Re: [Futurework] The article that Sally referred us to

[Keith Hudson]

At 21:09 20/08/2012, Natalia wrote:
Too many humans in Earth's future, for sure.

(KH) Too true.

(D&N) I've always thought that humans should never have strayed too 
far from the equator, where food and shelter would not be a big 
deal, nor an unsustainable issue. Yet, obviously, the mismanagement 
of the warmer environments forced people to find new lands, just as 
today plans are actually being drawn for terra-forming Mars.

(KH)  Humans and their predecessors never lived in or anywhere near 
the equator for millions of years (except briefly on the eastern side 
of the Rift Valley as various hominims migrated up and down the 
savanna regions between south Africa and the Ethiopia region). There 
was too much endemic disease for humans to cope with. Man only lived 
in or near the rainforests comparatively recently after he'd long 
left Africa and started migrating along the shorelines and major 
rivers, forcing excess numbers to leave the fishing regions (20.000 
to 10,000 years ago) or the new farming regions (10,000 years ago to 
the present).

Keith


Below, you said:

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.

Prophetic as this may be, I hope, instead, barring the most sane 
choice of relevant mass education to effectively reduce 
over-population, it would be prospective parents who are carefully 
screened for reasonable competence to raise a child prior to 
conception. Given the huge numbers of unwanted and abused kids, too 
often the results of abusive relationships, I harbour reservations 
about the right of such people to conceive under these stressful and 
truly harmful conditions. If any successful program could be 
implemented, we might just arrive at sustainable numbers of 2-3 
billion. Raising only potential prodigies is no guarantee of their 
continued uniqueness. I think it would be difficult to screen for 
such potential, and that screening would still lie within parental 
genetic/epigenetic potential.

Implementing parental screening without racial, cultural, religious, 
intellectual, educational, income, or sexual orientation profiling 
would be hard enough. Convincing people that it's the right thing to 
do for the sake of continuity of Earthly life itself, given how 
easily this could become a biased catastrophe, and considering the 
shameful recent history of all sterilization and eugenics controls, 
would first require conditions on Earth to become quite dire and 
would also require bureaucratic enforcement. Likely an impossible 
measure. We have only to recall the children who died at the hands 
of their guardians within systems of protective child welfare to 
gauge how difficult full implementation of a screening program would be.

Some reports indicate that education is reducing violent crime and 
domestic violence. Whether or not this is even true, however, 
doesn't address the population issue itself. Now would be the time 
to ensure education around sustainable populations. What with 
abstinence still being promoted over prevention and science, there's 
a long way to go.

Natalia

On 20/08/2012 2:15 AM, pete 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


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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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