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Comment by ativzzz | Hacker News Reader

He's not totally wrong, just replace "Religious organizations" with "Governments" and "tax-free status" with "solders and workers"

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How about we go further, and replace "Governments" with "human civilization" and "tax-free status" with "continued existence"?

Unbounded population growth is sufficient but not necessary for continued existence of a civilization..

The problem goes the other way - developed nations, the ones where you have people living comfortably enough to talk stuff like RiverCrochet's nephew, are all living below replacement rate. As things currently are, our countries are already extinct, they just don't know it yet.

The irony. For the past 50+ years, we were so obsessed with the threat of overpopulation that we didn't think of the opposite; didn't even realize that people who care about such things will all have bred themselves out of existence way before Earth gets too crowded.

There just may not be as much of a need for as many humans in the future as robots are built instead.

So maybe instead of 8 billion humans, we will have 1 billion humans and 99 billion robots. Then the humans can all be the 1%. Or maybe there won’t be any humans, and the robots can decide how many robots there should be.

> There just may not be as much of a need for as many humans in the future as robots are built instead.

Maybe, but we may never get there if the population that can build robots becomes too small to impact the direction of the economy.

> So maybe instead of 8 billion humans, we will have 1 billion humans and 99 billion robots

It's fun until you ask yourself, how will you allocate voting rights?

That is, again, if we can even get there, because again, differences in birth rates across countries and cultures, plus voting rights, means a shift in mindsets and priorities.

Also old people. They need younger people to support them, like grow their food, fix their houses, etc. But given that I plan on growing old, as I hope you do too, we should make sure the generations after us are capable of taking care of us.

Yes, and the basic idea that while a "modern" capitalist might want automation from a productivity point of view, they still need some consumers at the other end to buy their stuff!

Not exactly, because "governments" are expressly capitalist. While you're right in that governments and capitalists want this type of fodder, OP's nephew is wrong in his assessment of modern capitalists.

As an aside, some religions do teach a duty to be fruitful and multiply. While I don't think capital G "Government" cares who does or doesn't procreate in their country, there are large organized political groups that promote this for strictly ethno-nationalist reasons.

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