Empty Planet

[Stuart Galbraith]

When I was studying the Industrial revolution, it was noted there was a neat synergy going on. People were leaving the rural areas to get jobs in the city which paid better, which made mechanized farming equipment, which made agriculture more efficient, which meant they needed less people so more people left the land, and so on and so on. I suspect precisely the same effect is ongoing in China at the moment. It certainly is in Russia, where they have lots of villages that are only made up of a handful of old people, with no other people living in them. The death of collectivization hit them hard as well of course.

 

I think the next development will be online production. People publishing, writing software, doing your accounts, running local services, even (God Help us) adult services. I think there are as many jobs out there as things people can find to do online, which in the future is probably going to be quite a lot. The difficulty will be preparing nations for that change, both in infrastructure and even in taxation, to take account of it. We are definately living in a new industrial revolution, we just dont really see it that way yet. I genuinely wonder what the effect of that will be, where people can start an industry with little more than a desktop, requiring little in the way of startup cost from financial houses. Its not even going to require unions if most people are self employed, because they are writing their own conditions.

 

Skywalkre, I think your friend is right, I dont think any job being fully automated. Nobody will want to ride in a 200mph train run by computers, or fly in airliners with no pilot. I think even industrial processes are going to take human input just to deal with the unexpected and breakdowns, or stock foulups. I think its going to be gradual decline, and probably driven more by the lack of people to do the shitty jobs because they have alternatives as in the Industrial revolution, than laying off people that dont want to be. There will doubtless be exceptions of course.

Edited June 5, 2020 by Stuart Galbraith

[Ssnake]

Nobody will want to ride in a 200mph train run by computers, or fly in airliners with no pilot.

 

Nobody wants to put their lives into the hands of train drivers or pilots that are on drugs, have severe depressions, or undiagnosed aneurisms.

We're putting up with this for lack of alternatives. But putting humans into these places of resonsibility is far from perfect and safe because humans will always be humans. An AI may be devoid of emotions, but on the upside it's devoid of emotions.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Well as far as trains, they had a solution to aneurisms as long ago as 1900 with the dead mans handle. All trains today have a driver alert pedal to reassure the machine he is still aware of his surroundings and hasnt nodded off. Ill grant you aircraft are more complicated, but having more than one pilot seems to work. The only negative is a suicidal pilot, and there has been what, 2? 6 if you counter the September 11th attacks. Its a miniscule problem. Compare and contrast to cruise missiles which you know every time you fire them, you are going to get something like 1 percent fail. Even higher for Russian ones. Its just not reliable enough, even for systems designed to crash.

 

Whether machines emerge more competent than humans when we develop AI, well thats another matter, but I suspect we are going to keep humans in the loop if only for the reason we can feel connectivity with humans, which were are unlikely ever to feel for machines.

 

[Ssnake]

Yes, we have dead mans handles, but we also have humans in control centers playing candy crush, train drivers missing stop signals, driving too fast into curves because they are late on schedule, human managers responding to dysfunctional incentive programs that reward "trimming down" the maintenance expense. I agree that automated systems will never be 100% reliable but driverless light rails are a reality, and I think we'll see more of them in the coming decades. As passengers we don't build a human relationship with train drivers. Partially because they are physically separated from us, partially because nobody who can think ahead would want them to chat with us while driving.

Next, I don't see people refusing to step into driverless trains where they are in operation, and I doubt many people would notice if one day train engines would run completely automated. What's preventing us from doing the transition quickly is the lack of separation between automated trains and those under human control. And I agree, there's no hurry in this. But eventually I think we'll see it happen.

[Rick]

Yes, we have dead mans handles, but we also have humans in control centers playing candy crush, train drivers missing stop signals, driving too fast into curves because they are late on schedule, human managers responding to dysfunctional incentive programs that reward "trimming down" the maintenance expense. I agree that automated systems will never be 100% reliable but driverless light rails are a reality, and I think we'll see more of them in the coming decades. As passengers we don't build a human relationship with train drivers. Partially because they are physically separated from us, partially because nobody who can think ahead would want them to chat with us while driving.

Next, I don't see people refusing to step into driverless trains where they are in operation, and I doubt many people would notice if one day train engines would run completely automated. What's preventing us from doing the transition quickly is the lack of separation between automated trains and those under human control. And I agree, there's no hurry in this. But eventually I think we'll see it happen.

IIRC, back in the 1990's Atlanta's airport had driverless shuttle trains. So I do believe you are correct.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Automated systems can create as many problems as they solve. If they are made by man, they share the flaws of man. I can remember reading of an unusual near accident of a Tornado that retracted its flaps on take off. They eventually admitted they could never discover the fault, that it was probably a line of software code among the thousands in every Tornado, that would occur once in a blue moon. As it turned out, I dont believe it ever occurred again. But presumably there was other bugs in the software that did, or for whatever reason were never triggered.

 

The alternative is to develop an AI to write its own software, but we seem to be decades away from that. And it would still require the AI to adequately understand the terms of reference of what you want it to do.

 

Depends what kind of driverless trains. Its one thing to climb in a driverless train trundling around London docklands on a closed circuit at 30mph, id have zero problems with that because there is a limit to the harm it can cause. Its another thing to run an AI train at 200mph among the rest of the rail network. I like trains and I like technology, but im not ready to accept that and currently few others likely are. They also have to get it past the Unions, which is probably going to be just as hard as developing the technology.

[Colin]

 

Yes, we have dead mans handles, but we also have humans in control centers playing candy crush, train drivers missing stop signals, driving too fast into curves because they are late on schedule, human managers responding to dysfunctional incentive programs that reward "trimming down" the maintenance expense. I agree that automated systems will never be 100% reliable but driverless light rails are a reality, and I think we'll see more of them in the coming decades. As passengers we don't build a human relationship with train drivers. Partially because they are physically separated from us, partially because nobody who can think ahead would want them to chat with us while driving.

Next, I don't see people refusing to step into driverless trains where they are in operation, and I doubt many people would notice if one day train engines would run completely automated. What's preventing us from doing the transition quickly is the lack of separation between automated trains and those under human control. And I agree, there's no hurry in this. But eventually I think we'll see it happen.

IIRC, back in the 1990's Atlanta's airport had driverless shuttle trains. So I do believe you are correct.

 

Vancouver Skytrain is automated with a human manned control centre, but no drivers

[Skywalkre]

Just saw this on the front page of reddit.  Everything you need to know is right there in the byline.  SK's population will be half by the end of this century if not sooner (the UN always seems to err on the upside of these estimates).  Just... wow.

I honestly believe we'll see population decline in the world in my lifetime.  This is coming a lot faster than people think...

Quote

Korea Shatters Its Own Record for World’s Lowest Fertility Rate

• South Korea’s fertility rate slid further to 0.81 last year
• UN sees Korea’s population halving by the end of this century

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-24/fastest-aging-wealthy-economy-breaks-own-fertility-record-again?utm_content=markets&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-markets&sref=xTkgnLSf/

Later in the article is this bit:

Quote

The forecast is a sobering reminder of the demographic threat and associated economic challenges confronting Bank of Korea Governor Rhee Chang-yong and President Yoon Suk Yeol, who both took office earlier this year.

Rhee warned in April that South Korea’s economy faces the risk of secular stagnation as the population ages and productivity slows. He said rising welfare spending would take away from the finance needed to boost economic growth, a key goal set out by Yoon in his inauguration pledges.

Economics has become a new interest of mine in recent months/years and one thing I've noticed from a cursory search of stuff out there is a complete lack of discussion of how economies will have to adjust with incoming population decline.  I imagine someone out there in academia is talking about it... I'm just not seeing it in the casual discussions yet.

[Ssnake]

We'll make the shit up as we go, per SOP.

Sure, some will see what's coming, but honestly, knowing this and drawing practical conclusions (e.g., which stocks to pick) are entirely different issues.

[Soren Ras]

The entire West, the extended West (Japan, South Korea), Russia, China -  all these are going out of business as things stand. With varying speeds of course, but pretty inexorably so.

This has been pretty clear for at least 15-16 years.

Turns out the future will belong to those who bother to show up.

And that ain't us, at least not in any shape recognizable by those who built our civilization.

--

Soren

 

[Ssnake]

Maybe, but for some it'll happen faster than for others. Accepting immigration, for example, has the potential to slow things down, although it's still presented by many politicians as the worst idea ever because, fuck strategic thinking, these immigrants aren't exactly like us and we're too lazy to put up the effort to integrate them properly into our societies while we still have a chance.

[sunday]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period

[jmsaari]

1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

these immigrants aren't exactly like us and we're too lazy to put up the effort to integrate them properly into our societies while we still have a chance.

Not so much too lazy, but too much in love with the idea of multiculturalism, or too afraid of being branded a racist for speaking about problems with integration from certain cultures and proposing solutions, or too afraid of said immigrants as fundamentally threatening/inferior people beyond any integration.

[Skywalkre]

19 hours ago, Ssnake said:

We'll make the shit up as we go, per SOP.

Sure, some will see what's coming, but honestly, knowing this and drawing practical conclusions (e.g., which stocks to pick) are entirely different issues.

Heh... isn't this the problem?  It's far more than what stocks to pick... fundamental elements of society as we know it will start to break down.  We have an increasingly unhealthy (from choice) and aging population that will have no one to care for them, welfare systems that will break the back of the young (increasing the population decline as said young choose not to have kids), and so on.  Old fashioned staples of maintaining wealth like buying a home will turn out to be meaningless (here in the Valley that's a big question on several fronts... between water issues and population decline why buy a house out here if you're young?).

I get it, the problem of the West is that we can't look beyond the coming quarter (and its profits) and that's one big reason China will pass us by in the near future.  But... crazy thought... maybe we should start thinking about it?

[Tim the Tank Nut]

China might maybe possibly get ahead of the West for a very brief moment but don't get too cocky.

They're going to lose.  It's their nature.  They lack conviction.

more specifically China's wealth comes from the ability to rob its own people of the fruits of their labor.  Because they lack creativity (cultural issues) they aren't adaptable as a society.  That lack of adaptability is not an issue when circumstances are static but that is not a continuum.  Circumstances have a nasty tendency to change radically.

Of all the nations in the world I'd say China is one of the most rather than the least vulnerable to radical change.

 

With all that a little bit of forward thinking in our part of the planet would be a good idea.  A nice place to start may be affirming some basic biological facts.  You aren't going to raise children into brilliant engineers if they can't even understand that tab A goes into slot B to create another person.

[Ssnake]

I don't think China will get rich enough before it gets old/the demographic collapse will set in. They maintained the one-child policy for about two decades too long. China may appear ten foot tall at the moment because the bulk of its population is still in productive age. That that will change rapidly in the next 15, 20 years. Add to that the housing bubble and the water crisis, and it's not looking too well for them.

Like this:

...and this:

...and this:

The good news is, fewer people will be almost universally good for nature. Also, I don't think that we're going to see "collapse collapse". Rather, some sort of a prolonged global economic stagnation or recession (probably not in Africa, though).

[Ivanhoe]

57 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

The good news is, fewer people will be almost universally good for nature. Also, I don't think that we're going to see "collapse collapse". Rather, some sort of a prolonged global economic stagnation or recession (probably not in Africa, though).

Human demographics is going to result in an economic/cultural disruption*, but I'm not too worried. Rather than rely on the productive output of millennials to keep me afloat, I'd rather just work part-time in my 70s and 80s. Plus I am looking forward to less traffic on the roads.

I suspect western post-industrial cultures will need to begin getting retirees off the bench and back in the game to some extent.

* Contrast with the lockdown WFH revolution, which had many pontificators predicting a productivity collapse and loss of work ethic. What actually happened was a per-capita productivity gain in the knowledge-based economy. Yeah a lot of people checked out of the labor market, but those folks had checked out of the labor market while still showing up at work and wasting space. What the blabberati failed to point out was the adverse impact of lockdowns on light industry which requires physical presence.

 

 

[sunday]

Discredited Malthusianism rears its ugly head...

Quote

In the book, Simon dismissed the widely held belief that population growth must inevitably result in poverty and famine. Unlike other animals, he argued, humans innovate their way out of scarcity by increasing the supply of natural resources or developing substitutes for overused resources. Human ingenuity, in other words, is “the ultimate resource” that makes all other resources more plentiful.

Simon’s conclusions and forecasts were based on meticulous research, facts, and a deep understanding of human nature, intelligence, and creativity. They put him at odds with the doomsayers of his day, such as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, whose best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb argued that over-population would lead to the exhaustion of natural resources and mega-famines. As one of us wrote on these pages over a year ago, the two thinkers agreed to put their ideas to the test.

 

Edited August 27, 2022 by sunday

[Ivanhoe]

Yeah; when your standard-bearer is Paul Ehrlich, ...

 

[Skywalkre]

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/z82mj6/japan_births_at_new_low_as_population_shrinks_and/

Japan reports fewer births than the year before which was already a record low.

This was expected, though, and trends in Japan and basically every Western nation are heading in this direction.  On the bright side Japan (birth rate of ~1.3) isn't as bad as South Korea (~0.8).  The US is at ~1.7 IIRC but we're maintaining population growth through immigration.  You need a birth rate of ~2.1 just to maintain your population without factoring in immigration.

Linking to the reddit comment over the article because of some of the interesting statements in that tread.  One commenter was stating that child care in their major US metro area was $2800/month!  How... is that even possible?!

A lot of discussion about the difficulties in having a kid these days and wishes, especially for USians, of steps to make it friendlier.  Sadly, per the book that started this thread, those measures tend to have minimal to no impact on declining birth rates.

A strange, new world is approaching quickly... and I'm curious how it'll all play out.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Skywalkre

[Josh]

On 8/25/2022 at 12:54 PM, Skywalkre said:

Just saw this on the front page of reddit.  Everything you need to know is right there in the byline.  SK's population will be half by the end of this century if not sooner (the UN always seems to err on the upside of these estimates).  Just... wow.

I honestly believe we'll see population decline in the world in my lifetime.  This is coming a lot faster than people think...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-24/fastest-aging-wealthy-economy-breaks-own-fertility-record-again?utm_content=markets&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-markets&sref=xTkgnLSf/

Later in the article is this bit:

Economics has become a new interest of mine in recent months/years and one thing I've noticed from a cursory search of stuff out there is a complete lack of discussion of how economies will have to adjust with incoming population decline.  I imagine someone out there in academia is talking about it... I'm just not seeing it in the casual discussions yet.

I believe some projections of the Chinese population are similar. I think even the fairly middle of the road UN projections foresee a decline of ~40+ % by 2100, and some do go as high as 50%. Compared to the ROK that is a far more significant number. These projections of course assume fertility is fairly constant over the course of 3/4 of a century, which seems like one hell of an "if", but it does seem pretty assured that by 2030 the Chinese population will be dropping by tens of millions of people year over year.

[Harold Jones]

Doesn't look good for the home team.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/15/humans-could-face-reproductive-crisis-as-sperm-count-declines-study-finds#:~:text=A study published in the,– a drop of 51.6%.

[Skywalkre]

On 12/1/2022 at 12:13 PM, Josh said:

I believe some projections of the Chinese population are similar. I think even the fairly middle of the road UN projections foresee a decline of ~40+ % by 2100, and some do go as high as 50%. Compared to the ROK that is a far more significant number. These projections of course assume fertility is fairly constant over the course of 3/4 of a century, which seems like one hell of an "if", but it does seem pretty assured that by 2030 the Chinese population will be dropping by tens of millions of people year over year.

I've lamented for years how the West seems to be ignoring the rise of China if not still actively supporting them in their efforts indirectly.  Falls on deaf ears.  A few posters have commented in recent years that issues like this, as well as some others, should hopefully keep China in check if not make them crash hard.  I certainly hope that's true...

[Skywalkre]

On 12/1/2022 at 3:21 PM, Harold Jones said:

Doesn't look good for the home team.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/15/humans-could-face-reproductive-crisis-as-sperm-count-declines-study-finds#:~:text=A study published in the,– a drop of 51.6%.

I'd completely forgotten about this.  I've seen this come up in health/wellness discussions/podcasts over the last few years.  No one knows why though there's lots of theories.  Couple this trend to the fact most women, if they even choose to have kids, are having them later and you could end up with an even bigger drop in birth rate than we're already seeing.  We could see some real Children of Men type scenarios playing out in just a few decades!

[DB]

It often seems that the Marching Morons will outbreed the more intelligent members of society, because they're the ones with 4, 5 kids, all on the dole.

Isn't most of the plastics in the water hysteria about oestrogen analogues, or is that so last decade?