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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

- Agent Smith, The Matrix

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What I hate about these edgelord philosophies (see antinatalism also) is that they present a difficult problem but intentionally provide no solution. Like what do you suggest? The human race collectively ends itself? A global authoritarian state controls the birth rate? It's better to now dwell on the this train of thought and deal with individual problems.

Well, the author is a sentient AI bent on killing everything human and robot alike so it's pretty consistent.

Is it absolutely required to provide a solution when you highlight a problem? Is it possible some people are better at seeing problems than coming up with solutions to said problems, and vice-versa?

Sure, but I don’t believe the point of these arguments is search for an answer, it’s to make yourself look edgy and smart. Which is probably why it’s a popular ideology for movie villains.

It’s a bit stupid to highlight a well-known problem. People have been chicken-littling overpopulation for the past 80+ years.

how about urbanization drops our birth rates naturally and global population stops growing after a while?

Many animals will multiply and consume available resources without stopping. Cute bunnies left to their own devices on a lush meadow will multiply and keep eating grass until the is little grass left, upon which they will die en masse. Invasive fish crowd everything else out, insects that eat whole swaths of forest leaving no remaining habitat for themselves.

Perhaps animals who are territorial and fight, within-species, for territory can be considered to have a mechanism of self-regulating their consumption of resources.

Humans are perhaps the only animal that will even consciously contemplate the consequences of their actions on the environment. We are, I would say, the furthest from the virus.

It would have been funny if Neo had responded to Agent Smith with this logic.

the funny thing is no, this is how basically every organism works. take an invasive species and introduce it somewhere, if there are no natural predators and the environment is good for it the species will multiply and thrive and explode in population. it will suck up resources until it runs out and then there will be a die off.

man is just better at avoiding this last die off part.

They achieve that "natural equilibrium" by starving en masse.

It's why I started hunting deer in my country - no natural predators, so they'll breed until they outbreed the carrying capacity of the forests they browse, and then they'll suffer long and agonising deaths, and in their desperation will devastate the forest, eating anything that's remotely edible, seedlings gone, bark stripped from adult trees.

Sounds like Agent Smith needs a trip to Australia and New Zealand.

He's from Australia ;)

Weird how the guy who becomes a virus thinks everyone else is a virus. Almost like he's projecting.

Or, perhaps, it's an observation that humans created the malicious machine intelligence in their image.

> like he's projecting.

Neo is the one, and Smith is the zero. Zero times anyone else becomes zero.

> Agent Smith, The Matrix

Ah I thought this was from Shrek 2.

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