Quote: (01-28-2016 02:43 AM)Excelsior Wrote:
We have commercial airliners that can already fly themselves or be flown remotely. Have pilots become obsolete? We don't necessarily need as many men in cockpits as we do given current technological advances, so why do we have them?
Technology has its limits. New technologies will be introduced and some occupations will be made redundant. There is no guarantee that said technology will a) be cost effective relative to human labor (especially if said labor can be had in the developing world at a fraction of the cost of the labor in the west where pay and work conditions are the best on Earth) and b) as effective as human labor in every field.
Whether this comes to pass is still to be seen; there is no guarantee. We'll probably find out in our lifetimes. Change will come and redundancies will be made, but the idea that 75% of manual labor, service, and other such jobs will become entirely obsolete in the near future is not a given.
But you're arguing for the technology we already have. That technology will be much, much more advanced in 50 years. It will also be much, much cheaper.
It may not replace exactly 75% of the labor, that was just a number I threw out there. But I think it's safe to say that automation will be able to replace a pretty significant number of jobs, if needed.
Also, as I mentioned in my first post, many of the jobs we have already and redundant. This is true even in the developed world, but even more so in the developing world.
Quote:Quote:
Alright, you never argued for depopulation. My apologies for conflating such arguments with your own.
However, I must note that I never said we should "all just have as many kids as possible because there's nothing that could possibly go wrong". That is not my argument. I stated quite early on that people should be free to have 1 or 2 kids (or no kids) if they so desire. Granted, I think there are severe consequences to such action if taken by enough individuals in a given society to create sub-replacement fertility (as seen in the modern western world today), but so long as people are willing to accept said consequences, I accept their choice. Nowhere did I claim that everyone should have as many kids as possible even if they only want 0, 1, or 2.
What I did argue against, however, was the notion that choosing to have more than 2 children is immoral, dangerous, irresponsible, or otherwise worthy of condemnation and moral subordination to the 2-children-or-less alternative. People are free to have 2 children or less if they feel that's right for them, but they have no grounds to claim moral superiority for doing so. There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with choosing to have a large family.
Fair enough. I'm not saying it's immoral to have 4 kids either, I just think we should put some thought into it.
Also, to be clear, I am talking from a global perspective. Obviously a country like the US could easily support another 100 million people or so. And I'm not saying Americans should stop reproducing and let themselves die off.
Quote:Quote:
It likely would not take hold throughout the entirety of the planet. You would see UBI in the developed nations most likely to be hit by decreased employment in 75%-jobs-replaced scenario. Those in the developing world will have a lower proliferation of people-replacing machines (which will be costly) and a larger number of the service/manual labor jobs made redundant in the west (due to the fact that their citizens work for much lower wages and are likely to remain cost-effective for much longer, if not indefinitely). This, combined with the propensity for governments in much of the developing world to have limited competence/ability to maintain social security systems/safety nets/stable governments in general will make UBI rare outside of the west.
Well, yeah, that was my whole point earlier. The developing world are the ones seeing rapid population growth, and they're also the ones that can't support their current populations.
In a perfect world, civilizations would simply grow along with their economy.
Quote:Quote:
The future you envision (should it come to pass) will see an increasingly lazy west (in which even the bulk of the middle class can be freed from work and allowed to live like a lotus-eating trustafarian) surrounded by a much poorer, harder working developing world.
Quote:Quote:
You said you weren't arguing for depopulation, but this bit sounds rather sympathetic to the idea of depopulation. Am I missing something?
The point about India and the Philippines was just to illustrate my point. I'm not literally saying we should kill off half of their population.
Going back to the Singapore example, they went from a poor country to one of the richest very quickly. It would be impossible for a country like India to make such a transition, and that's mostly due to the massive difference in population. It's very, very difficult to bring that number of people out of poverty, give them jobs, provide them with necessary infrastructure, etc.
Same thing with China. They have one of the strongest economies by overall production, yet a significant portion of their population lives in extreme poverty.
Quote:Quote:
Comparing the future to the past on the issue of fertility rates makes plenty of sense. Regardless of the size of any given nation, the fact remains that civilizations with long-term sub-fertility trends do not survive the duration of said trend. They are replaced. That means that if you argue in favor of said trends by supporting de-population (as I mistakenly thought you to have done earlier), you argue to the accelerated fall of the civilization at hand.
But again, no other civilization had the medical technology we have. If you have less disease and longer lifespans, it is not as necessary to reproduce just to maintain or grow population levels.
If we were to say, increase lifespan by 50%, you would see the population grow exponentially if the same reproductive rates were maintained.
Also, like I mentioned above, I'm speaking from a global perspective. I'm not suggesting that the West not add another 10, 50, 100 million people or whatever to maintain their population.
Quote:Quote:
As for the more general topic of global overpopulation, we don't know what Earth's carrying capacity is. Estimates I've seen go up as high as 14 Billion now, and that could also move depending on technological advances (nevermind the potential for the addition of extra-terrestrial carrying capacity in coming decades).
Whatever the answer, odds are good that we'll live to find out. The next 50 years are going to be very interesting.
But why do you need 14 billion people?
This is the basically the crux of my argument. Just because the Earth can support 14 billion people, doesn't mean that it's ideal for the world's citizens.
The more people you have, the more problems you have. It's that simple.
You may be able to solve those problems, but it may not be necessary to create those problems in the first place.
Quote:Quote:
Similarly substantial technological advances could also make higher populations less problematic than currently expected. We can't be sure of that but, again, we'll probably live to find out.
Very true, but they also make reproducing at higher rates just to maintain population less necessary.
If people are living longer, dying from disease less often, manual labor is less necessary, potential standards of living are higher, etc., then you don't need as large a population.
An easy example would be farming. In the past, we needed huge swaths of our population just to produce enough food for people to eat. Now technology has made it so that is not necessary.
We simply don't rely on people as much to keep society running. Yes, there will also be a need for people, but we're becoming increasingly self-sufficient.
In 50 or 100 years, that self-sufficiency will be even more dramatic.