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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past.

You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated.

Don't want so many people? Mandate reversible sterilization at birth.

Don't want so many disgruntled and unemployed people? Endorse some form of guaranteed income, or incorporate basic housing, meals, healthcare and internet into the list of undeniable human rights.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator

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> Mandate reversible sterilization at birth.

This sounds like an absolutely atrocious idea ripe for corruption. It would be only a matter of time before those programs target the poor, those who whose political views, religious views, or ethnic origins are unwanted or inconvenient.

People used to do this during the original "Progressive era" im American history. The people who ended up targeted were poor and black. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization

If you look at current incarceration statistics I'd say it's still happening.

I don't know if it's the same, because I don't know if that's happening with the same sort of pre-meditated malice. Like, I don't think the people behind the incarceration soad "Let's jail all the poor black people" up front, whereas that was the explicit goal of some of these Progressive-era sterilization programs.

Then again, the intentions ultimately don't matter if you're on the receiving end of it.

If you are willing to go that far, why not "mandate" no robots?

Because this is the nogo alternative of a false dichotomy designed to support the other presented route.

In theory we could use food stamps to force people to do things on pain of starvation, but in practice we just do a little bit of drug testing sometimes. Meanwhile, the problems caused by unwanted babies are huge. If we could enact mass sterilization to reverse mass incarceration, the poor and ethnic would be better off even if they did face some discrimination in restoring reproductive access. Not to mention how much better everyone's sex life would be without worrying about kids.

How about instead of creating this dystopian hellscape where we make foodstamp recipients be sterilized, we simply reform the current welfare system so it stops trapping them in poverty and paying them to have more children?

Jesus. It's like some of you sit there and say "the status quo is horrific; let's just add a pinch more horror and everything will be swell."

> Don't want so many people? Mandate reversible sterilization at birth.

No. Forced sterilization is eugenics, and we've seen what happens with that [1]. Eugenics is unconscionable for moral, ethical, legal and humanitarian reasons. When you give government or the private sector or any human being the ability to control other humans' reproduction, that power is ripe for horrific abuse. We know this because that's exactly what happened last time [2].

Not to go full Godwin on you, but eugenics is literally the philosophy behind the Nazis (see [1]).

Overpopulation will be an issue eventually. Better to solve it through more creative means, like becoming a 2+-planet species.

[1]: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...

There is a range between eugenics and no population control. I.e. free birth control, no tax breaks past 2 children, etc. Even a small change in birth rate makes a big change in 200 years.

Overpopulation will not be an issue. IIRC we are already past "peak child".

Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies

being a 2+ planet species wont help local overpopulation. it is too much more effective to ship a highly diverse sampling of frozen sperm and ova manufacture most of your people onsite. Moving that many people just does not make sense when you have more cost effective alternatives.

plus adding planets inside the solar system only gives you 2 real targets (mars and venus) mining asteroids to build spinning habitats is a much more viable colonization target.

> Don't want so many people? Mandate reversible sterilization at birth.

Jesus fucking Christ, let's just round up all that don't have jobs and kill them all it'll go faster.

Money has worked really well to share limited resources in a fairly peaceful way.

Making decisions about how to share limited resources in a post-work world is one of the most difficult problem we are going to face, and yet it isn't discussed. Instead, we'd rather claim that Basic Income pixie dust is going to solve all problems.

You know why people in rich countries don't have a lot of kids? It's because when you give people everything they to have a decent life they start to think about other things than just having tons of kids, kids are the retirement fund for poor people, give them enough to have a decent retirement fund and suddenly they will stop having ton of kids.

Overpopulation is not the problem in itself, the problem is that people do not have enough to survive, all when we as humans are producing more wealth per capita than any other time in history.

Or is it because bringing up kids responsively in industrial countries is really expensive?

This has been my wife and I's experience. It's very common among the majority of our friends and family who are, like us, childless well in to their 30s (mostly in the pursuit of "career").

>You know why people in rich countries don't have a lot of kids?

Because we can't afford a spare bedroom to put them in.

And here I thought it was because people with better socioeconomic outcomes want the same/better for their children, and therefore have to accumulate far more significant financial resources before procreating than someone who doesn't really plan on devoting much resources towards their offspring.

Turns out kids are just a pain in the ass not worth having if you don't need 'em to fund your retirement. I'll tell my wife; thanks.

It's amazing how nobody has understood that your comment was out of exasperation and you were disgusted with the parent post.

Feed the homeless to the starving. Solves two problems at once.

How does the left wing reconcile its push for UBI, more redistribution to compensate for automation job loss, etc., with an unquestioned belief in immigration or even open borders?

You cannot have UBI due to lack of jobs but then also have the US' current family-based immigration system. It would be a different situation if we were specifically targeting skilled robotics engineers and AI coders from around the world, but we put those people through the ringer to favor an unskilled third world immigrant because his brother is a US citizen.

Simple, the leftists believe you pay for UBI from the limitless resources confiscated from the "rich." /s

I do wonder about the "not everyone can contribute" perhaps they can't contribute in building cars, but with a cultural shift and education, well there are a lot of avenues of research and mathematics that only require thought and basic tools like chalk. I tend to view an unemployed human as an awful waste of computational resources. This ofcourse assumes we haven't figured out strong AÍ or we don't want to, cause that's an entirely different chat.

Yes. We are made to be active (non-passive), so most people will choose to do _anything_ anyway. Might as well something that furthers our objectives.

I have been building houses in Indonesia and other parts of South East Asia and there is ample need for people who can build stuff and teach things.

are you honestly suggesting that a large part of the population can be trained to become research mathematicians?

Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it ? That asides, research mathematics is only a small subset of mental tasks available to humans. There are a lot of areas that could benefit from "computation" Laws, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology. We seem to have forgotten how much of our society is based on how our thought is applied to knowledge. Thought rather than Praxis has been relatively neglected in our age.

intelligence and mathematial ability can't be taught very well

> Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it?

Yes. The aptitude of higher abstract thinking varies greatly among different people and groups.

If you are really curious, check out the IQ test about pulling info from a sports column.

After that, your question becomes similar to asking why every short person can't be taught/trained to do well on a professional basketball team.

Elevating educational standards of society as a whole, especially the poor, has nothing to do with whether all disenfranchised groups have the native intelligence to become academics or well paid knowledge workers.

The number of active NBA players is in the hundreds and their careers are short. Education is a very effective weapon against multi generational poverty and the focus of international aid organizations for a reason. Someone from an impoverished background is much more likely to live a better life with more education than someone without.

I don't really want to divert this thread into a full discussion on the validity and value of IQ tests, but I do find the view you are espousing to be very depressing and I had hoped that they had died along with Ellis island and phrenology.

I took the point as in "everyone can still do something", be it mathematics, art, politics etc.

That was mostly the point, though there are dozens of offshoots I'd love to argue to death on. I feel quite strongly that the path we take on labour and automation will strongly pivot us towards very different futures. Do we want to live in a future filled with thinkers, or with consumers ?

> I tend to view an unemployed human as an awful waste of computational resources

This feels like a pretty strong over-application of the computational metaphor, my friend.

Guilty.

> I tend to view an unemployed human as an awful waste of computational resources.

If we extend the metaphor, there are 4004s and there are i7s. You need a lot of 4004s to equal the output of one i7. That many 4004s use a lot more watts than the one i7, and at some point the value isn't there.

I see your point, however these humans are alive, thinking, using power you might say anyway. There is a nearly infinite task in improving our society and science, and we have strong evidence that humans become self destructive or just destructive when not actively engaged in something they enjoy doing.

What do you propose that we do with the 4004s?

>I tend to view an unemployed human as an awful waste of computational resources.

Is this a joke? It sounds like something so detached from the reality of humanity that it's something only an engineer or computer scientist would say. An unemployed human isn't a 'waste' of anything; the fact that the human does not need to be employed but is still suffering at the hands of capitalism is horrible.

If you have an IQ of 89 or below in a first world country, you might be able to barely complete high school, but are not going to become a math professor.

IQ (g) is normally distributed.

The only hope here is that there is some extrinsic element, similar to nutrition, but as yet undiscovered, that will improve human IQ for those on the left-hand side of the curve in a real way. Otherwise, no, not everyone can contribute in the same way.

> not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation

I don't know if this statement is true, but a lot more jobs could be created in the area of teaching, caring for elderly and ill people, etc.

I wonder if compulsory national service in these areas for individuals who don't contribute over x% or $yy.. in personal income tax a year would work?

The last person I want teaching or caring for my old body is someone being forced to do so. Rather, we should increase the incentive for people to train in those areas by increasing their wages.

My idea is more an incentive to get the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes so we can find initiatives like you suggest.

Still it's reasonable to expect the transition to a post scarcity society within the next two generations, at least not globally in the first phase but the growth boom will cause a new wave of hyperexpansionism to secure the growing lands and resource depots.

Jobs as care worker won't be enough and not everyone is good/motivated in them and I don't think you don't realize how bad it is for the cared to have a spiteful worker

There's a huge issue looming as the current mainstream libertarian model is ill suited for a post scarcity society plus there's gonna be a huge problem with migrations ready to compound with internal strifes.

Nothing impossible to solve with preparation but seems we gonna reach that point fastly and badly.

That's a very classist attitude founded on a view of economic activity that pertained to human history only over a short period of tube and otherwise is a completely unrealistic view of the human condition.

Humans are amazing creatures. Moreover there is no limit to the work that can be done, there is always something else that can or should be done should the labor become available. I can assure you, people will not run out of valuable, substantive work to do.

People got much more efficient at farming (by orders of magnitude), that didn't lead to people stopping working it led to people finding other things to do such as crafts, art, and later manufacturing. Now that the save thing has happened with manufacturing people are again finding other things to do.

While I dont agree with everything this comment or said, I definitely see that most people in the US (because that's where I live) are typically either tellers, paper pushers, execs... Hardly anyone does anything actually meaningful it seems. There is like 3% that seems to be in endeavor fields like science, exploration, invention... But most of what I see is completely meaningless drone work.

"Meaningless drone work" needs to get done just as much as "science, exploration and invention." Just because it's work that seems tedious and boring to you doesn't mean it's not valuable to either the person paying for it or the person doing it.

Does it though? Look at the health insurance industry, Aetna pulls in $15B and has $3B in overhead. Couldn't automation cut out (nearly) all the people involved in that overhead. They spent $20 million pulling levers to get a better deal for themselves in Washington alone. This is worse than drone work, it's drone work that kills people.

Well, if we're going to drill down a layer and talk about specific companies and the specific work that is done for them, rather than paint entire classes of people as worthless, then sure, we can find all sorts of "meaningless" work.

Health insurance is actually a very good example if you want to find meaningless drone work, because of the rent seeking you describe and because of other perverse things that come about due to government intervention in that market. That's work that nobody would do if there wasn't a government regulating that industry. You could make an argument that all of that work is meaningless and human beings should be freed from doing it.

Of course, you could also argue that work is no less necessary simply because the government exists and intervenes in healthcare, because the government exists and is going to intervene in healthcare whether we like it or not. Thus, having drones at the office to lobby governments is valuable to Aetna. And I'm sure someone from Aetna would claim that they have to spend that $20 million or else they'd be unable to provide health insurance at all. Which is also a ludicrous claim, but a lot of companies seem to be getting out of health insurance lately...

Exactly. People are talking that there is no jobs like if everyone in the world have a roof on their heads, have enough food to eat, have good education and so on and so forth. Just those basic things are a huge amount of human activities.

The problem is not no jobs, the problem is political will and priorities. Right now most of the wealth created by all humans goes to a tiny minority that has different priorities than the rest of humanity.

> Moreover there is no limit to the work that can be done, there is always something else that can or should be done should the labor become available. I can assure you, people will not run out of valuable, substantive work to do.

Maybe. The existence of so many businesses with vast stores of cash in the bank makes me wonder, though. This is capacity to pay for valuable, substantive work, but it sits.

Even if people look back on this era in 100 years and note that everyone had something else to do by 2060, the sudden change seems likely to cause more traumatic social upheaval, so a peaceful transition to a post-whatever-this-is economy seems unlikely without trying something very different.

I'm quite libertarian, and I think a basic income is not fundamentally incompatible with that, if implemented correctly. It seems to me that GiveDirectly's voluntary approach is a step in the right direction.

Parent poster here. Just to make it clear, I am not advocating eugenics or anything, just saying that some form of basic income seems to be the only option if we want the human race to flourish and science/technology to advance.

You don't need mandatory sterilizatiion. Men are scared enough of unwanted pregnancy. Just offer free VASALGEL procedure on and off for anybody and the problem will solve itself. Now we just need the procedure to become legal in the us, but i'm very eager to use it myself and have high hopes for it.

Birth rate in western countries is hardly the problem.

I disagree. I think our quality of life would improve if we could half our population, once passed the painful periode where society adjusts.

Why? What's magical about halving the population in the typical Western industrialised country? That's not an order of magnitude change. I don't see any reason why this would have some kind of magical effect.

We'd still need pretty much the same kind of society. We'd need pretty much the same kind of infrastructure. Given that wealth in the typical industrialised, Western country isn't generated by natural resources, it wouldn't be the case that suddenly there's simply more stuff to go around. Why would halving the population of the place improve quality of life?

Traffic jams, pollution, loads of wastes, material consumption, needs to administrate all that, size of the cities, ability for justice to be served, hospital facilities, availability of pre-schools, number of children in class rooms...

People think overpopulation is a problem when you reach a certain cap, but I don't think there is a cap. I think it's progressive.

Plus with our current population size, we are bound to certain kind of systems and can't try alternatives. We have to normalize, we have to batch, we have to have pyramids, a chain of command to manage things.

This is great to produce and consume a great quantity of goods, but not so much for education, progress as a society, as a specie and even for something simpler such as producing goods of great quality.

But even if you disagree with any of that, and my whole population size theory, great birth control would solve one current major problem: unwanted pregnancy by men.

I'd say about half of my male friends became parents unwillingly for a lot of different reasons and scenarios. It does not make them great fathers because they didn't want to be one at this time of their life in the first place.

I think a global solution for a safe, non invasive and permanent procedure to keep one sterile at will would improve immensely the quality of life, eduction, and growth of children. Because the ones being here would be the ones wanted.

Which means basically shaping a better future.

People (in our hypothesised Western industrialised nations) WANT density of population. People can already freely move to less densely populated areas, where they avoid traffic jams, pollution, etc etc etc. They choose not to. Density of population creates opportunities that people decide are worth the extra problems to be part of.

Halving the population wouldn't stop this happening. There would be a rush to the cities, a rush to create density of population and all the opportunity people want from it. What you're complaining about would happen again; particularly since people know what's possible with density of population, and they choose it over the alternative.

I suppose you might be able to get the effect you want if you really, REALLY reduced the population. By an order of magnitude or more.

We have to normalize, we have to batch, we have to have pyramids, a chain of command to manage things.

Which allows us to have a society in which people are hundreds and hundreds of times richer than they were even a couple of centuries ago. The wealth of humanity under this is astonishing. We are all so much better off. And again, to reach the point where this efficiency became uneconomic and your alternative options would become optimal would require a population drop of far more than half.

Yes but:

- I believe lowering the population density will not annihilate those benefits. Paris was still Paris with the half of its population, but you could find a pre-school much more easily 50 years ago.

- the benefits of the current density can be achieved with a lower one given our current knowledge and technology

- accumulating wealth is probably not as much as linked to population density (in our modern countries) as that we have added science (machines and software) to our optimized slavery and theft.

- With a smaller population, we may be able on concentrate on quality of life. And education, which could lead to limit our current huge amount of wastes and appetite for superficial things. This could balance what we loose for a higher density population.

The TFR of non-immigrant populations in most postindustrial countries is already below replacement rate. You don't have to do anything.

>Don't want so many people? Mandate reversible sterilization at birth.

So... they tried a little something like that back in the 30s and a lot of people didn't like it.

There was 2 billion people on Earth then. It's 7 now and will be 8 by 2024 if nothing changes.

Turns out, if you raise people's standards of living, make it possible to invest in their kids, they stop having so many kids. In fact, in Japan and about 48% of the world they're not having enough kids to replace the existing population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

Seems a lot more humane than sterile-by-default until magical government bot decides it's ok for you to continue your genetic lineage.

But we're technologists right? We don't care about that fluffy duffy humanity thing. Politics is not worth our time.

Sign here to add yourself to the baby waitlist. Party members get priority, of course.

As long as important problems remained unsolved and human desires remain unfulfilled there will be opportunities to contribute.

> With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute

People keep saying this, but why is it true? Why can't you just have 4 billion people making boutique food for the other 4 billion who are making boutique clothing in return?

Why can't you have 8 billion people making TV shows for each other while robot housekeepers keep them alive?

Mental health care alone would seem to me to be an almost infinite market in need of labor.

Is there some economic law that defines an upper limit on how much work there is to be done? I see seemingly infinite undone tasks around me.

Is this serious?

The solution to fewer people needing to work is reversible sterilization at birth? Not bringing down the system that puts people in destitution, poverty and at risk of death beacuse they cannot find a job?

Capitalism is the cause of the inequality, not overpopulation. There are more than enough resources.

They can fight each other for control of the robots.

What reverses sterilization? Money? The possession of a certain ideology? Do you trust government in creating ideal criteria for which germ lines should live on - when the human genome project was such a failure?

It could just involve the signing of a simple document that says you and your partner are ready to raise a child together, and preemptively agreeing on who will get custody and who will pay how much should you divorce in the near future.

The only criteria a government needs to check is whether the couple has lived together for a certain amount of time (say 1 year) without an incident of domestic abuse etc. or a past criminal record involving child abuse.

And you trust the government to keep it simple and not push any other legislation into it besides the simple "just live together for a year without incident"? What's the punishment for having a kid before you've lived together for a year?

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