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by brigandish
1155 days ago
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> Just consider that a miniscule 6.7% of people have a college degree [2]. That provides something resembling an upper limit on the set of people actively contributing to technological advancement. Isn't that a bit like wanting to only take in high skilled immigrants without wondering where they're going to get their favourite food from home (which as a high skilled immigrant, I can tell you, food is immensely important to us). We don't do this stuff alone, we need haircuts, streets cleaned, trains to run, people to make and deliver food etc. We all contribute. |
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So, let's take a look at food - and some data.
Only 150 years ago, it required over 70% of the population to produce enough food for 100% of the population. Today, it is under 5% in rich countries, and about 65% in poor countries [0].
Obviously, given the uneven distribution of technology and knowledge, those people are today contributing to society.
But it is also true that fully distributing modern agricultural technology will make entirely redundant (to the maintenance of a technologically advanced society) something like half of the world's population.
And that is just an example from one industry.
The point is that declining replacement population does NOT automatically mean that the technological level of society will decline.
Correlation is not causation.
If anything, population increased as a result of technological advance — ability to generate more food, better shelter, better medicine — technology was not the result of greater population. Once we have the technology, evenly distributing it will require far fewer people to build and maintain it.
Let's take it a step further, and say we want to avoid using massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides common in modern agriculture. That will STILL not require the same amount of people slaving in the fields. The technology that will enable scaled-up organic farming is also massively labor-saving — agricultural robotics, not only planting and picking, but most critically monitoring for and eliminating weeds and pests [1,2].
Yes, there will be a greater need for people fabricating and maintaining agricultural robots, but that will be dwarfed by the number today's slaving-in-the-fields-jobs that will disappear in a near future decade. If they do not reproduce at full replacement rates, we will still have a society that has both technological workers, and others who contribute much more to the culture, including authentic cuisine.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/five-roles-robots-...
[2] https://www.ieee-ras.org/agricultural-robotics-automation