What we've built instead for more than half a century is continuous radiating sprawl.
Even suburbs cannot afford all of their ongoing infrastructure obligations, and why you see many dilapidated areas.
This is all becoming apparent now because birthrates have plummeted hence what used to be masked by economic growth due to sheer population growth no longer has the ability to be papered over with increased tax collections due to increased population.
Unfortunately, there's talk of shutting it down[2] due to low ridership stemming from the pandemic.
[1] https://www.metrotransit.org/northstar
[2] https://outline.com/smYCML (startribune.com paywall)
Then we can run autonomous vehicles (private and corporate) over the same infrastructure.
The issue is human overpopulation, not our society’s “failure” to destroy the fabric of closely knit communities.
Humans are by far the least efficient life form on this planet, and what little enjoyment most humans get out of life mostly comes down to the integrity of their local communities: their safety, their health, their prosperity. Yet we’ve become so hyperfocused on economic growth that we’ve turned our larger society into a malignant tumor unto Earth, while ironically an increasingly high proportion of humans lead unhappy, unfulfilled lives.
Why do so many people just accept the answer is more growth? Until we can master interstellar travel, we have to contend with finite physical resources.
There is very much not a direct relationship between absolute number of humans, and technological advancement. This is increasingly true as we inch closer to AGI.
There very much absolutely is a direct and bidirectional link between the two. Technological advancement (esp fetilizers) has been crucial to the increase in the absolute number of humans to its current level.
There is also good reason to think that there are direct effects in the opposite direction. There seems likely to be a minimum population that can support the degree of specialization needed for a given level of technological advancement.
But while there absolutely is a direct relationship, I don't think that your core point is necessarily wrong. The minimum population required to maintain our current level of technology might well be one or more magnitudes less than our current population. Our current population may well be sufficient to achieve the level of technology required to become a space habitating species.
(E.g. you don’t seem to be arguing increasing the human population by X% leads to X% technological advancement.)
Current human population levels are ecologically unsustainable without several major shifts taking place — Sir David Attenborough counts regulating the human population size among them [1].
[1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/david-attenborough-wa...
That is not correct. I laid out the effects in both directions.
50 people can support much smaller degree of specialization than 50 million people can. This should be fairly obvious, so I am not sure why it needs to be restated.