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.
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").
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.
"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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
Apparently today would've also been his 115th birthday! I sometimes wonder what he would have thought about (*gesturing broadly at everything*) all this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
Naive or not depends a lot on the subjective view of the reader So you shouldn’t worry. I like your response.
> 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.
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.
"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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
What is one thing you’d reform about the global financial system?
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.
We tend to overestimate the impact of technology advances in the short term but underestimate their impact on the long term.
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.
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
> 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?
"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.
> 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.
Naive
"this is fine" meme with a dog on a chair surrounded by fire?
>>> 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
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.
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.
Apparently today would've also been his 115th birthday! I sometimes wonder what he would have thought about (*gesturing broadly at everything*) all this.
Anton Petrov had an episode on this 3 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_aeB4TPxo
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...
Phew.
reads the last paragraph
Oh. Wait...
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?)
Is there like a Rule 34 for doomsdates? )
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.
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.
Wrong premise, but otherwise feels about right.
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.