With the exception of the blossom in homosexuality that followed the AIDS epidemic, I don't see, in my family, a population decline. My sister had four kids, her children each have at least four kids. My parents, after the war, simply replaced themselves. As for the coming human wave of people of color, what I see is conservatives breeding like crazy and trying to make birth control illegal and look poised to succeed. That's my experience in a city with a metropolitan* population of 18 million.
*Metropolitan area is within a fifty mile radius. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Monday, August 20, 2012 6:28 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; pete Subject: Re: [Futurework] The article that Sally referred us to I meant to write, "Most of the indigenous populations . . " as my first sentence. Then it slipped by. My apologies. But without substantial immigration over the past 30 years, the population of several European countries would already be at the point of declining. declining. America's non-Hispanic population is now at the point of decline and its population overall is now dependent on immigrant numbers. So you think that parents have the longer-term future of the population in mind when deciding on how many children to have? What is your evidence for believing this? My evidence is that after the post-war fertility euphoria of the '40s and '50s, children have become steadily more expensive. For the latter half of that period even the real (uninflated) mean wages for all those I call the 80-class (the "working class" in this country, the "middle class" in the US) has been in decline, never mind that costs, particularly educational, have been shooting up anyway. Any couple in an advanced country who is likely to remain on ordinary wages will think long and hard about having more than two children these days. In 20 or 30 advanced countries family size is already rapidly approaching 1. Keith At 10:15 20/08/2012, Pete Vincent wrote: Extracting a section... On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Keith Hudson wrote: > But most of the populations of advanced countries are declining > anyway. For the past two generations, ever since the post-WWII > baby-bulge, families have decreased to much less than replacement > sizes. Within two generations from now, populations will be halved; > within three generations, populations will be less than a quarter; > within four generations there'll only be remnants. But, with any luck, > the bulk of the population (what I term the 80-class) will decline > pari passu with the onslaught of the robot. Mismatches along the way > will have to be made up with welfare payments from governments. I disagree entirely. No country has yet seen an actual decline in population, that I am aware. Certainly lots of regions have, but the national totals still hover at manifestly unsustainable numbers, ...and everybody knows it. Talk to people. Everyone I talk to is just waiting for the other shoe to drop. On a discussion in a random web forum the other day, someone asked "How many are we?", and the unchallenged answer came immediately: "Too many!" People aren't stupid, they know we're courting catastrophe, and they aren't going to breed recklessly in that situation. Everyone has seen the growth curves, they know the numbers, and they can see that this sort of thing doesn't usually end well. However, it is a matter of habituation. People will tend to estimate that a sane population ought to feel like what it was like back when they were small children, and so each generation will have a different sense of what is excess. So, what I expect to happen is at some point there will be a slight decline in populations which will show up at the whole country, and then the whole world, level. This will cause a huge mental sigh of relief, followed shortly by a tiny uptick in the birth rate, so that the total population drop will not amount to more than ten or perhaps fifteen percent below maximum before it levels off, assuming that the long term pathologies to the environment due to human overburden have not yet ripened to the point of inflicting overt impact on our numbers. At this point, I expect that those long term pathologies are going to play the determining role. Each different, unforeseen, presenting a new and different assault which will hack at some portion of the population. Some will be simply the stochastic inevitability of epidemics. You keep a homogeneous population at unsustainable density long enough, and it will be vulnerable to pathogenic culls, not all of which will be controllable by our medical technology. Again, the longer the time scale, the more likely something too tricky to solve will come along. The situation essentially selects for it. Other assaults will arise from our corruption of the un- or underacknowledged necessities of our environment, air water, soil, healthy bacterial populations, etc. I don't expect these events to occur quickly, nor do I expect things like warfare to substantially affect the population total. I do expect that life will go through a fairly long period where we will experience as a planetary species a pretty wretched time, and how long and how bad it will be will be chiefly dependent on how long it takes us to acknowledge the superiority of cooperation over individual struggle. It may be that the population takes a massive dive due to a particularly vicious assault of the type mentioned above, but certainly not due to a massive social neglect of breeding. Barring such a hit, I expect the total population to subside slowly as reality sets in. Where it finally settles will be contingent on how our technology solves each challenge I've outlined above, including those just sketched vaguely. In the shorter medium term of the next 3-400 years, I expect a stepwise downward trend as apparently viable population levels prove unsustainable, due to inability to manage the challenges noted above, and population reduction is recognized as the only available solution. It may be that in a half a millennium or so we will decide that the planet cannot sustain more than 2.5 or 3 billion, or we may devise ways of supporting 8 or 12, or even 30, but with extraordinary technological intervention and considerable energy flows onto and off the planet. At any rate, at each stage along the way, people will tend to breed to the point of filling up the planet to the maximum regarded as viable, and I expect there will be a permanent struggle to hold the numbers to what is seen as desireable at any time. At any time ahead, with the planet at what is then generally perceived as a safe and manageable population level, there will never be a problem keeping the population level up, only with keeping it down, and the latter problem may result in a permanent undercurrent of nastiness. It would seem unlikely that managing population numbers would not be combined with some form of eugenic practice in such a world. Each child born would be expected to have something about it which justified its right to life in place of others whose would-be parents were thwarted. -Pete On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Keith Hudson wrote: > The article that Sally referred us to ("Skilled Work, Without the Worker", > John Markoff, NYT, 19 August 12) was eloquent on job destruction but only > hinted at another, equally significant by-product of the increasing use of > robotics. This is that robots are becoming increasingly versatile. If suitably > programmed, they can be instantly switched from one job to another. (Mention > was made of one robot which could switch between four distinctly different > operations.) Items can be custom-made. The mass consumer goods and services > market will also be destroyed in due course. > > Which, from the point of view of the very rich and the supportive specialisms > around them (what I call the 20-class), is just as well. Mass production of > standard goods and services is becoming increasingly risky. Competition > between ever-larger corporations in every field is not only becoming fiercer, > profit margins (the future source of investment finance) are becoming > narrower. The Apple iPhone4S might well have a profit margin of 50% or so at > the present time but, within five years or so, we can be certain that > competition from Samsung, Matsushita, Google and others will drive it well > below 10%, perhaps nearer to the 1-2% profit margins of most personal computer > manufacturers. Given an innovative tweak by another manufacturer to its own > smartphone and Apple could easily go out of existence, much as threatens Nokia > at the present time. > > Being a more mature industry, what's happening to cars at the present time is > an even more instructive pointer to the future. On the one hand, we have the > mass production of cars by no more than about a dozen large manufacturers in > the world with, at best, only modest profit margins of around 5-7%, more > usually 2-3%, and sometimes 0% (being kept alive by government subsidies). On > the other hand, we have the recent burgeoning of many luxury types of cars > (for the 20-class) which are either brand new in design (e.g. Tesla, McLaren) > or are revivals of some of the hand-made brands of the past (e.g. Porsche, > Aston Martin). They are made in surgically clean workshops with robots dancing > up and down the line and with hardly a worker to be seen. There are more than > 20 luxury car-makers already and undoubtedly there'll be many more. But they > won't be competing on price, only on customers' personal tastes. Later, > they'll be competing on the basis of how versatile their robots can be > programmed, even down to making customers' own designs as well as their own > brand. > > One question will be raised immediately: "If robots are to take over, and > there's to be no future for mass production then there'll be no future for > jobs for most of the population." Exactly! But most of the populations of > advanced countries are declining anyway. For the past two generations, ever > since the post-WWII baby-bulge, families have decreased to much less than > replacement sizes. Within two generations from now, populations will be > halved; within three generations, populations will be less than a quarter; > within four generations there'll only be remnants. But, with any luck, the > bulk of the population (what I term the 80-class) will decline pari passu with > the onslaught of the robot. Mismatches along the way will have to be made up > with welfare payments from governments. > > The other questions will be: "If there's no labour (80-class) for the 20-class > to exploit where will profits (for future investment) come from? How will an > economy exist at all?" The answer is that economic development has never come > from labour as such. Slave labour never gave way to paid labour solely because > of the sentiments of William Wilberforce or the Quakers, but because the > energy of paid labour was more efficient than slave labour. Paid labour is > giving way to robotics because the energy of robots is more efficiently > expended than the muscular (or mental) energy of the routine jobs of humans. > The future economy of a 20-class is perfectly viable so long as efficiency > savings are made between one generation of robots and the next. > > Keith > > Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/> > _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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