[D4Ha]

Interesting quotes to go with this Post

“So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. [Steve] Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” (NYtimes article, Sept. 10, 2014)” ― Nick Bilton

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley

[m463]

"When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you'd have to say we succeeded when you look at all the people walking down the sidewalk looking down at something in their hands and totally oblivious to everything around them!" - Steve Wozniak

[shiroiushi]

>“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley

Interestingly, though he didn't intend it (he thought he was writing dystopian fiction), Aldous Huxley actually predicted humanity's best possible future with "Brave New World".

Without traditional (basically pre-technological) societies where women are essentially slaves, people earnestly believe in ridiculous supernatural religious claims, and couples are basically stuck together no matter how miserable they are, it's simply not mathematically possible for birthrates to be kept high enough to sustain the human population. Huxley brilliantly predicted a future society that could use technology to solve this problem which we're now seeing in developed nations. Societies should be looking at it as a blueprint, not something to avoid, though the constant drug-use should probably not be emulated.

[freeone3000]

Is sustaining the human population at its current levels an ideal to strive towards? Fewer people means fewer goods, but also less demand; automation has taken over so much already it’s hard to see the point of having so many people.

[shiroiushi]

Fewer people means less insurance in case of natural disaster, less innovation, less of everything really. Of course, that has to be balanced with resource consumption, environmental effects, etc.

Also, a declining population doesn't just mean "go back to a more sustainable level". It's not like people are suddenly going to start having babies again when the population gets to, say, 1B, and things will carry on sustainably. Instead, there'll barely be anyone who can have babies, because everyone will be elderly (i.e. inverted population pyramid), so the population will just keep collapsing. And with so many old people needing care, and no young people around to do it, things are going to get really bad quickly.

People seem to think we're going to invent some super-advanced humanoid care-giving robots "any day now", and I suppose also invent some way of people being able to have more kids over a longer lifespan or something, but betting your society's future on uninvented technology is not good planning I think.

[ElevenLathe]

If we can survive population decline at all (fwiw I think is still an open question on a planetary scale), we shouldn't worry about rebounding for a long time yet. So many problems we face that would be easier to solve at 1B people than 10B would also be even easier with 100M. The "market" will clear and human population long term will settle into something that can be sustained with available resources and biosphere services. Getting there via "attrition" is preferable to getting there via apocalyptic wars, famines, genocides, and diseases.

[shiroiushi]

>Getting there via "attrition" is preferable to getting there via apocalyptic wars, famines, genocides, and diseases.

How do you think wars are going to be avoided when there's a demographic collapse? With so many old people and so few young people to support them, something's going to break. People don't normally just put up with failed economies; wars are a frequent result. Famine is also a strong possibility: the elderly people probably aren't going to be doing all the farming, but they still need to eat.

People who talk about population reduction as a good thing always seem to assume that the demographics will be similar to today, with plenty of young people to balance the old people, and that's absolutely not what's in store.

[ElevenLathe]

Right, hence my parenthetical. If we can do it at all, we should keep going. If we can't, then there's no good outcome available and we only get to choose between demographic collapse or biosphere collapse.

[D4Ha]

That was lost on me, because the second quote felt like a prediction of the impact of technology on our social lives.

[shiroiushi]

Yes, I think it was; the second quote (from Huxley) had nothing directly to do with BNW at all. I merely brought that up because of the Huxley connection and because I thought it was an interesting tangent.

[southernplaces7]

>“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley

It may have provided us with the largely unused means to more easily go backwards if we want to (for example, via nuclear or massive biological war), but the idea that it's made us worse off from some ideal previous state of lower technology is popular, fashionably nihilistic nonsense with no bearing on concrete reality. It was also just as stupid an idea in Huxley's time.

Anybody who thinks such a thing should really read more carefully on how nearly every aspect of life was in the past, even fairly recently, or if they have the means, go visit a society that today genuinely lives without using modern technology.

(pseudo-hippie communes of "like-minded" individuals that back up their cute experiments with modern industrial products, modern medicine and the ability to go back to civilization at any time, don't count)

[igor47]

This is an over statement. I, too, have read Slouching Towards Utopia and Steven Pinker. But (a) technology is not a monolith, it's clearly nice to have enough food and modern medicine while it's also terrible that we're destroying our biome or facing increased illiteracy due to social media. Also (b) technology, like beer, is both the cause of AND the solution to all problems. Harari and James C. Scott make compelling arguments about how agriculture, among the first widely adopted technologies, deprived us of a utopia that we're scrambling to recover with more technology ever since. I call this the Operation Cat Drop problem. See also Under a White Sky.