[usrnm]

Personally, I see no reason to be alarmed. Humanity has been growing at an absolutely batshit crazy rate for the past hundred years, even the doomsday Thanos-level event that halves the population of the planet overnight would just bring us to the level of mere 50 years ago (the main reason I never understood the logic behind the whole Thanos idea). This growth must stop at some point and maybe even correct itself, it's perfectly ok. Our current economic system along with some countries may not survive it in their current form, but it's definitely not a humanity-level crisis.

[Filligree]

The crisis isn’t one of total population, but one of having too many unproductive old people.

There are solutions to that. One or more of them will eventually manifest, assuming we don’t outrun it by way of AI. Personally I’m betting on the AI, so I’m not too worried right now.

[roysting]

I would agree, but that perspective overlooks many different secondary effects. Essentially it’s a matter of that we have the tiger by the tail and your perspective basically just says, “hey, just let go of the tail. It was fine when we didn’t have the tiger by the tail and most of our lives we have not held the tiger by the tail, so it can’t really be all that bad of we just let go.”

If you prefer, adapt the “deal with the devil” metaphor. Same difference.

It ignores that there are massive dependencies once you commit to bad ideas. It is an inherent and possibly catastrophic oversight of all the “globalism” that has been pushed so far and for so long now, i.e., centralization and brittleness rather than decentralization and resilience.

People here hopefully can appreciate that when you create an extremely vulnerable and brittle monolithic system, it tends to fail in catastrophic ways rather than contained and manageable, when your concerns are separated and functionality is modular.

Ironically somewhat, even and especially in the tech industry and this kind of world domination VC swamp YC/HN is a part of has built exactly the opposite, a huge basket into which they want to put all the eggs they’ve accumulated, but because they are convinced of their superiority, they believe THEY are the ones who have figured everything out… If only people will slow them to control everything.

It’s not really any different than all the other impulses throughout history of narcissistic maniacs to centralize power and control around them. Things have been relatively not catastrophic in the world for around 90 years now, it looks that the same sick, supremacist, megalomaniac, psychopathic, narcissistic types of people are gaining the upper hand again and will in fact start something that may very well be called WWIII by anyone that survives.

I’m sure it will be fine and work out splendidly this time though, the super superior people are in control now. We have nothing to worry about.