I think the tweet is saying a lot less than it seems like it is.
In particular, the risk of civilization collapse due to climate change is really small. There are all kinds of bad things that might happen due to climate change, and I’m strongly in favor of working hard and spending a lot of resources to fight it, but I think it’s < 5% for even business as usual to lead to civilizational collapse due to climate change.
Suppose Musk thinks that as well—and in fact probably his estimate is lower than mine for collapse. Now he’s only needs to think that there’s a small chance of collapse due to low birth rates for it to be greater than the civilizational risk of climate change.
He also said: “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” He also followed up the original tweet here with “(And I do think global warming is a major risk)”.
Connecting his statements literally, you come to the conclusion that collapsing birth rate is a by far bigger than a major risk. I think this means that this answer (that he puts both global warming or population collapse to have a quite small probability to collapse civilization) is false. On the other hand, he’s well known to make ridiculous statements on twitter without much regard for the truth.
I think the tweet is saying a lot less than it seems like it is.
In particular, the risk of civilization collapse due to climate change is really small. There are all kinds of bad things that might happen due to climate change, and I’m strongly in favor of working hard and spending a lot of resources to fight it, but I think it’s < 5% for even business as usual to lead to civilizational collapse due to climate change.
Suppose Musk thinks that as well—and in fact probably his estimate is lower than mine for collapse. Now he’s only needs to think that there’s a small chance of collapse due to low birth rates for it to be greater than the civilizational risk of climate change.
He also said low birthrate is more dangerous than AI (which I think makes no sense).
He also said: “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” He also followed up the original tweet here with “(And I do think global warming is a major risk)”.
Connecting his statements literally, you come to the conclusion that collapsing birth rate is a by far bigger than a major risk. I think this means that this answer (that he puts both global warming or population collapse to have a quite small probability to collapse civilization) is false. On the other hand, he’s well known to make ridiculous statements on twitter without much regard for the truth.