Honestly this worry in general, at the current stage, seems a bundle of nonsense to me. There is obviously a real and relatively pressing issue about an inverted demographic pyramid and its sustainability—that’s a different matter, as it starts being felt pretty quickly. But “people will keep reproducing below replacement rates for centuries until humanity basically goes extinct” is so absurd I can’t even begin to take it seriously. The current rates of reproduction are a product of culture as well as socio-economic factors. None of those factors would survive impact with even just a halving of the current population! I can imagine a dozen ways in which the assumptions would break, from “lifestyle has worsened, thus people have a lower bar for what counts as a good situation to have kids in, rolling back roughly to the 1960s” to “a shrinking and aging population means way more opportunities for young people or working age, which raises the relative well-being of such people, which makes it easier to decide to have children”. A world in which population crashes is a world in which housing and jobs are desperately seeking for people to fill them, not the other way around—incentives change wildly, and so would people’s priorities. It’s honestly absurd to even try to extrapolate that way. The one scenario in which I think this wouldn’t happen is if somehow we all had perfect friendly AGI-powered automation, with robots taking care of all our needs and entertaining us, possibly even replacing human connections. It’s up to anyone to decide whether that’s a good or terrible future, or how likely it is, but it’s certainly much more than just a simple extrapolation from current trends.
Honestly this worry in general, at the current stage, seems a bundle of nonsense to me. There is obviously a real and relatively pressing issue about an inverted demographic pyramid and its sustainability—that’s a different matter, as it starts being felt pretty quickly. But “people will keep reproducing below replacement rates for centuries until humanity basically goes extinct” is so absurd I can’t even begin to take it seriously. The current rates of reproduction are a product of culture as well as socio-economic factors. None of those factors would survive impact with even just a halving of the current population! I can imagine a dozen ways in which the assumptions would break, from “lifestyle has worsened, thus people have a lower bar for what counts as a good situation to have kids in, rolling back roughly to the 1960s” to “a shrinking and aging population means way more opportunities for young people or working age, which raises the relative well-being of such people, which makes it easier to decide to have children”. A world in which population crashes is a world in which housing and jobs are desperately seeking for people to fill them, not the other way around—incentives change wildly, and so would people’s priorities. It’s honestly absurd to even try to extrapolate that way. The one scenario in which I think this wouldn’t happen is if somehow we all had perfect friendly AGI-powered automation, with robots taking care of all our needs and entertaining us, possibly even replacing human connections. It’s up to anyone to decide whether that’s a good or terrible future, or how likely it is, but it’s certainly much more than just a simple extrapolation from current trends.