husband in general.
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
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.
Edit: more lore on Paul Ehrlich: he had a bet with an economist Julian Simon that the price of metals would go up because of scarcity. His logic was that the population would increase with limited supply of raw metals. Simon OTOH bet that it would go down because of technological progress - more people would have more intelligence combined and find better ways to extract metal. Simon won btw.
"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 ...).
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
2. 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.
3. The Ogallala aquifer will eventually reach a level where it's not economical to tap in to for agricultural purposes. Probably within our lifetime. Meanwhile, snow in the Rockys is increasingly rain in the Rockys, which means the rivers don't flow steady, but just corral floods down to the oceans. What technology is going to replace all of that water?
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).
> 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
It's not just rising sea levels. Natural disasters will continue to increase both in terms of frequency and severity. Less steady rainfall, more aggresive cycles of drought that kill your crops and floods that destroy homes and businesses.
Some places are going to lose their sources of drinking water and others will face deadly heat. Either way millions of people are going to get displaced every year.
Yes, but I guess that some people could pedantically argue that a human kind of one billion people living only in a few acceptable areas will have a median standard of living much higher than a human kind of eight billion people spread all around the world. After all, all those millions of displaced people are going to die of old age and their pains will go away with them /s Sarcasm apart, we don't really care much about the pains of the people who were displaced millenia or centuries ago. That's history.
The point of view changes according to the sets of people one belongs to while still being alive, eg living in a warming Denver or attempting not drown in NYC?
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.
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?
"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.
Please try to answer this: how did poverty and hunger reduce so dramatically in the last 100 years.
I'm reasonably extrapolating much like most economists would.
Also here's my other bet: even the WORST areas in the planet would see prosperity and better living conditions in 100 years compared to today. That's how it has always been, unless you come up with tail risks due to climate change which I don't personally buy.
Try Spain, for example. Wikipedia: "Over 30% of the area is already severely impacted by desertification". Agriculture will depend more on irrigation, and there will be less water available.
There will be enough food for people to live there, yes. But agricultural yield is expected to go down by ~20% or so if emissions continue. And people sitting in worse spots are not just going to sit there and wait for the flood and die. There will be wars about who gets the resources from the new best places.
I won’t extrapolate toy models that predict end of human civilisation due to tail risks. None of that is going to happen.
even if the tail risks do happen like ice sheet melting, it is over 1000s of years before it truly makes an impact. And even then the impact is minor in grand scale of things.
You could always find some looney model that predicts the world would end if we don’t control emission. Agree to disagree on that.
The only "looney model" is thinking "AI" poses any existential risk while ignoring the coupling of food production to heavily threatened biophysical systems.
> 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?
Building anti-fragile systems is something capitalism has been ignoring for a bit and Covid pointed out quite a bit of that. A lot of things have got better off, or at least cheaper, but at quite a cost of fragility. For example, more high technology created in one place in the world or controlled by a few people. Higher amounts of energy required to extract ever difficult resources. World wide manufacturing pipelines that are ripe to be disrupted.
Two hundred years ago you didn't give much of a shit what happened on the other side of the planet, unless it was a huge volcano it wasn't really going to affect you. Now some dipshit 8000 miles away can cause you to lose your job and send you into bankruptcy.
> 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!
> Except of course the problems caused by insufficient population. That is: insufficient production of food
That does not make much sense as this is a relative limitation. If you have twice as many people you also need twice as much food. If the manpower is the problem of food availability (which it isn't really, but let's say it is) then you need to increase the fraction of people working on it, not just the absolute number.
In contrast, emissions have an absolute effect on the climate. Twice as many people doesn't mean we get to emit twice as much for the same effect. The carbon budget is per planet, not per person.
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...
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.
LED lights have nothing to do with human wellness. They are just a more efficient source of light. PWM dimming or spectral differences aren't harming anyone.
Well there is recent research around a 'blue spike' in most LEDs. "nothing to do with human wellness" might be putting it too strongly. See Prof. Glen Jeffery and his work in this area. Note however that this is nowhere near a settled science yet.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
More often than not when I look upon the weather radar, I pray for it to get warmer just a little bit more. There are still too many cold, merciless nights but it is getting better, albeit slowly.
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.
As you’ve just said, the decline isn’t the problem, it’s the global financial system. We should be looking to reform that, not to boost the population: that’s a long-term impossibility in a closed system.
> As you’ve just said, the decline isn’t the problem, it’s the global financial system. We should be looking to reform that...
What organizational 'reform' is going to address the issue that the young and the old survive by consuming the resources of the working age population?
No matter how productive you are, you aren't going to be producing enough tomato's between years 18 and 65 to be still consuming tomato's at 95. They don't last 30 years. If you want a smaller population to support a larger retired population you need to either:
1. Lower the expectations of the larger population set regarding their quality of life.
2. Reduce the size of the larger population, probably by raising retirement age.
3. Utilize capital improvements and investments to increase the productivity of the smaller population
This isn't some issue with the 'global financial system', it's simply a side-effect of people needing to consume some perishable goods and so are dependent on the continual production of those perishable goods even after these people have stopped supporting that production.
The problem is we don't know what that other system would look like. A lot of countries will try a bunch of different stuff. A lot of them will fail. Catastrophically. Some of them might succeed. The countries further behind the curve will get the advantage of looking at what succeeded before them and use that (if they're smart).
Well not really the financial system per se, but people's appetite for better living than we as a species can really "afford" at any given moment. The hedonic treadmill is to blame. Good luck stopping that!
It’s not really the “global financial system”, tax-funded pensions are mostly a richer-country thing. In less developed places, young people often “pay” for the elderly without ever giving them a tax dollar, e.g. by staying put to care for an elderly relative instead of moving somewhere with better pay or quality of life.
I'm glad you said "or", because in a lot of cases better pay does not lead to better quality of life, not until you've broken through to upper middle class and beyond and can choose how much time you spend on work or choose to live somewhere nice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That concern has merit though, because living cost has become a problem and middle class is responding by having less children, so while we are in peak population, the population is growing older, which is an indication of future population decline.
> peak global population and almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days
That is because these nations want those industrialised benefits remaining limited to populations of certain language, certain nationality, certain skin colour, certain ancestry, etc – i.e., ignoring few rare exceptions and nuances it can be just summed as a "certain race" – as uncouth as it sounds, or "not very civilised talk" like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
You left out my first sentence when re-reading, though. My final sentence was not only referring to the one before it. Try increasing your context window, or read it like this:
"Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic. [...] Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space."
yes, I read the first sentence, it was the point of contradiction in your other two. My friend, I don't doubt you have reasons to believe what you think, but your comment as worded is self-contradicting and lacking those reasons.
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
> 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.
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.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
Ads are talking up off world colonies in Texas.
No traffic though, so that's where it's fiction.
Really though the entire fiction relies on the contrast of inventing slaves in giant, monstrous firms while still having plenty of forgotten underclass, huddling in the lower ruins. Deckard is middle class, commuting from his empty suburb to prop up the system.
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.
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.
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.)
I thought the concept of sigmoid curves modeling population was well known at that point in 1960. Perhaps human exceptionalism meant people thought it wouldn't apply to us.
We thought the curve would level out when we ran out of food, same as with rabbits.
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
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"
You may not be wrong but the authors were just picking an example in the headline. In the analysis they calculate t0 as 2026.87 plus/minus 5.50 years. They clearly state what assumptions that is based on do not take it as absolute fact but as providing thought for discussion.
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 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.
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.
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 starting to understand the enormous variation found in our biosphere. 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. Of course, tearing other's down will also tear our own niche down because they are all connected, at least, our old niche is. Can we build a new one fast enough? Or should we stop tearing our niche down?
Agree. Humans are atypically successful because we don't simply adapt to existing environments... we actively "transform" (destroy) environments to suit ourselves.
I have a feeling that's possibly just a property of life itself, reshaping its environment to maximize its ability to continue. Even simple one cell organisms cluster together to form biofilms to better survive in their niche.
It's a question of degree. Humans are uniquely adaptable, but only on small/medium scales.
We don't have the evolutionary intelligence to manage a planetary ecosystem without destroying it through overconsumption.
Intelligence is partly about scope. The smarter you are, the wider your predictive horizon.
Humans are semi-smart - good at small/medium problems, not smart enough to understand, build and maintain very complex multimodal systems with many moving parts.
Humans are the only species I know of that goes out of its way to eradicate other species they find annoying, particularly without understanding said species' role in the ecosystem. And we're definitely the only species that has an economic system that rewards superorganisms that accidentally poison the entire ecosystem and then lie about it.
If you watch something like "Life on our planet", there have been species that basically hunted the seas empty of their food sources and then died out, so we're not that unique in that respect, but we are extremely efficient about it.
> Under conditions which come close to being paradise—that is, no environmental hazards, unlimited food supply, and no detrimental interaction between elements—the fate of a biological population as a whole is completely determined at all times by reference to the two fundamental properties of an individual element: its fertility and its mortality.
(Emphasis mine)
The unreality of frictionless perfectly spherical cows strikes again...
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
I'm sure this is all hopelessly naive.
> 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.
Innovation relies on bigger groups, which then allows a smaller portion of the population to do more.
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?
Causal arrow goes the other way. Complex societies are dissipative structures, whose increasing complexity is powered by surplus energy.
I see you enjoy Bataille as well.
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
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8
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. Intimidation and transportation scale differently. At different scales, different decisions are more likely.
- 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?
I have family that has worked to fight corruption and poverty, for decades.
They believe that poverty is the root cause of most human problems. For example, some of the worst despots in history, got there, escaping grinding poverty, in their youth.
When you are skint, your priorities change, and things like labor laws, ecology, and species diversity, are non-starters.
It also doesn't help, to have rich people, dancing around, showing off their wealth. That tends to breed resentment (see "war").
Poverty is the default state of the world and is definitionally the absence of resources to solve problems. I’m not surprised that if you’re struggling to eat, you’re not going to have surplus energy to be concerned with longer-term problems, but this doesn’t seem especially insightful to me, and further, would lead me to invest in net-GDP-positive actions as opposed to poverty- or inequality-reducing ones so that there are more resources to bring to bear to longer-term and larger-scale problems.
Well, discussions of poverty, seem to be unpopular, amongst wealthier folks.
Probably comes from the only real solutions to poverty, are transferring portions of wealth from richer people, to poorer.
That type of discussion won't really happen, in the Halls of Power, because...
...those folks are richer, so they look for any solution that doesn't involve them, having to divest anything.
Smart people will let green flow from themselves before any red.
> Probably comes from the only real solutions to poverty, are transferring portions of wealth from richer people, to poorer.
What a strange conclusion. Why is that the only real solution? How much wealth was transferred from rich to poor during 1870 to 1950 in the US (when most of the US population was freed from poverty)? What was the mechanism that transferred the wealth? Where and when did this wealth transfer reduce poverty, what are the historical examples of this solution working?
This is a good example of where the conversation goes, when the subject comes up.
The issue is not with resource transfer, but of resource hogging.
History also shows a fairly regular cadence of what happens, when an elite minority starts accumulating all the resources for themselves, to the detriment of most.
This is an uncomfortable truth for HN where a large number of participants believe themselves to be the next Elon Musk. They're not temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they are millionaires that are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. Speaking of re-allocation of wealth is the scariest thing you could say around here :) Keep doing it anyway.
The majority of wars are fought over control of territory, not resentment, and the aggressor is almost always either on equal footing or more powerful than the victim. The leaders of a nation won't start a war if they think they could lose it so they must have some materially founded belief that their nation can over power the other (a stronger economy, a more powerful military, a technological advantage). Resentment can be used as a rhetorical tool to motivate hatred of an enemy and to justify an already planned war but it's not the instigating factor.
does your family promote free market capitalism? Can you cite a economic system that has raised more people out of poverty than free markets? I'm open minded here, but all my research has shown that free markets combined with new land to expand to is historically the best way to eliminate poverty.
Your family is on the right side of history in this.
I do believe that poverty can be (psychologically) traumatising, potentially resulting in abusive behaviour by those affected. However, I don't see that most human-made catastrophes are caused by such individuals.
Firstly, political decisions are never made by a single person. Even the most brutal dictator needs to be enabled by his environment.
Secondly, most powerful people have always been as far away from poverty as possible. For dictators, corrupt presidents and oligarchs, growing up in a wealthy environment seems the most unifying factor among the people in such positions. They are also the ones that cause wars, poverty, starvation.
Life is about struggle and satisfaction. Some are content to plow fields, and some want to rule nations.
Effective leaders now how to move and sway both groups. If you sway only one group, you offend the other.
There will be a group that yearns to learn, and another that chooses a simpler life.
A group that wishes to push to the sky, and another that wishes to tend to the Earth.
Who is more right? Who should exist? Politics and War....
What happens when someone powerful chooses to give it back to the people? When a King decides to share?
To empower the man plowing the field and elevate his status. Do you think the man that was happy plowing the field will suddenly be happy running a business? If his society crumbles around him, would he still be happy?
Will the once happy plower see the good deed of his King? Or will he look for another leader, one who will return his life to something he considers normal?
I think poverty and its threat to personal wellbeing (and the power dynamics surrounding it) are indeed a large driver. Looking back in history…
Genghis Khan [1: approximately 10 to 15 million deaths during his 1206 to 1227 reign, or roughly 2.5% to 4.2% of the 360 to 400 million global human population] and his family were abandoned by his clan following his father's death by poisoning. Joseph Stalin [2: approximately 6 to 9 million deaths during his 1924 to 1953 rule, or roughly 0.2% to 0.5% of the 2.0 to 2.5 billion global human population] grew up in an impoverished family with an abusive father. Hong Xiuquan [3: approximately 20 to 30 million deaths during his 1850 to 1864 rule, or roughly 1.6% to 2.4% of the 1.25 billion global human population] was raised in a poor peasant family that sacrificed heavily for his education; his repeated failures in the imperial civil service exams triggered a psychological breakdown prior to his path. Adolf Hitler [4: approximately 17 million direct regime murder victims, or 35 to 40 million including all European WWII war deaths during his 1933 to 1945 rule, or roughly 0.7% to 1.7% of the 2.3 billion global human population] grew up lower middle class; his father's death in 1903, his mother's in 1907, and two rejections from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts left him impoverished by 1909 prior to his pursuits. Pol Pot [5: approximately 1.7 to 2.2 million deaths during his 1975 to 1979 rule, or roughly 0.04% to 0.05% of the 4.1 billion global human population, and 22% to 28% of Cambodia's population] came from a prosperous, royally connected family and lost his government scholarship in Paris after failing his exams. Mao Zedong [6: approximately 30 to 45 million deaths from the Great Leap Forward famine alone during his 1949 to 1976 rule, or roughly 1.0% to 1.5% of the 3.0 billion global human population] grew up in a prosperous farming and grain-dealing household under a strict father who had built the family's wealth from poverty, but who pulled him out of school at about 13 to work the farm and later cut off his allowance.
Evidence & Sources via latest Gemini model then grounded with Fable
1. Genghis Khan [Active Rule: 1206 to 1227]: Isolating Genghis Khan's personal campaigns [Northern China against the Jin, Western Xia, and Central Asia or Khwarazmia] from later 13th century conquests under Ögedei, Hulagu, and Kublai Khan suggests a rough estimate of 10 to 15 million deaths [an approximation drawing on census comparisons by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones in Atlas of World Population History, 1978, and historian John Man's Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection, 2004] out of a global population of approximately 360 to 400 million. 2. Joseph Stalin [Active Rule: 1924 to 1953]: Post-Soviet archival studies by historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010) and demographic historian Stephen Wheatcroft support 6 to 9 million direct and policy-induced deaths [executions, Gulag mortality, forced deportations, and the 1932 to 1933 Soviet famines] within his tenure, against a global population of approximately 2.0 to 2.5 billion [per U.S. Census Bureau historical estimates]. Older, pre-archival estimates run higher. 3. Hong Xiuquan [Active Rule: 1850 to 1864]: Sinologists Jonathan Spence (God's Chinese Son, 1996) and Ho Ping-ti estimate 20 to 30 million war, disease, and famine deaths during the Taiping Rebellion up to Hong's death and the fall of Nanjing in 1864, out of a global population of approximately 1.25 billion. 4. Adolf Hitler [Active Rule: 1933 to 1945]: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates total approximately 17 million civilians and prisoners of war murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Including European theater WWII military and civilian war deaths up to Germany's surrender in May 1945 brings the total to approximately 35 to 40 million out of the 2.3 billion global population in 1940. 5. Pol Pot [Active Rule: 1975 to 1979]: Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program estimates about 1.7 million deaths from execution, starvation, and forced labor during the Khmer Rouge's 1975 to 1979 rule, and most scholarly estimates fall between 1.7 and 2.2 million. Demographer Patrick Heuveline's reconstructions allow a wider range of roughly 1.2 to 3.4 million excess deaths. This is out of a 4.1 billion global population in 1976 [roughly 22% to 28% of Cambodia's 7.8 million population]. 6. Mao Zedong [Active Rule: 1949 to 1976]: Demographic reconstructions of the Great Leap Forward famine [1958 to 1962] by demographer Judith Banister [30 million], journalist Yang Jisheng (Tombstone, 2012, 36 million), and historian Frank Dikötter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010, at least 45 million) place famine excess deaths at 30 to 45 million out of a 3.0 billion global population in 1960. Deaths from the early 1950s campaigns and the Cultural Revolution [1966 to 1976] would add several million more. The account of his father's treatment comes largely from Mao's own 1936 interviews with journalist Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937).
> Genghis Khan [1: approximately 10 to 15 million deaths
You aren't doing the error bars on that quantity justice. There is not sufficient information from that era to get an accurate death toll. It could be 3 million or 30 million.
This was gathered from other research. Totally agree that it’s a wide range of estimates with lots of unknowns as you very well pointed out given the lack of dependable evidence and records from that period. Today’s DNA legacy is an interesting one.
- 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.'
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.
> 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.
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.
Agree. Especially considering the most pollutants come from relatively few people/corporations/industries.
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...
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.
> 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.
Which people do you propose should not exist?
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.
And that reduces male sperm count and quality how?
Can you explain the logic behind that question, because I can't see any.
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.
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.
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).
Why would men want to have more children than women?
They'd want to have sex, and contraception was unavailable or too expensive.
Women don't want to have sex?
Often less, and it's more "expensive" to them in a no-contraceptives world because men don't get pregnant, and they (historically?) also had an unfavorable "workload/child" burden compared to the husband in general.
Women don't necessarily want to have children... You don't have to plant seed in the field every time you plow it.
Also women's choice and reasoning behind mates tends to be different from the male section algorithm.
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
Why don't you ask a woman about that?
While you're at it, look up who invented the (manually powered) chainsaw in ~1785.
Also relevant for this discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend
Naive or not depends a lot on the subjective view of the reader So you shouldn’t worry. I like your response.
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.
Edit: more lore on Paul Ehrlich: he had a bet with an economist Julian Simon that the price of metals would go up because of scarcity. His logic was that the population would increase with limited supply of raw metals. Simon OTOH bet that it would go down because of technological progress - more people would have more intelligence combined and find better ways to extract metal. Simon won btw.
"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 ...).
> 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.
> 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.
One reason the Romans didn’t invent the steam engine is that slaves are much cheaper.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
1. true, hurray!
2. 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.
3. The Ogallala aquifer will eventually reach a level where it's not economical to tap in to for agricultural purposes. Probably within our lifetime. Meanwhile, snow in the Rockys is increasingly rain in the Rockys, which means the rivers don't flow steady, but just corral floods down to the oceans. What technology is going to replace all of that water?
> Sooner or later, climate change will end humanity.
What makes you think this? Even in the worst case scenarios, I can imagine a smaller global population surviving in what remains.
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).
> 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
It's not just rising sea levels. Natural disasters will continue to increase both in terms of frequency and severity. Less steady rainfall, more aggresive cycles of drought that kill your crops and floods that destroy homes and businesses.
Some places are going to lose their sources of drinking water and others will face deadly heat. Either way millions of people are going to get displaced every year.
Yes, but I guess that some people could pedantically argue that a human kind of one billion people living only in a few acceptable areas will have a median standard of living much higher than a human kind of eight billion people spread all around the world. After all, all those millions of displaced people are going to die of old age and their pains will go away with them /s Sarcasm apart, we don't really care much about the pains of the people who were displaced millenia or centuries ago. That's history.
The point of view changes according to the sets of people one belongs to while still being alive, eg living in a warming Denver or attempting not drown in NYC?
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.
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?
Talk: Arithmetic, Population and Energy from 20+ years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY
Beaming energy across interstellar distances is much easier than moving stars.
"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.
Please try to answer this: how did poverty and hunger reduce so dramatically in the last 100 years.
I'm reasonably extrapolating much like most economists would.
Also here's my other bet: even the WORST areas in the planet would see prosperity and better living conditions in 100 years compared to today. That's how it has always been, unless you come up with tail risks due to climate change which I don't personally buy.
Try Spain, for example. Wikipedia: "Over 30% of the area is already severely impacted by desertification". Agriculture will depend more on irrigation, and there will be less water available.
There will be enough food for people to live there, yes. But agricultural yield is expected to go down by ~20% or so if emissions continue. And people sitting in worse spots are not just going to sit there and wait for the flood and die. There will be wars about who gets the resources from the new best places.
1) Development of industrial processes for the production of ammonium sulphate and other synthetic fertilizers;
2) Development of internal combustion motors and their application in agricolture.
Try extrapolating like climate scientists do.
Trad econ has as much predictive value as fantasy football.
I won’t extrapolate toy models that predict end of human civilisation due to tail risks. None of that is going to happen.
even if the tail risks do happen like ice sheet melting, it is over 1000s of years before it truly makes an impact. And even then the impact is minor in grand scale of things.
You could always find some looney model that predicts the world would end if we don’t control emission. Agree to disagree on that.
The only "looney model" is thinking "AI" poses any existential risk while ignoring the coupling of food production to heavily threatened biophysical systems.
> 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?
This feels like a version of the Nirvana fallacy, asserting that unless things are better off by every metric, then they are worse off.
It's the metrics that you ignore that kill you.
Building anti-fragile systems is something capitalism has been ignoring for a bit and Covid pointed out quite a bit of that. A lot of things have got better off, or at least cheaper, but at quite a cost of fragility. For example, more high technology created in one place in the world or controlled by a few people. Higher amounts of energy required to extract ever difficult resources. World wide manufacturing pipelines that are ripe to be disrupted.
Two hundred years ago you didn't give much of a shit what happened on the other side of the planet, unless it was a huge volcano it wasn't really going to affect you. Now some dipshit 8000 miles away can cause you to lose your job and send you into bankruptcy.
> 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!
> Except of course the problems caused by insufficient population. That is: insufficient production of food
That does not make much sense as this is a relative limitation. If you have twice as many people you also need twice as much food. If the manpower is the problem of food availability (which it isn't really, but let's say it is) then you need to increase the fraction of people working on it, not just the absolute number.
In contrast, emissions have an absolute effect on the climate. Twice as many people doesn't mean we get to emit twice as much for the same effect. The carbon budget is per planet, not per person.
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...
I don't understand the downvotes on this one - it's not so much the size of the population as it is the lopsided nature of it.
Too many kids - big problems.
Too many folks in retirement homes - bigger problems.
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.
LED lights have nothing to do with human wellness. They are just a more efficient source of light. PWM dimming or spectral differences aren't harming anyone.
Well there is recent research around a 'blue spike' in most LEDs. "nothing to do with human wellness" might be putting it too strongly. See Prof. Glen Jeffery and his work in this area. Note however that this is nowhere near a settled science yet.
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/7465-glen-jeffery/publications
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.
Your logic about solving the second problem also applies to the first.
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").
Well, aging people should use their accumulated wealth to pay for their support. This is how a defined contribution retirement system should work.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> Worried in economic terms though, because the foundation of that is an assumption of continuing growth?
Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.
That requires growth.
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.
> since the 1940s,
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?
> 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.
>> with each successive generation since the 1940s, wealth has concentrated further in older generations.
He never said living standards were better in the 40s.
It requires increased productivity, which can be driven by growth, but also without (population) growth.
That promise has already been broken for most of the western world.
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.
More often than not when I look upon the weather radar, I pray for it to get warmer just a little bit more. There are still too many cold, merciless nights but it is getting better, albeit slowly.
> 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
grapes absolutely do not require a mediterranean climate, they grow in places as cold as USDA zone 3
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.
As you’ve just said, the decline isn’t the problem, it’s the global financial system. We should be looking to reform that, not to boost the population: that’s a long-term impossibility in a closed system.
> As you’ve just said, the decline isn’t the problem, it’s the global financial system. We should be looking to reform that...
What organizational 'reform' is going to address the issue that the young and the old survive by consuming the resources of the working age population?
No matter how productive you are, you aren't going to be producing enough tomato's between years 18 and 65 to be still consuming tomato's at 95. They don't last 30 years. If you want a smaller population to support a larger retired population you need to either:
1. Lower the expectations of the larger population set regarding their quality of life. 2. Reduce the size of the larger population, probably by raising retirement age. 3. Utilize capital improvements and investments to increase the productivity of the smaller population
This isn't some issue with the 'global financial system', it's simply a side-effect of people needing to consume some perishable goods and so are dependent on the continual production of those perishable goods even after these people have stopped supporting that production.
The problem is we don't know what that other system would look like. A lot of countries will try a bunch of different stuff. A lot of them will fail. Catastrophically. Some of them might succeed. The countries further behind the curve will get the advantage of looking at what succeeded before them and use that (if they're smart).
What is one thing you’d reform about the global financial system?
Make a realistic attempt to include ecological externalities in all accounting systems.
End interest payments to banks from central banks.
Levy a micropercentage Tobin tax on all forex transactions.
End Citizens United and make penalties for political corruption much harsher.
For example.
Greatly reduce the role of speculative derivatives
Well not really the financial system per se, but people's appetite for better living than we as a species can really "afford" at any given moment. The hedonic treadmill is to blame. Good luck stopping that!
> We should be looking to reform that
By making retirement unfeasible until you are 80? That might be tricky...
It’s not really the “global financial system”, tax-funded pensions are mostly a richer-country thing. In less developed places, young people often “pay” for the elderly without ever giving them a tax dollar, e.g. by staying put to care for an elderly relative instead of moving somewhere with better pay or quality of life.
I'm glad you said "or", because in a lot of cases better pay does not lead to better quality of life, not until you've broken through to upper middle class and beyond and can choose how much time you spend on work or choose to live somewhere nice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Roulette is a finite game. Life is an infinite game.
Cemeteries say otherwise.
That concern has merit though, because living cost has become a problem and middle class is responding by having less children, so while we are in peak population, the population is growing older, which is an indication of future population decline.
> peak global population and almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days
That is because these nations want those industrialised benefits remaining limited to populations of certain language, certain nationality, certain skin colour, certain ancestry, etc – i.e., ignoring few rare exceptions and nuances it can be just summed as a "certain race" – as uncouth as it sounds, or "not very civilised talk" like.
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.
We tend to overestimate the impact of technology advances in the short term but underestimate their impact on the long term.
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.
Most likely, we'll simply go extinct as a species over time. Real life is much more boring than disaster movies.
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.
Isn't that how climate change models work?
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.
I’m not worried about data centers in space, i think they’re a foolish investment and further proof that people are high on AI promises.
"Which is why I'm not worried about..."
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've heard it described as "Pollyannaism"
>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
> Even though there are disasters all around him.
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?
Pronoia
I have it, I acquired it to balance the paranoia
Its awesome.
Nirvana?
Panglossian - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Panglossian
From Voltaire's Candide. Doc Pangloss was always happy as the world was burning around himself.
"this is fine" meme with a dog on a chair surrounded by fire?
Naive
> I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space.
null hypothesis extrapolation from past data
haha yeah, was thinking the same! "Stop extrapolating from past data", then proceeds to extrapolate that nothing happens from a few past examples.
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.
You left out my first sentence when re-reading, though. My final sentence was not only referring to the one before it. Try increasing your context window, or read it like this:
"Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic. [...] Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space."
yes, I read the first sentence, it was the point of contradiction in your other two. My friend, I don't doubt you have reasons to believe what you think, but your comment as worded is self-contradicting and lacking those reasons.
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
Let's not jump to conclusions yet. We are still on the 13th, doomsday might still come ;)
>>> or data centers in space.
I am about as worried about data centers in space as I am about jetpacks disrupting the flying car market.
That's called cherry picking to suit your opinion. I imagine train executives of Nord Express weren't very worried about air travel in 1910s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Express
But, as the authors point out, "the possibility of deriving some fun by extrapolating ... should not be overlooked" :)
Non sequitur. One problem may have merit while another does not.
> 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.
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.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
I like the explanation here by Hans Rosling - We'll settle around 11 billion people
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
It's just LA to be honest.
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.
No traffic though, so that's where it's fiction.
Really though the entire fiction relies on the contrast of inventing slaves in giant, monstrous firms while still having plenty of forgotten underclass, huddling in the lower ruins. Deckard is middle class, commuting from his empty suburb to prop up the system.
Logans Run too
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.
These "academics" willingly distorted the issue by treating humanity as one lump.
The West was in no way contributing to "overpopulation". It was other areas of the globe that were causing problems.
This trending on HN right now might tell us more about our current state of mind than the people in the 60s'.
Approaches infinity has little meaning. Every semimonotonous series of numbers approaches infinity: you can never say that you are a factor 100 off.
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.
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.)
Anton Petrov had an episode on this 3 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_aeB4TPxo
I thought the concept of sigmoid curves modeling population was well known at that point in 1960. Perhaps human exceptionalism meant people thought it wouldn't apply to us.
We thought the curve would level out when we ran out of food, same as with rabbits.
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968It seems the authors were publishing outside their main area of expertise.
"The authors are members of the staff of the department of electrical engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana."
Genuine question: Is the displayed document the original typesetting, or a later reproduction?
Original of course.
Year of publishing is 1960:
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"
:)
You may not be wrong but the authors were just picking an example in the headline. In the analysis they calculate t0 as 2026.87 plus/minus 5.50 years. They clearly state what assumptions that is based on do not take it as absolute fact but as providing thought for discussion.
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.
> even in 1960 some were thinking about that "there may be a fixed date of end of the 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.
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.
Relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
That's an excellent article.
Phew.
reads the last paragraph
Oh. Wait...
Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
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.
We can only hope.
Wrong premise, but otherwise feels about right.
Wow pretty accurate, off by about a month only. It is 17th December.
Where did the date December 17th come from?
Somehow I feel Marvel lost an opportunity here
Checking in!
These scumbags helped to destroy the West through demographic collapse.
Villains of the first order!
I posted this yesterday. 4 points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50465582
That’s one day too early.
There's still 11 1/2 hours left
Holy cow, quit whining in both threads. Luck of the draw, buddy.
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 starting to understand the enormous variation found in our biosphere. 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. Of course, tearing other's down will also tear our own niche down because they are all connected, at least, our old niche is. Can we build a new one fast enough? Or should we stop tearing our niche down?
Agree. Humans are atypically successful because we don't simply adapt to existing environments... we actively "transform" (destroy) environments to suit ourselves.
I have a feeling that's possibly just a property of life itself, reshaping its environment to maximize its ability to continue. Even simple one cell organisms cluster together to form biofilms to better survive in their niche.
It's a question of degree. Humans are uniquely adaptable, but only on small/medium scales.
We don't have the evolutionary intelligence to manage a planetary ecosystem without destroying it through overconsumption.
Intelligence is partly about scope. The smarter you are, the wider your predictive horizon.
Humans are semi-smart - good at small/medium problems, not smart enough to understand, build and maintain very complex multimodal systems with many moving parts.
Citation needed? Everything seems fine currently.
See Tainter's work on the collapse of complex systems, and watch this nice video from B. Sid Smith. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8
We are literally and figuratively shitting where we eat on a global scale.
Ecosystems we dependon for survival are shrinking, becoming I hospitable to life or straight up disappearing.
+1.5°C
Humans are the only species I know of that goes out of its way to eradicate other species they find annoying, particularly without understanding said species' role in the ecosystem. And we're definitely the only species that has an economic system that rewards superorganisms that accidentally poison the entire ecosystem and then lie about it.
If you watch something like "Life on our planet", there have been species that basically hunted the seas empty of their food sources and then died out, so we're not that unique in that respect, but we are extremely efficient about it.
bc we accessed oil
I think we'd start to hit problems before the population got to infinity. Half infinity or even half of half of infinity would be a real issue.
I'm no mathematician but isn't half of infinity still infinity? (or is that the joke?)
> Under conditions which come close to being paradise—that is, no environmental hazards, unlimited food supply, and no detrimental interaction between elements—the fate of a biological population as a whole is completely determined at all times by reference to the two fundamental properties of an individual element: its fertility and its mortality.
(Emphasis mine)
The unreality of frictionless perfectly spherical cows strikes again...
Also, check out that lovely vintage emdash use!
Well, this explains the Outlook and Claude outage, obviously.
Best way in the world to be wrong is putting a date on some future calamaty.
It's not true guys. Doomsday is 18 December
> human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millenia
Narrator: it didn't
Is there like a Rule 34 for doomsdates? )
Electrical engineers doom prophesying about population dynamics? History repeats but not exactly
Ahh, doomsday. They just keep coming don't they.
The day's not over yet!
Where’s the doom?
Does a population of infinity suggest “get off my lawn” no longer works?
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?
Black hole made of humans, what a thought.
Hairy or not, that is the question.
Another kind of Doomsday happened instead: the Outlook Outage, blocking companies on a global scale by sending/receiving emails
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.
Markets are up on Doomsday.
And yet NVIDIA ceo resigns, m$ is d0wn and Claude is having problems, we are still in time
"Making accurate predictions is difficult. Especially about the future."
Microsoft 364
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.
You are correct but there is probably a very simple explanation: the author of the paper was born on a Friday 13. Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_von_Foerster So a pun.
now do recursive super intelligence.
Claude is not working .. so yeah .. lol
ah yes; ye old 13th day of friday... bad