I thought this is such a table stakes in EA/LessWrong circles it’s not worth justifying. Will MacAskill in “What We Owe The Future” have spent many pages arguing for why more people is good and procreation is good. I assumed that most readers of the post either have read this book or have absorbed this positions through other materials.
I think you’re mistaken about what’s considered table stakes on LW. We don’t make such detailed assumptions about the values of people here. Maybe the EA forum is different? On LW, newcomers are generally pointed to the sequences, which is much more about epistemology than population ethics.
In any case, it’s somewhat difficult to square your stated values with the policy you endorse. In the long run, the limiting factor on the number of people that can live is the fact that our universe has a limited quantity of resources. The number of people willing to bear and raise children in “western countries” in the early 21st century is not the bottleneck. Even if we could double the population overnight, the number of people ever to live in the history of the universe would be the about the same, since it depends mostly on the amount of thermodynamic free energy contained in the regions of space we can reach.
It would certainly be bad if humanity dies out or our civilization crumbles because we produced too few offspring. But fertility in many parts of the world is still quite high, so that seems unlikely. While we still might like to make it easier and more enjoyable for people to have children, it seems backwards to try and induce people to have children by banning things they might substitute for it. It’s not going to change the number of unborn future people.
Please read MacAskill or someone else on this topic. They argue for more people in Western countries and in this century not for galaxy-brained reasons but rather mundane reasons, that have little to do with their overall long-termism. Roughly, for them, it seems that having more people in Western countries this century lowers the risk of the “great stagnation”.
Also, if long-termism is wrong, but sentientism is still right, and we are not going to over-live AGI (but not too soon, but let’s say in 100 years), it’s good to produce more happy-ish sentient observers why we are here and AGI hasn’t yet over-taken the planet.
But fertility in many parts of the world is still quite high, so that seems unlikely.
Fertility rate drops across the globe rapidly. If Africa is lifted out of poverty and insufficient education through some near-term AI advances, we may see a really rapid and precipitous decline in population. Elon Musk actually worries quite a lot about this risk and advocates everyone to have more kids (he himself has 10).
I think you’re mistaken about what’s considered table stakes on LW. We don’t make such detailed assumptions about the values of people here. Maybe the EA forum is different? On LW, newcomers are generally pointed to the sequences, which is much more about epistemology than population ethics.
In any case, it’s somewhat difficult to square your stated values with the policy you endorse. In the long run, the limiting factor on the number of people that can live is the fact that our universe has a limited quantity of resources. The number of people willing to bear and raise children in “western countries” in the early 21st century is not the bottleneck. Even if we could double the population overnight, the number of people ever to live in the history of the universe would be the about the same, since it depends mostly on the amount of thermodynamic free energy contained in the regions of space we can reach.
It would certainly be bad if humanity dies out or our civilization crumbles because we produced too few offspring. But fertility in many parts of the world is still quite high, so that seems unlikely. While we still might like to make it easier and more enjoyable for people to have children, it seems backwards to try and induce people to have children by banning things they might substitute for it. It’s not going to change the number of unborn future people.
Please read MacAskill or someone else on this topic. They argue for more people in Western countries and in this century not for galaxy-brained reasons but rather mundane reasons, that have little to do with their overall long-termism. Roughly, for them, it seems that having more people in Western countries this century lowers the risk of the “great stagnation”.
Also, if long-termism is wrong, but sentientism is still right, and we are not going to over-live AGI (but not too soon, but let’s say in 100 years), it’s good to produce more happy-ish sentient observers why we are here and AGI hasn’t yet over-taken the planet.
Fertility rate drops across the globe rapidly. If Africa is lifted out of poverty and insufficient education through some near-term AI advances, we may see a really rapid and precipitous decline in population. Elon Musk actually worries quite a lot about this risk and advocates everyone to have more kids (he himself has 10).