Hacker News Reader

Comment by progne | Hacker News Reader

> Government-funded cooperative breeding is one solution.

So the author sees the shrinking of the next generation as a problem to be solved, with less individualism. But is the shrinking of human population and environmental impact a bug or a feature? This essay is an argument for individualism for environmentalists.

View on HN

It's as if an anthropologist read Plato's Republic and developed an ambition to be a philosopher king. "Government-funded cooperative breeding", quite a sequence of words to clobber together. Sounds utopian.

"You will eat the bugs and have the babies"

Seriously, the whole "demographic crisis" is a figment of the ponzi scheme imagination.

It also doesn't square with the productivity gains of technology.

If one person can do the job that used to take ten, how on earth is a minor dip in work participation[1] going to 'cause collapse'?

[1] More than offset by 20th century developments like women entering the professional workforce.

Sub replacement fertility crisis is real, it's not a figment of imagination. And immigration only works if you have a place to draw immigration from.

Also, with the advent of AI and eventually AGI, it may be preferable to have smaller populations since the generated wealth can be distributed more in far more significant amounts.

Religious conservatives are not too happy with such ideas however, since it takes away one of the ways in which a religion grows.

It's estimated that 25% of the global population is subsistence farmers with little to no connection to the global market. AI is not going to impact every demographic, using it as a guideline for policy (or human psychology) is too risky to be useful. The dynamics of resource competition have not changed now that ChatGPT exists, people will not start tailoring their families towards AI unless it becomes a matter of survival. As-is, not a single person I know is convinced that AI will replace human labor in any meaningful capacity. The consensus seems to be, religious or otherwise, that AI is not a limiting factor in population growth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com