We all need to strive to have a collapsing population, the key is how we handle it.
Isn't the danger is that there are not enough workers to aide an aging population at the same time there aren't enough consumers to feed growth and manufacturing changes that designed to turn out vast quantities of goods?
A labor/consumption imbalance. It would seem that we would need to make our manufacturing more elastic, retooling existing factories to be more dynamic in what and how they produce goods. Would be a good thing in general.
Even just to bring up the material standards of living for the global poor to match developed world conditions will need more people, not less. I can't in good conscience say that we have peaked as a species now and need to start declining.
Don't let your goal of "fully automated luxury gay space communism" force your risk curve into oblivion.
The problem is, of course, that immigration turns it into a tragedy of the commons: Population A won't reduce their birth-rate, if that just means population B will take their place, and the strain on their local environment won't be reduced:
Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
Europe needs immigrants, young and committed and eager to learn. They are the future taxpayers who will support an ageing population - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/12/the-gu...
People who have never trained a neural network nor attempted to model the weather or any large system might be inclined to believe current climate modeling. Unfortunately we lack the data to do so with any precision or accuracy. And I'm not convinced by someone yelling at me to trust experts. I can reason well enough on my own to know that we lack the data to know if humans are causing global climate changes or if these are just natural progressions.
In other words I am suspicious of the motives of the people pushing the agenda. And they have done little to allay my fears, instead it seems to be increasingly militant in their rhetoric.
And I don't believe for a minute that the people advocating that we reduce our standard of living intend on sharing in that reduction. I think they are hypocrites.
When I see them raising their own animals or having a garden then I might believe them. Instead they try to tell me that we should eat bugs instead of raising chickens, despite chickens being more palatable and emitters of 0 green house gasses compared to insects at 2g/kg.[1] Chickens also eat kitchen waste. We don't have kitchen waste at my house.
If they instead advocated for things like that, things that make sense and have a tangible benefit today, they would have more credibility. Not to mention the mental health benefits of returning to the earth and being closer to nature.
Instead they come up with these half baked authoritarian notions and seem intent on ramming them through. 15 minute cities, eating bugs, and owning nothing. zero emissions. no gas powered engines. and on and on it goes. Qui bono?
Just taking things away and providing no real solutions. Battery powered earth moving/farming equipment is not feasible, for example.
I don't take kindly to being ruled by people with less sense than I have, who refuse to include the very "stakeholders" that they are making decisions for. And who use force to impose their will.
[1]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/good-grub-why-we-migh...
Allow me to throw my hat in the ring. How do you feel about localized food production? I am a proponent of people producing more of their own food, this reduces both transportation costs and pollution.
Considering AGI and automation, this would free people up to return to the land more and produce more of their own food. Which is more sustainable.
Of course implementation details would need to be worked out.
- producing food takes space (preferrably arable land, though a larger plot of pasturable land will also work).
- producing food takes time (taking care of crops or animals takes a significant amount of time, which is time people can't spend on salaried work).
- producing food takes knowledge (knowing which crops to plant, when to plant them, how to properly care for them, and when to harvest them, for example).
Aside from those three problems and, where applicable, the problem of needing water (I hear some place called California tends to have problems with that) I can't see any notable issues with that idea.
There sure are a lot of green lawns in California, maybe we can start replacing them with gardens.
>- producing food takes time (taking care of crops or animals takes a significant amount of time, which is time people can't spend on salaried work).
Automation seems to be taking care of that issue, if gradually.
>producing food takes knowledge (knowing which crops to plant, when to plant them, how to properly care for them, and when to harvest them, for example).
ChatGPT and other educational tools can take care of that.
> producing food takes space (preferrably arable land, though a larger plot of pasturable land will also work).
We would be able to justify single family residences more if the yards were used to grow food, and keep chickens. Added benefit of reducing kitchen waste to near 0.
https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/japan's-f...
Most people are leaving rural japan to find more than subsistence as I would imagine many people on this platform have left one place or another to find means that ideally outstrip their needs and allow them to save for the future.
Japan has a serious depopulation problem and is the first country to tip into negative population growth without much policy change to soften it.
The results are not good. They are things like:
- not being able to move out of your parents house
- not being able to have kids
- old people starving to death
-limited food production, limited social services (where's the tax base), greater divides between density and rural life
Like others mention Japan needs to have leadership that is not xenophobic and begin to embrace policies that encourage family growth including supporting women who work rather than continuing to build on female invisible labor at home and a salaryman effort in the public sphere.