Futurology

In the interest of balance, an ai singularity is far far far from a foregone conclusion, in fact has significant theoretical issues that are largely handwaved away by people wanting you to be scared of singularity or to buy into their ai grift.

We’ll have far more infra and a far lower population.

Nope. We will have a lot of older people who need the help of younger people in order to get things like medical aid, food and so on. And we will have lesser and lesser young people to provide these goods. To make matters worse, the younger generation has to deal with issues like maintaining infrastructure, building new technologies, and fighting the unwelcome effects of climate crises.

In a word: If utopia has a chance to happen, it will make us wait for almost 2 decades. No guarantee that utopia will ever happen. History knows not one example of population declaine without a collaps. Captialism isn't the issue here.

A couple more covid-level events will take care of that.

Is it?

I'd be much more concerned if the world population skewed young and we were still projecting mass population decline within their lifetimes.

A non-growing population doesn't mean the species is going to end. This isn't the economy we're talking about here...

Why? Reduced headcount = reduced stress on resources. The key is acknowledging specifically where the population has capped, and meeting the needs of those where it hasn't. Also increasing the availability of immigration to smooth these spikes and transitions.

(I am not advocating eugenics or classical overpopulation myths. Only recognizing that if we were in a situation where population was going to say, double, we would have different concerns in 100 years.)

They've been saying that for 100 years now and it hasn't happened yet. Humanity has always been able to adapt to changing circumstances.

Some cross-disciplinary work by climate scientists, ethnographers, and economists who have more holistically examined economic collapses, have tentatively posited that the latter half of this century (2040 to 2080) could see a 40% to 90% collapse in the human population due to chaotic weather and lethally high wet bulb temperatures shrinking agriculture at scale to next to nothing.

Considering that we are accelerating past +1.5℃ of warming, and are still solidly on the “business as usual” path that is increasingly likely to lead to +4℃ of warming before the end of the century, combined with historical evidence that +4℃ warming will likely cause the extinction of most any megafauna over 50kg, and yes. We will likely see a rapid and unrecoverable plummet.

Thank you!