Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, it would be worrying if there were a million, and at least worthy of consideration if there were a hundred million, but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
And if you believe in the fair distribution of the benefits of automation and AI in the population. IMHO, this belief is the more unrealistic one, at least in the short term.
>Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans,
The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.
Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.
And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.
>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. Just because you can fit a trend line doesn’t mean the projections will pan out. It could just as easily be the case that once population starts meaningfully decreasing, the opportunity cost of children will also decrease and fertility rates will recover. This happens all the time in nature.
Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years. This can easily just be a reversion to the mean. There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now. In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom. I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging because they believe they are saving the species.
>This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. J
The opposite, actually. Your assumption is that the rates bounce up and down, mostly because you don't want to believe there's a problem.
The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen. You and everyone else on HN whines "the reason people aren't having kids is the economy is awful and we can't afford them"... but in a world with a shrinking, aging population the economy just gets worse.
You're the one making the very stupid assumption, and you can't even say why. I can, it's because you haven't thought about it. Perhaps it's uncomfortable to think that you're driving your species to extinction.
>Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years.
More nonsense. Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly. I already laid out the math... how long before 8 billion becomes 1000 when you're splitting it in half every generation (a generation is commonly held to be 20-25 years)? Can you do that math puzzle for us? There are only about 5 generations living on Earth at any given time. Just do the math already. None of this is pretty.
>There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now.
Yes, there is. People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years. Every moment you waste "not worrying about it now" is the problem compounding with interest. You've already waited too long to worry about it.
>In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom.
Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
>I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging
It'd be because you and those like you forced the issue. Go ahead, stick your head in the sand some more. We all know that willful obliviousness to reality can change the rules of the universe themselves, right? Wish it all away!
> The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen.
And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met. So it's not just not impossible, it's by far the likeliest scenario.
> Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly.
The whole population of the world slowly rose from some 10-50 million before 1 CE to some 100 million by 1000 CE, to maybe some 2-300 million by 1700 CE. And then it suddenly reached 1B in 1800, 2B in 1920, 4B in 1974, 8B in 2022. This is a massive population explosion, with the doubling rate increasing rapidly, especially before the 2000s.
> People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years.
This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history, a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again. And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s (note that the record is currently 74), while men can and often do reproduce well into their 60s+.
Now, is it better if people who want to have children have them when they're younger, probably in their late 20s? Absolutely - mostly to keep generational gaps manageable, to benefit from grandparents' help, etc. But it's not in any way a strict biological necessity, and as fertility science advances, we have every reason to believe this will continue to improve.
> Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
>And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met.
No. It's never happened in the history of the human species. It's unprecedented. When human population dropped, it recovered... but only because the fertility rate was still high. Fertility rate isn't population... a sub-replacement fertility rate is literally and exactly "this population no longer grows at all".
You're gibbering nonsense right now, and somehow it sounds intelligent to you.
>This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history
It's non-ideal. Awful? Dunno. But they can, it's documented fact, and a mere 20 years after that it becomes functionally impossible at scale. That's the window of reproduction, but I guess it's easy to try to change the subject because if people start thinking about icky teenage pregnancies then they can stop thinking about their looming extinction.
>a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again
I can promise that it will soon never happen again, because your entire species will become extinct in just a couple centuries. Your perfect utopia is coming, and more quickly than you might have hoped.
>And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s
No. They've become able to in exceptional circumstances. This isn't the same thing as "able to reproduce". For it to matter, it would have to be every woman capable of this, every time. This problem won't go away because 1 in 60 affluent women will have a geriatric pregnancy.
>This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
It's not hyperbolic. Not even a little. One of us is, but it's not me. And it's bizarre that you think it is... I live among lunatics. Go back and read your horseshit... you're talking about how there's nothing wrong and everything's just fine because some women can carry babies to term at age 74.
It recovers when having 1.1 kids per person on average does not mean making substantial sacrifices in quality of life over your entire life. Since many people will still not have kids, that sounds like 3 kids per couple being affordable in a comfortable, enjoyable, not stressful manner.
Right now you can guess that for many couples, 2 kids becomes close to unaffordable, and 3 becomes nearly unmanageable. Individually, you will see couples choose to do it and even to do it in ways that others both envy and chastise; but overall, it's not happening.
It requires many things to change not just in economy, but in society as a whole. It's not going to happen in a society devoted to growth, that's for sure.
> When civilization falls to the point that nobody can make birth control pills, if not before.
This won't save us. By the time civilization can't make birth control pills, it also means we've lost advanced medical care and now maternal/infant mortality kicks in. Nearly every baby born now survives into adulthood, barring rare misfortunes. But the idea that obstetrics will still be cruising along while we can't crank out simple pharmaceuticals is nonsense.
The trend is accelerating. We'll see 0.1 fertility rates in our lifetimes, you and me, and I'm old. We'll see central Africa hit sub-replacement fertility rates in 25 years. And even then we'll still have to listen to retarded jackasses tell us how it's no big deal, population will bounce back once things clear out. Buried deep in the human psyche is some truly superhuman level of obliviousness and denial of reality, and no logic or long term observation or plain facts are a match for it.
I'd take that bet. Except... the term of the bet is "in our lifetimes", which means that it ends when one of us dies, which means that collecting is going to be a problem.
For the record, I'm 64. "In my lifetime" is somewhere between 1 day and 40 years.
I'm 53. Even if you told me that you have a history of heart disease in your family I'd take the bet. It's grim. I figure we see sub-0.2 in South Korea by 2047, but it'd be cheating to round down until it's like 0.14... that'd only take a few more years, 3-5 maybe. Japan's non-immigrant population will hit that in roughly the same time frame, but I don't have a clear read on the politics there. China will be hitting 0.5ish about that time unless the regime panics and tries to implement forced breeding. The Uighur thing might even now be experiments in that direction. Europe's only about 20 years behind east Asia.
We'll still be getting the cycle of "politicians are trying tax incentives" and "someone needs to fix the economy so people feel safe having children" headlines in North America, which is apparently enough to lull everyone into thinking it's not a problem.
No, this should absolutely not terrify anyone, at all. The only reason it is a concern is that our economic system is built on infinite growth, which is going to fail one way or the other eventually. It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids than any of the other possible fail states.
The solution is to fix the economic system, not to worry that teenagers aren't getting accidentally pregnant so much anymore.
Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics. The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans to maintain our current economic system is absolutely asinine.
>The only reason it is a concern is that our economic system is built on infinite growth,
This is plainly, factually wrong. A sub-replacement fertility level isn't "the growth has stopped". It's "rapid shrinking has started, shrinking of the sort that causes even more shrinking". That's the concern.
> It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids
If they have fewer than 2.1 on average, that's not better. It's literally "you should die out and become extinct". That's what you're telling them.
>The solution is to fix the economic system
What you're pushing doesn't fix the economy, it makes it worse. When there aren't enough workers to maintain infrastructure, there will be rolling brownouts. It's food rationing because there aren't enough workers to keep agriculture going. It's "there are no more consumer goods because the factories were hollowed out"... which leads to "there is no retail and no retail jobs".
A shrinking, aging population wrecks an economy.
>Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics.
"Robots will save us!" is juvenile fantasy. You're deluded.
>The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans
No one was talking about "increase the number of humans". Maybe you're just really bad at math. We're talking about "keep the number of humans steady, because shrinking locks us into a never-recovering vicious spiral of shrinking til we hit 0". Which is where we are now.
> It's literally "you should die out and become extinct". That's what you're telling them.
This is both dumb and dishonest. It's dumb because you're not making an actual argument, just pointing at a potential long-term outcome, which isn't even an obviously bad outcome; if there are no more humans, there are also no humans to fret about their own lack of existence, so who exactly is being harmed here?
It's dishonest to claim that a temporarily shrinking population (which is a good thing given our current population level) will automatically lead to extinction. It will absolutely not.
You sound like somebody with some kind of religious conviction, which is fine for you, but leave the rest of us out of it.
Ok. I suppose that I can play along and pretend (literal) human extinction isn't a "bad outcome". Is that the point of contention? You think it's ok or even preferable, while I dislike that outcome? Is that the source of our conflict? If so, this is the closest to honesty I've ever heard from someone like yourself.
But for me, this makes you my enemy. People who truly believe as you do are beyond redemption. No courtesy, kindness, or obligation is owed to you. You can be allowed no influence, no one should hear your voice.
>It's dishonest to claim that a temporarily shrinking population
It's never temporary. We've jumped out of the plane without a parachute, there's not much time left, but you're still arguing "sometimes things move upward".
Shrinking populations by their very nature cause more shrinking. There are dozens of well-understood and empirically confirmed mechanisms that make this so.
It's actually pretty deserving that the people like yourself should be wiped out. I would just rather you didn't take the rest of us with you.
> You think it's ok or even preferable, while I dislike that outcome?
Explain to me how you are harmed by the eventual extinction of humanity (which will come at some point in the future, as all things end).
> It's never temporary.
Everything is temporary.
> But for me, this makes you my enemy. People who truly believe as you do are beyond redemption. No courtesy, kindness, or obligation is owed to you. You can be allowed no influence, no one should hear your voice. It's actually pretty deserving that the people like yourself should be wiped out.
If you read what you just wrote, then read what I said to you that caused this outburst, and think about how warranted your reaction was, I'm sure you can reach an objective conclusion about which of us is genuinely more likely to be beyond redemption. I've used HN for as long as it's existed, and this is the first time I've wished I could block someone, because your behavior is not acceptable.
