UKH

I have been watching David Attenborough, and other than the marvellous footage, the overall message is so depressing, and for me, quite difficult to watch. But he is clearly unable to say that there are simply too many humans on this planet, and he must therefore focus on ways to mitigate the situation with improved food production, etc, in addition to the well-reported energy issues.

The US Census Bureau gives a current global population figure of 8 billion, and projects that it will reach 9 billion by about 2040. This will not be helping any other of the global issues that we are trying to deal with, but doesn't appear to be on the discussion table in any environmental forum. Why not?

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/11/world-population-estimated-e...
 

I too am surprised that population reduction is a topic that very seldom seems to be discussed. 

The words population control/reduction could sound pretty sinister, but a worldwide policy of a maximum of 2 children per female would quite quickly reduce the human population due to the number of women having 1 or 0 children.

I'm sure there are plenty of arguments to say why his is not a fair solution for every person/country and it is far from perfect. But it seems like a single, clear and simple (in theory, not in execution) policy that would have a huge beneficial impact on the planet.

It's been 'on the discussion table' in environmental discussions since at least Thomas Malthus in the nineteenth century.

Limits to Growth in 1972 spoke widely of these issues. Some in Green movements do still talk about population concerns, most don't though for a number of reasons. I'll not go into the finer details of it, but over consumption in the richer countries is by far the biggest problem, rather than population growth in poor countries.

The population is generally declining everywhere except for sub-saharan Africa. 

The only way to reduce birth rates in sub-saharan Africa is for them to become wealthy.

A simple start would be to open more trade routes with these countries.

This is where the UK needs to focus its trade agreements as it's a win-win.

The words population control/reduction could sound pretty sinister, but a worldwide policy of a maximum of 2 children per female.

Population control sounds very sinister.

The average number of children a.k.a. fertility rate is well below replacement in most countries.

China 1.28

Japan 1.3

Italy 1.3

South Korea 0.8

Significant population declines are baked in and these numbers predict massive societal upheaval. 

I would like to think we're moving away from the idea of controlling women's bodies, not towards it.

Haven’t you noticed the increasingly urgent debates around rich countries having enough workers, or the right wing “pro-natalist” groups who want to raise the birth rate? To be fair, this isn’t just a rich country problem, as China is facing the same issue not that far down the line. 

I think you might find that the population increase is overwhelmingly in countries where women do NOT have the right to even decide whether or not they get married or to whom, let alone have the right to any form of contraception.

I don't see how that's an argument for going to the other extreme and forcing them not to have children?

Surely it would be more about educating than enforcing? If people say they have the right to have as many children as they like, it must be explained to them that with rights come responsibilities. Very much like people who believe they have the right to eat huge quantities of beef every day, not realising this is at the expense of other people's food security and the planet's resources.

Illness, disease and starvation are the natural way populations of any species are regulated, but we keep interfering as we find it hard to see others suffer.

It's those of us in the rich countries that are responsible for ecological breakdown, not the poor countries with expanding populations.

If we consumed resources per capita at the same rate as low income countries, the planet would have plenty to go round.

A planetary ecosystem suitable to support continued human habitation cannot be regained by changing the behaviour of those countries, it can only be gained by changing ours.

"High-income countries, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, bear the overwhelming responsibility for global ecological breakdown and need to urgently scale down their use of natural resources by over 70 per cent to achieve a sustainable level of consumption, according to a new analysis published in the journal, The Lancet Planetary Health."

"The researchers calculated each country’s "fair share" of resource use according to its population as a share of the global population.   

They found that high-income countries, which represent only 16 per cent of the world’s population, are responsible for 74 per cent of cumulative excess resource use worldwide. It was primarily the USA and the European Union – including the UK over the time span looked at - which over-consumed materials. They are responsible for 27 and 25 per cent of global damages, respectively."

https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2022/d-Apr-22/High-income-c...

The more challenging problem is how we're going to encourage couples to have more children to avoid drastic swings in population and age demographics.

By the end of the century the ramifications will be clear.

It's going to be a very expensive problem to fix as it's effectively going to result in the government having to sponsor couples to have children.

Agreed

How do you propose we achieve a reduction to third world levels of consumption?We may have started it, but everyone else in the world is scrambling to meet our levels of consumption and consumerism.

Global population reduction, with financial incentives for sub-Sarahan Africa to follow suit, in tandem with reduced consumption is the only chance we have.

Unfortunately I think we're already f**ked. Pretty much every other species on the plant is probably finished anyway, unless we become extinct first, which isn't likely.

Do they want to buy any cheese...?

Robotics and AI will (hopefully) solve a lot of the "menial" skills shortage, probably the "skilled" skills shortage as well.

I just hope the programming is 100% on the care robot that wipes my bum when I'm ancient and infirm.

Hmm. Bottom wiping becomes increasingly more complicated once the days of the clean nip are over.

AI will know this, and will leave such menial tasks to the less intelligent humans.

Elon Musk recently has been going around saying that human population collapse is the real emergency, and the human population could be 10x what it is with no environmental impact. 

Meanwhile humans continue to uncontrollably consume the earth.

I think his mask rather slipped at Meloni’s recent event where he spoke about the need for the natives to have more kids so inwards migration doesn’t shift the culture.

I think about this a lot. We are very clever as a species but as Scotty says you cannie break the laws of physics and unless you are Jesus you can’t feed five thousand with a few loaves and fishes. We can ingeniously squeeze ever more energy out of our sun but we cannot make more space. Already we are having a strong impact upon our environment.

That the population is on the cusp of declining is a natural consequence of the situation we find ourselves in and in some ways, even though it may have an effect on the economy is the lesser of several evils. The others are starvation, disease or war. Rather than urge more children we need to find a way to thrive with fewer.

I saw that and thought what planet does he live on? I also thought he said AI was going to make us all redundant anyway? (Even though he's got an AI start up company)

Anyway while we are all still here, Happy Xmas everyone

It is too late to prevent drastic demographic changes. 

They are coming and it will not be pretty.  At the moment there is no sign of an end to the decline in the fertility rate. 

We should watch South Korea intently.  The number of women born this generation will be 40% that of the last. Get that two generations in a row and you are down to 16%...

Bleating about population reduction is just the latest example of making environmental decline Somebody Else's Problem.

The problem is that in the developed world, we have spend the last hundred years becoming accustomed to an unsustainable and destructive way of life. It's a major part of what has fuelled our improvements in quality of life, and it will be incredibly hard to undo.

Fortunately, we have a lot of very smart people unlocking many ingeneous ways of living sustainably and supporting a global population much larger than present. The problem is getting past the roadblocks put in place by the vested interests that have become impossibly rich and powerful through the destruction of our environment.

Did I say that ? - NO I ruddy well didn't, and anyone with half a brain should have understood such.

For you, the person unable to understand, I will elaborate;

The population increase is overwhelmingly in countries where women ARE FORCED INTO MARRIAGE, USUALLY AT FAR TOO YOUNG AN AGE, WITH MEN FAR OLDER, WHO JUST WANT YET ANOTHER YOUNG GIRL TO SCREW AND THEN PRODUCE CHILDREN AND PROVE HOW MANLY THEY ARE, or maybe to produce a number of offspring to look after said father in his old age. In the likely event that such a woman dies in childbirth, they won't care, and will simply get another. If she does survive then she's a virtual slave, basically pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen until death.

Given the above as the current option, I would suggest that asking the odd male to wear a condom in order to save his wife from the inevitable is something that most of these women would prefer.

Someone started early today.... 

https://youtu.be/2LyzBoHo5EI?si=jjDqexycUs7pbP-B

As has been pointed out several times already, the problem isn't population. The problem is the rest of the world wanting to live the same profligate, destructive, and unsustainable lifestyles we've got used to in the West. 

I can spend my vote and my money in ways that influences us towards a cleaner and more sustainable future. I can and do write to politicians on the subject. There are plenty of ways to take responsibility without simply blaming it on foreigners. 

What is it we need to do? 

You cannot separate population and consumerism they are the same thing when it comes to this problem.  We either control population numbers or reduce our consumption per head.

And that is not blaming foreigners because we are all a part of the same problem.

We can vote however we like and write to as many politicians as we like but "activism" does not excuse the personal choices that we make. We all need to reduce our consumption and we should be able to do that one hell of a lot  more quickly than it can be achieved through glacially slow legislative channels.

We should but, realistically, collectively we shall not do so. Not without legislation, incentives and massive investment in the right technologies.

We missed our chance with Covid. Perhaps we'll get a second go. 

Enviromentalists tend to avoid the subject as when people talk about population control, they tend to mean other people, and not their friends.   Would you rather limit pop growth in Africa or limit resource intensive medical treatments jn the UK?

Luckily runaway population growth seems not to be happening 

No need to shout.

I was responding to someone who suggested limiting women's rights to have children, by saying that wasn't a good idea, and you appeared to be disagreeing with me. 

As I see it, existing abuses of womens reproductive rights should be a completely different conversation to climate change. We should do what we can to improve them for the sake of improving them, not to impose a "fix" on them for the problems that *we* created and that the poorest countries are beating the brunt of.

There has been a consistent pattern around the globe that reducing poverty slows birth rates, therefore reducing poverty should be the focus. Unfortunately, the damage we have caused to the planet, and the current world order (that we largely control), make that very difficult.

To my mind, we caused the problem, and we have the biggest shoulders, so we need to take responsibility for fixing it.

Pointing at population growth in the global south seems to me to be a continuation of the exploitative  attitudes that have lead to the current situation.

I put things in capitals to make the amendment easier to see !

"We" haven't caused the problem, the problem has been caused by the world's population as a whole, with few exceptions.

The population growth in the global south as nothing to do with exploitative attitudes in Western Europe and the USA. It is driven more by political and pseudo religious figures over whom we have no control whatsoever.

We have provided modern medicine to alleviate sickness and increase life expectancy, but that is touted as western imperialism. Our attempts to then provide contraception - rather a useful item, due to the vast increase in babies now reaching reproductive age - is trumpeted as an insult to their manhood (and remember they don't care about womanhood !).

We provide education, clean water, and food - that also declared as western imperialism.

The religious nut-jobs and tin-pot warlords are only interested in power (and money). If the people they control can be kept uneducated and producing more "soldiers" to die for the boss then that is what they continue to ensure happens. The fact that these areas have far too many people for the possible food supply does not concern them - they can always invade next door or let the West provide more aid.

Yes, "exploitative attitudes" are at the heart of the problem, but they come from the "leaders" in these countries, aided by such as China and Russia, who hand over vast sums of cash to the "leaders" in exchange for access to the raw materials that should be for the benefit of the local population as a whole. Such exploitation makes anything the colonialists of the 19th century carried out to be a mere pinprick.

Because people including politicians and environmentalists are afraid that campaigning for smaller families will antagonize people and some religions whose support they need. On a personal level I don't want to risk losing friends by suggesting that their large family is environmentally irresponsible and selfish.

It seems so blindingly obvious that more people generally means more pollution etc. While it may be true that rich counties have a worse environmental effect per capita , poorer counties are likely to have a worse impact when many of their population become richer.

Edit. IMHO we don't need to stabilise population but rather greatly reduce it. That will have adverse effects, eg less carers/support for old people, but we have already passed an environmental tipping point and drastic measures are needed.

It baffles me that such extremest anti-human views are so willingly shared.

So you get to consume your entire life and you secretly judge those for having children.

Unbelievable.

There is and has been a global effort to control population growth that has been active for over 70 years. It's called poverty alleviation and it's enacted by the UN. It's a well documented fact that counties where there is no health care and the majority of families have no access to social security in old age have a high infant mortality and require many children to work the fields. The UNs efforts have bought the number of countries that are in that state to single figures and whilst there is a short period where the number of surviving children  in a household rises the lasting effect is that the number of children per household drops for 6.5 to 2. Whilst we may panic at the idea the UN predicts that the global population will peak at 12 billion and then fall back solely by removing poverty.. this has such a huge effect both on reducing population growth and giving people a reasonable prospect of a life free of the burden of survival no other measures are required. 

in every other respect it is the first worlds responsibility to creat infrastructure that supports sustainable living for ourselves. When those countries are the lowest income levels rise up to median income as so many have done (China, India and so on) they can then live sustainably by adopting our technologies or invent there own. 

China is a great example of how countries need not become polluters by becoming wealthy. They have risen from agrarian  economy to world leading technology and financial industry. They may be big emitters but they have to worlds largest alternative energy sources , they manufactured the world's pv and they have the financial muscle to make a sustainable system. It's not a case of replacing infrastructure as we have, rather they are creating infrastructure from nothing and in the most part they are doing so much more sustainably than we are 

​​​​I know the last but is debatable but the success of the UN taking countries out of poverty and thereby reducing population growth is a fact that can be easily verified with published UN data.

I think you may be leaping to conclusions. I have a family (one son). My friends and their families are all good people and play a valuable part in our society.

However I would not want to suggest to them that they are irresponsible because that would be divisive to say the least. I think your response is indicative of the reason that many environmentalists don't emphasize the importance of population, as it will simply alienate rather than persuade about measures necessary to control climate change.

I have indeed consumed my entire life (don't we all) but hope I have contributed too.

This thread is about why population may be the elephant in the room. I've given an opinon, which may be wrong of course. I'm not sure that it is "anti-human" to propose something that IMO might help preserve our world and the human race. Incidentally I'm definitely not for enforced population control.

It would be useful if you pointed out why I am wrong rather than just implying that my view is unacceptable.

Edit. Spelling of divisive 

The first issue with any ideology of wanting a reduction in population is that as already discussed birth rates are predominantly less than 2 in most countries.

The UK is 1.56.

So we need to be enabling larger families not spreading false environmental excuses that we need to reduce the population.

Humans have only been concerned with the environment for about 60 years. A blink in the eye. We will get on top of this problem and we're going to need lots of brains to solve all the problems that need to be solved.

With the technologies we have at our disposal, once sustainable practices are well established we will be able to support a population much larger than our current population.

So the ideology of wanting a reduced population is wrong in both the short and long term.

If the population declines at a manageable rate then that's fine, but that's not the current prediction. Rapid population collapse is predicted.

Everybody who makes a case for population reduction under the guise of environmental benefit if making the problem worse.

Or seems hard to believe that a larger population will be good for the planet regardless of any success at developing technologies that we believe make everything OK.

Why would a bit of natural shrinkage in the population be a problem for anything other than selfish reasons?

This was the point made by Earth III (1:7 - Humans). They had three sequences, one of the Amazon rain forest being cut down illegally to make grazing land for cattle, then a superb juxtaposition with a plague of billions locusts in N Africa facilitated by global warming, and then one on amazing vertical farm food production facilities in the States, with the claim that that was going to solve all our problems.

However I'm struggling with their claim, and with the rest of your post, which seems to be implying that without larger families and more youngsters we will have to rely on immigration  to maintain our economic well-being; which is what we have been doing for centuries anyway. I don't see how having larger families in the first world solves in any way the issues facing those countries with uncontrolled population growth.

The plague of humans is a real thing; how can 9 billion humans be a good thing?

My 3 bedroom semi probably could house at least 40 people instead of the current 3. It’d be miserable for everyone though. It’s not a given that more people in a finite space is a good thing.

You state we need larger families but have given no reason above. My admittedly simplistic thinking is that pollution etc is obviously related to number of people, thus more people equals more pollution. Richer countries do have a greater adverse climatic effect per capita, but as wealth in poorer countries increases the adverse environmental effects will also increase.

More brains are not much good for this without education. Appropriate education to produce more useful brains is really what is required.

I hope you are right and that technology does solve our problems. We can't be sure of that. But there is no reason we actually need a bigger population, quite probably the reverse is true.

You haven't given a good  reason why its wrong yet. It is true that without drastic events, such as a nuclear holocaust, population decrease will be too slow to deal with the forthcoming climate crisis, but it could be invaluable in the long term depending on one's viewpoint.

Is rapid collapse of population the generally accepted prediction? I can't remember reading that but I'm no expert.

How does population reduction actually make the environmental problem worse? I can see there will indeed be huge problems with a big decrease in birthrate. As just one example I'm at the age where I worry I might have minimal care if I lose independence, but unfortunately for me slowing down climate change is more important (perhaps your technological advances will help in caring, IF those advances are sufficient).

I'm not saying we need a bigger population. What I'm saying is we want a stable population. I don't care what the number is.

It's economically disastrous. Since poverty is lethal it's quite a concern. 

Richer countries care the their environment more. We haven't got to the point where we want to be yet however. It's hard for the environment to be your number one concern when you don't earn enough to feed your family.

So the technologies for sustainable living will come from wealthy countries. 

If all countries were poor, it would likely take longer to burn all our fossil fuels but we would have no hope of finding any alternative.

Our fuse might be burning faster with our wealth but at least we're in a position to establish solutions.

How about roughly half what it currently is ?

In the developing world, having too many children that survive (rather than dying very young) means that parents have to find a lot more food - that's a pretty lethal source of poverty. When these children then go on to have children of their own the source of their food has to be stretched to provide for yet more mouths. How long before the limit is reached ? - In some countries this has already happened.

With a rapidly decreasing population you loose out on those that can earn money, and what they do earn is stretched to look after the elderly. 

You'll see it unfold in Japan and China very shortly.

Just compare child mortality with share below the poverty line.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/extreme-poverty-vs-child-mortality

I recall reading a 2014 UNICEF report that estimated that 8 million children die a year due to poverty. 

So we have to maintain the population so that we have enough youngsters to labour in order to look after the unproductive elderly?

That seems like rather senseless and selfish behaviour as a species.

I fear this is based on weak speculation. With AI the predication is that there will be fewer jobs. People can only earn money if the jobs are there and pay well. What we could end up with is a vast poor population requiring subsides just to survive. Also fewer people could lead to a richer population as those people will be able to command higher wages (as happened after the Black Death in the 14th century). It is however very likely we will see changes in how the economy is run (A thing mentioned in the article below).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/population-decline-will-change-t...

“While many assume population decline would inevitably harm the economy, researchers found that lower fertility rates would not only result in lower emissions by 2055, but a per capita income increase of 10 percent.

Lower fertility rates also typically signal an increase in gender equality. Better-educated women tend to have fewer children, later in life. This slows population growth and helps reduce carbon emissions. And when women are in leadership roles, they’re more likely than men to advance initiatives to fight climate change and protect nature. These outcomes are side effects of policies that are necessary regardless of their impact on population.”

 We can reduce the need for care for the elderly by encouraging healthier life styles and allowing young people from countries still expanding to emigrate and take up the slack. Also bare in mind that care for the elderly is already vastly reduced from what it was when we had a smaller population (due to withdrawal of finances). Over half of care homes have closed in our area since 2000 although the population has increased.

Also we are not in a “rapid decline”. I did some calculations and at the current rate it would take between 90 to a hundred years for any decline to drop world population to 2 billion and that can be reversed at any point in that hundred years. What we are seeing in population decline is a natural response to education and improved women’s rights. Rapid decline would be due to war, disease or famine.

I am watching Japan to see how it pans out. Maybe they will reverse their anti-immigration laws? who knows?

This says more about countries at war with broken infrastructure than anything to do with population. Note that China has one of the lowest fertility rates (1.2) and Bangladesh (1.9), while Nigeria (5.1) and Mali (5.8) are amongst the highest (5.1)

In conclusion I do not dispute we need a reasonable size of population and a stable population. And I do not dispute that a reduced population will present us with certain challenges but more people doesn't necessarily mean better or more advances in technology. Most of our big advances took place in the 20th century with half the population we have now. The technology we have today is built on what we discovered back then. We stand on the shoulders of giants. I see many people saying “Oh technology will save us” as if it were some magic trick that will pull us out of disaster in the nick of time. But technology cannot give us more space, unless you think we are going to be living on Mars anytime soon.

That's a useful contribution to the thread, summarized in the last paragraph.

Many, by no means all, do seem to agree that population reduction is desirable, at least regarding climate change, but has its downsides. However most posts have not answered the OP's question about why environmental activists and others seem to barely mention overpopulation re climate change.

My view is that they may believe essentially telling people they have too many children will just alienate them and be counter productive (probably most of us wouldn't do that on a personal level either). Of course it may simply be that they know/believe that currently population is not relevant.

Also we are not in a “rapid decline”. I did some calculations and at the current rate it would take between 90 to a hundred years for any decline to drop world population to 2 billion

A 75% drop in 90-100 years is what I would call rapid decline.

Call it what you will, though, the consequences of  a decline of this magnitude will be dreadful to live through. 

So would be a decline of 75% in 10 years due to starvation, plague or war.

At least a longer time span gives us time to come up with solutions

However the "decline" isn't that pronounced. As I was postulating a worse case scenario of a 1.3 fertility rate.

According to World Bank data, the global fertility rate was 2.4 children per woman in 2019 (for current see below or follow link). This rate is approximately half of what it was in 1950 (4.7), and more economically developed countries such as Australia, most of Europe, and South Korea, tend to have lower rates than do less-developed or low-income countries. Three main factors have been credited for a decrease in the global fertility rate: fewer deaths in childhood, greater access to contraception, and more women are getting an education and seeking to establish their careers before—and sometimes instead of—having a family.

The population replacement rate, which is the fertility rate needed to maintain a society's population size, is 2.1 children per woman. Countries with fertilities rates below this number may experience an overall older demographic and a decrease in population size over time. Lower fertility rates and the resulting population contraction can be seen as beneficial in some countries, especially those experiencing overpopulation, by reducing the strain on infrastructure and social programs. However, lower fertility rates can also lead to challenges, such as a workforce that lacks the new workers it needs to replace those who are retiring, or too few workers paying into social programs (such as Social Security in the U.S.) that support those who cannot work or have retired.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate

Currently fertility rates are: 2.3

https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/world-demographics/

Fair enough.

I disagree.

Africa has around 15% of the world's population, but has been responsible for only 3% of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution.

Europe has around 9.5% of the world's population but has been responsible for 33% of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution.

The USA has around 4% of the world's population, but has been responsible for 25% of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution.

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

And these figures are before you take into account that our demand for African resources will have contributed significantly to their CO2 emissions, whereas African demand for European and North American resources won't have.

Carbon emissions is only part of the story of course, but excess resource consumption is going to follow along similar lines.

What do you think will be dreadful?

It may be necessary to change the way we live and adjust our priorities to live simpler, more practical and productive lives but is that really a bad thing?

Lets pretend we live on an island that is representative of such a decline.

The tax base will be drastically reduced, infrastructure will be hard to maintain.  Whole towns and cities will decay and be abandoned. What will happen to all the empty houses (Detroit anybody)? 

75% of of supermarkets, schools, manufacturing, not needed.

From an era of growth we shift to one of decline and neglect.

Financials are dire.  Why invest?  The tax demands on the working will increase, retirement becomes a myth.

That's for starters.

You mention these but so far they've never been that significant except for the black death in the middle ages that probably killed 50% of the population over significantly longer than 10 years (but faster transport links ...)

War would only do it with a global nuclear war, and starvation will only be local (regardless of how horribly desperate it may be) unless we have a nuclear winter.

So that leaves us:

• Global nuclear war
• Large asteroid
• Supervolcano, e.g. Yellowstone
• Pandemic far, far deadlier than Covid, Ebola Covid cross maybe 

Otherwise education (birth rate), medical advances (enhancing longevity) and the falling fertility rate will have by far the largest effects.

While I think many who have chosen not to have kids feel like they are doing a good thing for the environment, I suspect it's not the main driver for most who have chosen this path. 

I, personally, don't like babies and also don't want to have to stop working for a while to deal with them. I work antisocial hours and spend every summer away for a week every other week. My lifestyle doesn't suit childrearing and I chose that lifestyle over kids. 

My generation in our extended family really hasn't gone in for kids at all. My brother is also child free and only one of my cousins has kids. On my husbands side, neither of his brothers have kids yet (both are younger, so there is a chance they might, but neither seem to have any likely looking relationships on the go. Time will tell. Neither seem particularly interested at the moment), and out of his 5 cousins, 3 have kids. So from 10 people of our generation in our combined extended families, 4 have had kids. And they have had 2 each, so very much not at replacement levels. 

One of his cousins may have chosen not to for environmental reasons (I haven't asked, but they are very environmentally aware, so maybe), the rest is more just that they have better things to do with life and money! Education and contraception are great things!

Will old age be tough for us? Yes, maybe it will. However, a few tough years at the end of life is a small price to pay for a happy and prosperous child free life until I reach there! 

Why on earth would we want to maintain current levels of infrastructure, tax, schools, supermarkets and manufacturing in the face of falling demand?

As demand falls the required workforce will shrink so why would retirement become a myth?

Why on earth would it be a problem if abandoned towns decayed and returned to nature?

The road network would cost 4x as much per capita or be scaled back significantly.

Likewise for the electricity supply, water distribution and sewage networks.

Retirement becomes a myth because the age-profile of a declining population is top heavy.  There will be many more people in the age 70-80 than say 20-30. 

Currently, our retirement age is roughly 50% above the median age of the population.  As the population declines, it also ages and the median will rise inexorably to somewhere around 55.

To be fair we have never been in the position we are heading for.

When competition for resources becomes critical what is the likely outcome?

My feeling is that rather than seeing a collapsing population we are in the position to have the firts sustainable one.

Hans Rosling did a very interestign TED talk on it

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_global_population_growth_box_by_box

Consider first that in 1983 at the time of mass unemployment yet also boom times in finance the world population was 4.6 billion nearly half of what it is now We are currently at 8 billion people a number that seemed astronomical back then. If predictions are correct we should stabilise at 11 billion by the end of the century. That is still a lot of people and we will need all the science we have and social changes to make it work and that in a world with increased global warming reducing areas in which we can live. I suppose then there will be cries of stagnation, but then if double the population from 40 years ago isn’t enough when is enough? Elon Musk’s 1 Trillion, 10 trillion, a 100 trillion. If the only reason to have children to pay taxes to have children then surely that is not sustainable?

Okay as of now we are on such an island. What is your solution? Given that Health care, women’s education, education in general are drivers of that reduction.

Now I agree we have far more old people but that number will fall off as the boomers are head into their 80s and beyond. That percentage will only stay high if we continue to decline (or if we continue to live beyond retirement) instead Hans Rosling suggests we will stabilise at around 11 billion.

Empty houses means cheaper houses, supply and demand. Less population, higher wages as available labour will be more in demand. Will that be the case? I don’t know it is a possible scenario. We will need innovative financial solutions as much as we will need technological ones.

HOWEVER it isn’t that bleak. Aside from AI coming to our rescue (according to some) we have people falling over themselves to get into our country so much so that we want to send them to a third world country. Populations in Africa are still going up, as some of those areas become uninhabitable they will want to move here. I don’t see a future of decline and neglect I see a future where, if we have the will, we could make a better world.

Or the kind of rapid and radical climate change (and associated change in sea level) that could happen if we pass any of various potential 'tipping points' with the climate.  The thing about a tipping point is that you only find out exactly where it was retrospectively.

I like the optimism. In the medium term though the worldwide imbalance between young and old is going to mean much less care for the elderly, reduced working population, reduced tax receipts etc. No two ways about it unless and until androids step in to help.

Immigration it's there and waiting.

I take your point that it is a medium term problem.

Although ironically provision for the elderly is much less now than it was 40 years ago and pensions are already being erroded

Thanks for that Ted talk, he was so good at getting stuff across

Hmm maybe the androids will step in to help. Let's face it AI is in its infancy and is predicted to take over various jobs. In the future it may well take over or help with looking after the elderly and step in to help with the reduced population.

However there still remains the problem of tax but then why should it only be humans paying tax? What if we paid AI (ie rented it) and some of that money went on taxes. What if a whole virtual ecconomy grew where machines were given wages which they were programmed to spend on virtual goods? I could start a business selling virtual pints to Traffic lights after a hard rush hour. As a farmer I could offset the loss of real crops by selling virtual crops. Let's face it money barely exists (numbers on a screen) why should the purchaser? In Second Life people buy things that don't exist why not AI. wouldn't it be funny if there was a whole virtual world that existed to service ours without even knowing it? Perhaps it has already happened? Matrix anyone?

I wonder if C3P0 got paid? I never saw any sign of it!

I can see the headlines now. Robot back pay claim bankrupts the Empire

You continue to ignore the fact that everyone on the earth consumes food and breathes the air. The current population level (and its' increase) is unsustainable due to the simple fact that we cannot grow enough food to go around.

You harp on about "since the industrial revolution" - but, taking the UK as an example, we've been at it for 300 years or so. The current worst offenders have been at it for far less time, but in that time they have not only caught up in the "bad actor" stakes, but are doing their level best to churn out far more crap per year than it took the UK to do in a century.

You have also deliberately omitted any reference to either Russia, China or India. These 3 nations are the very worst when it comes to any form of CO2 emissions and so forth. Their sheer population numbers mean that unless they stop their trashing of the planet it doesn't matter what the rest of us do. The UK is a pinprick compared to any of these 3.

I'm not ignoring the fact that everyone on the earth consumes food and breathes air; as I said before, if we all used similar amounts of the world's resources as those in the poorest nations there would be more than enough to go round. The problem is that with high levels of global inequality, some of us use way more than our fair share.

The notion that the solution should be for those who take the least per capita to stop having children, rather than those who take the most per capita cutting back, seems rooted in the same feelings of superiority as colonialism was.

I'm "harping on" because these figures show who has caused the problem (as opposed to who is currently exacerbating it the most).

I haven't deliberately ignored them, Russia is part of Europe (so included in the numbers I quoted above), and I didn't feel the need to list every comparison I could think of - I provided a link to the data for people to see for themselves.

To pull out a few more statistics from that article for you:

Despite having double the population of Europe, China has been responsible for 12.7% of cumulative global emissions, whilst Europe has been responsible for 33%.

India, with a similar population to China has been responsible for just 3% of cumulative global emissions.

The population of Russia is just over twice the population of the UK, so that's just wrong.

Quatar, Montenegro, Kuwait, UAE, Trinidad and Tobago, Oman, Canada, Brunei, Gibraltar, Luxembourg, Bahrain, Australia, Estonia, Saudi Arabia, United States, Falklands Islands, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Iceland all produce more CO2 per capita than the three countries you have mentioned.

Russia is a big producer at 11.4 Tonnes per capita, but China isn't much worse than the UK at 7.44 Tonnes per capita to our 5.6 Tonnes per capita.

While it's true that China is the world's largest emitter, due to its size there's no point in comparing it with a small country like ours. It's population is a little bit more than the population of Europe, and whilst it's currently producing around 25% of global emissions, Europe's 17 percent of global emissions isn't all that far behind. 

China is racing ahead of us in terms of green technology so their numbers may well come down, and their population is declining so I'm not sure what they have to do with your argument that population growth is the big problem?

The average person in the UK emits nearly three times the CO2 of the average person in India. There is a long way to go before Indians are producing as much as we are.

To re-iterate my point, it's those of us in the rich countries who have the broadest shoulders, as we have benefited economically from causing the problem in the first place.

Both views are right. The older "rich" nations have produced more greenhouse gases in toto and per capita. However we can't significantly remove these so the only option is to drastically cut current emissions and this really means the biggest current in toto emitters including China et al. This is the case regardless of blame or fairness.

Interesting discussion. In response to the OP, I agree with the sentiment that there are too many humans on this planet. It would seem Sir David Attenborough thinks so too; he is a patron for the charity Population Matters, which advocates for population reduction to a sustainable level.

Personally I support the more radical Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (reduction of the human population to zero through voluntarily not breeding, for the benefit of all other species on our planet). Dislikes anticipated!

You appear to be assuming that we would attempt to plough on exactly as we are.

Are we really that stupid as a species?

The figures I use are to illustrate that we cannot go on as we are as population declines. 

The jury is very much out on that one!  It could still go either way, but it's not looking good at the moment tbh.

I thought you were arguing that we had to maintain or grow the population rather than that we can work around a declining population?

So many people taking this view, so few willing to kill themselves. A lack of commitment from the “too many humans” brigade. 

Duh!

Do people need to kill themselves or just to be a bit more confortable with their own mortality?

I am simply arguing that a decline by 75% will be a dreadful process. 

I see no way of avoiding such a decline.  At some point, maybe a century or more away, fertility rates may recover to the 2.1 or so required for stability.

Assume Sheffield's population decreases by 75%, what would it be like to live there?  What will it be like to live in a society with a median age of 55 or so? That sort of thing.

I don't really understand how some can be so sanguine, positively Panglossian, about this

Killing yourself means one less person; one less high consuming person if you’re in the U.K., so it’s even more of a win. How do we get to billions fewer people? Yes, one less person at a time.

It all depends of course on how fast the decline happens; if it's slow enough then its impact can be well managed, and better management can cope with faster declines. However, I suspect that unless there is some huge change in the way the world's politics works, the coming decline will actually be too fast for a smooth ride down to a smaller world population ☹️

A 75% reduction in itself is perfectly ok, the smallness of the remaining population being a problem won't happen unless the population decreases to a very small number. I've no idea what that number is but I can't imagine that 1 billion, i.e. <10% of the peak, will be a problem as long as the reduction rate (as mentioned above) was manageable.

Science will sort us out. After all this is the answer people give to every other problem, global warming, population explosion, giant meteors, etc.

The remaining 25% of Sheffield will be able to get to work a lot quicker

From what I've seen of the t0ssers on the motorway this afternoon, sh1t driving will sort out over-population

Science COULD sort us out, politicians will make sure that this doesn't happen.

Timely article from CNN about the problem with South Korea having a reproduction rate 1/3rd of the sustainable - they’re not going to have enough people to conscript to keep the North Koreans at bay for much longer.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/30/asia/south-korea-birth-rate-military-str...

I said “reproduction rate” as the actual fertility of the people is not the limiting factor, the effects of living in certain societies is what’s driving this.

I think after we witness how much impact this has in far eastern countries and we'll quickly change our stand and policies on population here in the UK.

There's all of a sudden be lots of support for parents and we'll be arguing about why we left it so late to bring in these policies.

Hopefully larger families will then naturally result from favourable financial conditions from the new policies.

So it will be bust, the boom.

I think a better name for this bunch would be the convenient movement for diversion, aka head in sand but happy to have a purpose brigade.

No dislike from me, but you won't get any from the oil burning free market forces right either. Isn't this type of thing a  wonderful diversion from actually taking real meaningful action now on the human impact on everything from micro plastics to climate change?

Best of luck with your movement, you will need it.

We are incomparably less stupid than any other species. No other species would anticipate they were heading for disaster; it would just happen and their population would crash. At least we have a chance.

The decline in the fertility rate is driven more by childlessness than family size.  There are more and more women who are not having children at all.  There are many reason for this.

One reason put forward for the complete lack of evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life is that they may inevitably destroy themselves! Happy New Year!

Are you sure about it being mainly driven by childless adults?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/294633/proportion-of-women-remaining-ch...

The childless rate in England and Wales hasn't changed all that much. But we're always out of date so it relies on predictions for the latest info.

I know it's anecdotal but all of my friends are either having kids late, or limit the number of kids as it's just to much with both adults working.

My suspicion is the number one cause is both adults having to work. If our economy allowed for a stay at home parent and a comfortable income on one salary I believe we would have a completely different outcome. A problem I see no solution for.

Not having children is by far the biggest lifestyle choice you can make to reduce your carbon footprint, so it's a pretty meaningful action in my book. If everyone committed to this, we as a species could feasibly be extinct in around 100 years, ending all human impacts such as microplastics and climate change.

I get your point that the movement is a futile one, but that's probably the case with the majority of environmental causes!

That is indeed the danger

You are in a death cult. 

Suicide is not something I would encourage, but I wonder what your thinking is on living.  If a reduction in human numbers is meaningful action, why wait? 

Do you have statistics that are more recent? The link ends in 1971

A thought experiment occurs. If you became infected with an infectious fatal disease would you run around affecting as many people as you could before you croaked? What if you could develop a disease that didn't kill but made people infertile so that the problem did not become immediately obvious, would you release it? Or the Logan's Run scenario of bumping people off over 50?

You might be right.  I had read/heard about family size, but not seen the numbers.

The %age of women being childless at 30 is now over 50%.  (Fig 2)

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriage...

Modern dating apps aren't helping.  That is a whole other thread.

Absolutely don't agree. It isn't going to be easy so supporting diversionary causes is worse than doing nothing. 

Thanks for this. It seems that Sir David and the BBC editorial team may have disagreed on how to present the impact of humans, assuming he wanted to be more forthright, as on the PM website. Would be great to be able to ask him about that

The website has good info, but seems to have had zero impact on the global debate about what to do.

And who ends up the default stay at home parent? Most of the time, the mother does. So we are back to the 1950s! 

No economic policy would convince me to trash my body, my mental health and my career to then be stuck at home with a baby. Absolutely not ever. 

Although the proportion of men staying at home would be far greater than in the 50's, I think you're generally right.

It is so, so easy to slip into stereotypical roles once you have kids. That may be fine for most people but society has not yet moved on enough to not see "stay at home dad, working mum" as still a little unusual.

A fair point.

It also assumes a two parent household. As the link shows more and more people are living alone, particularly in richer countries

https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone

Maybe those who are more relaxed about it  are those who live closer to nature and see life and death as a natural process.

As a species our society conditions us to see death as a bad thing In many different ways.

There will always be people who propose extreme actions when there are more practical and moderate solutions.

Surely science is largely responsible for the current state of affairs?

Has it really advanced far enough to get us out of the hole that it has dug us into?

Is it any more efficient to try to avert the population declines rather than riding it and rebuilding the population from a smaller healthier base?

We are only "less stupid" if we fall into the trap of measuring intelligence with our own potentially flawed metrics.

We may yet do the same thing, leaving another more resilient species to tout the same flawed logic.

Oh I don't know.  Neural networks started in the 1940s, things like advanced image recognition via CNNs forty years ago, even LLMs extend back to the 1950s.  What has changed is that OpenAI (and others) have got hold of sufficient processing power to train huge models based on massive amounts of data to the point that the tools they produce seem miraculous (even if they are stochastic parrots prone to making stuff up).  Also the Chinese - it feels like 4 out of 5 academic AI papers come from Chinese organisations.

Well, I'm one of the "too many humans" brigade (can't believe people are arguing against this) and I'm investigating my options in this respect, and I must say the UK institutions go out of their way to make it difficult.  This includes the attendance of certain clinics in the more enlightened Switzerland.

Absolutely not a death cult. For anyone advocating population reduction to reduce suffering, any methods involving suffering would not be encouraged. That means no to suicides, no to genocides, no to virus releases (as suggested elsewhere in this thread), etc.

Our planet is entering a mass extinction event, of which we (humans) are the cause. If we all voluntarily stopping breeding, we could bow out gracefully for the benefit of all other life on Earth.

Not sure how you can. It's the latest data available. Hard to tell if a 20 year old is going to have a child before 50, so it's always 50 years out of date.

Fair enough

That's the choice of the parents.

It's true, most of the time the mother will have a stronger urge than the dad to stay at home. If that's what the couple want I see no issue. As long as they support eachother (financially and otherwise).

If they don't agree on who should be the full time patent then they need to find a compromise. 

The problem with the 50's wasn't that there were a lot of stay at home mother's, it was the societal expectation. Any stay at home parent is doing a difficult job but if it's by choice all credit to them.

That's your choice. But to suggest mothers are trashing their mental health and bodies is a bit of an unfair summary of their choices. An exaggeration of the negatives and complete absence of the positives.

We're still a ways off General AI though.

I imagine having a child would be a very traumatic experience. As a man I wouldn't dream of commenting on a woman's experience of giving birth

Excellent work there montyjohn, I believe we may have just hit peak UKC mansplaining!

How typical. Why should a dad have any opinion on the merits and challenges of having and raising children?

Maybe we're still in the 1950's afterall. 

This.  Most of what has been called “AI” over the last 50 odd years really isn’t, and that continues to be the case.  I’d agree we’re in the early days of AGI and I’ll eat my hat if it comes from building what ultimately are just formally reducible to 3-layer feedforward network.  I’m sure they’ll form parts of an AGI but they’re a long way from it.

Whilst we’re navel gazing on the future, there’s a rising tide of funding for longevity therapeutics.  If people start dying much late in 30 years time, that changes the impact of reduced fertility dramatically.

Take the two topics together and Isaac Asimov starts to look very prophetic.

No, we are definitely less stupid/more intelligent than all other species unless we completely redefine what is meant by intelligence and thus render the word effectively meaningless.

To be fair (and I apologise for my flippant answer earlier) Girlymonkey only said that extra cash wouldn't induce her to have children. I didn't take it as a comment on what other people should do. Without knowing anybodies physicality or mental health I wouldn't make a presumption. i am sure people who have kids are very glad they did so but kids are not what everyone wants and a cash injection isn't the incentive

Parenthood, sure.  Childbirth?  Ha ha.. nope!

I think you are confusing my ideas here. I don't believe for a second that you can convince people who don't want to have kids to have kids with a realistic amount of money (by realistic I mean not millions).

But there will be lots of families who choose to stop having more kids due to financial reasons. Even indirect financial reasons like not having enough time.

So money can remove barriers to having children which if we had a money tree would be a great thing for families. I wouldn't suggest bribing people to have children.

In general you're right but here girlymonkey was commenting from the experience of not having had a child. Does that alter things, is she more able to comment on childbirth than a man, and if so why?

Of course I'm not saying she can't have those views but if you're going to jump down montyjohn's throat for having opinions about an experience that he's not had, then why not girlymonkey?

Also, I think labelling all childbearing as traumatic is not correct (I doubt you were doing that intentionally) - it can be, but for many/most (I've no idea what the proportion is) it is not.

All childbirth definitely not traumatic.  I’ve done it three times, first time was tiring and a bit meh, second two times both uplifting, life affirming and I actually enjoyed it.  Yes, it hurt like crazy but was also a huge rush.  Im aware I’m very fortunate in having this experience.

Unfortunately, social norms still expect it to be the mother, and women earn less on average. 

Or they can't afford for it to be the mum who works as she earns less! 

I didn't speak for others, I spoke for myself. It would trash my mental and physical health. Even a brief moment of contemplating being stuck at home with a baby feels depressing. 1 in 10 mother's get postnatal depression, so it's certainly not uncommon. And physically, I already struggle to control my weight, I don't need to be dealing with pregnancy fat too!

Alternatively, that money could go into making sure kids who already exist can actually eat properly, live in houses which are suitable for them and get a good level of education and healthcare! We could even use some to ease life in old age for our generation. 

Isn't education the key here, followed by economic stability?

Poverty and ignorance are the big enemies. (I am not only thinking about the third world).

Education can offer women more chances to make decisions for themselves not coerced by their lack of control over conception or by their social environment, and economic stability allows them to look after the children that they want better, and to help them have a future.

Equally, if we had a somewhat better immigration policy than putting them on a barge and then sending them to Rwanda, also focussed on education and economic stability, plus some effort to persuade them that the UK is a great place to make your fortune rather than somewhere that is going to imprison them in a forever citizenship limbo, we might do better, and not need so many children. It worked for the USA.

That would be one way.

Interestingly in japan there is a great rise in people also remaining single and this seems in part driven by the cost of housing

My fear, with a predicted declining population is there won't be enough workers for any social welfare at all in the medium to long term.

The problem you raise will just get worse. And significantly so.

I watched a documentary on this. Something about the big companies only hiring graduates and then they have a job for life.

Then during a large recession (might have been 2008, or the one before) no graduates got jobs for a decade or so. 

So the best part of a generation can't get work, love or raise a family.

This in turn means that those that should be massive consumers are not inputting into the economy.

They call them the lost generation or something like that.

I don't see this. We are daily turning potential workers away from our shores and many are from countries where birthrates are still high.

We are in an underrecruitment crisis now and a lot of that stems from how staff are treated. In addition many foreign works left after Brexit and current policies make it difficult for them to stay.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62267282

And side from human health care AI is starting to make in roads into care for the elderly.

https://sensi.ai/blog/5-ai-tools-paving-the-way-for-the-future-of-senior-ca...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/elder-care-artificial-intel...

It is not with out its problems as this article says. Robots can create more work and are not as good at carer patient interactions, but I see these more as challenges rather than obstacles

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-elderc...

This is really a temporary situation however.

Birth-rates in poorer countries will decline as they get wealthier. We want those countries to become wealthier so I expect trade with these countries to improve to help with this.

Then countries in the east will either economically fil, or open their doors to immigration. Assuming the latter, if this happens inline with poorer countries becoming wealthy, I don't think we will have the luxury surplus immigration potential.

I keep hearing again and again that AI will mean we need less workers, we can work less hour etc, but this has been claimed so many times before. Every time there is a new revolution, tech boom in the 60's, digital boom etc it's been claimed that we can start living a life of leisure. But these technologies whilst making many roles less human intensive, seem to create more work and industries on the back of them.

Maybe AI will be different, but my bet is on more work from humans being needed not less.

Absolutely. That is the predicted outcome.

Then populations will agregate around the areas where one can live comfortably. As the world temperature increases some areas in Africa and the Middle East will become untenable as places to live.

I has and does mean less workers. You can now run a farm on a fraction of the people you needed to in the middle ages, factories are run with a minimum of people. Do we not live a life of leisure? Do we not have endless ways to fill our leisure time unthought of a century ago? There is no reason in the future why we couldn't hive out meanial work to machines and take the higher paid jobs for ourselves.  I don't say it won't be challenging but a lot less challenging than trying to live on a planet with dwindling resources due to over consumption.

I am not anti-human but we have yet to live sustainably. I believe our population will stabilise and we will, in the end, create a better future for ourselves and our planet. Always assuming we have the political will.

A few positive links:

Automated factories

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/automated-factories-video

An AI led economy

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sanjitsinghdang/2022/12/31/can-artificial-inte...

A few thoughts on an AI economy

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/economist-less-economics-the-future-...

One thing is sure the future will not be what we expect it to be

Surely intelligence is a measure of the ability to adapt in order to survive and thrive within your environment.

Other species have intelligence, we even have artificial intelliegence these days. If they manage to adapt more effectively than us then I would say that they are more intelligent.

It is destabilizing to import large numbers of unskilled young, mostly male, immigrants.

Importing unskilled people keeps wages down for the rest of our working population. 

The lack of assimilation by large numbers of existing immigrants weakens our country.

Fewer not less.

Sounds like you are confusing species level evolution with individual level intelligence.

Lots of animals can learn by trial and error conditioning, but there's little evidence of higher level reasoning to deal with novel problems outside of humans.

Doesn't mean that intelligence is the be-all-and-end-all though. Success as a species (or even as an individual) depends on more than just intellect.

I agree that AI reduces the number of workers needed to complete a task. But I also expect it will increase the number of tasks we want completing. Like every advancement in the past has.

The big question is whether the the people per task x the number of tasks equates to more or less workers after fully incorporating AI.

We still work 35 to 40 hour weeks when full time. Apparently over the last 30 years we work 1.7hours less over a week. It's such a minor change despite all the automation that's gone on over that period.

https://standout-cv.com/average-working-hours-uk

I agree, but between now and then I think there will be some really painful periods that we need to iron out or what's more likely suffer through.

Whereas others confuse intelligence with the ability of the individual to solve maths problems.

I can't quite remember a Terry Pratchett quote that seems apt.  Can't find it now, so I'm probably misquoting but anyway... 

There's a crowd situation getting out of hand, someone says people are smart and Sam Vimes replies: "No they're not, a person is smart.  In a crowd people are dumb, jumpy, dangerous animals and you know it!"

Aimed at me? Wouldn’t be a feature of any assessment of intelligence I use. Too heavily weighted towards years of education rather than intelligence. Someone highly proficient at mathematics is likely to be quite intelligent, but the reverse certainly isn’t true.

There’s a Pratchett quote in a similar vein (I was thinking Night Watch but it might be in Jingo) but I think you’ve actually quoted Men In Black there! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119654/characters/nm0000169

There is no proof that this is the case. 

People are only smart in groups. The existence of the cup of tea I just drank depended upon dozens of people all with vastly different jobs. On my own I’d just be a scared human looking for water. 

Not aimed at anyone in particular.  (Ok, I admit it, perhaps aimed at Robert just everso slightly.)

Ha!  How embarrassing.  But come to think of it Kay is quite a lot like Vimes.

That's ants!

But good point, this isn't a hill I'll die on.  Self-destruction, denial and delusion - some forms of stupidity require intelligence.

So more people in the world is not a good idea you're saying

This reminds me of one of my favourite adverts.

Think it was the Tetley character wondering through the desert saying:

"water, water".

He then stumbles on a convenient jug of water. Picks it up, but rather than gulping it down he continues walking with it saying:

"kettle, kettle".

You're underestimating crows. These guys make tools. Underestimate them at your own peril.

Alfred has warned you already.

Terry had something to say about that too: "It often seemed to him that Leonard, who had pushed intellect into hitherto undiscovered uplands, had discovered there large and specialised pockets of stupidity."

I only looked it up because it felt familiar but I wasn't sure it was Vimes. I was torn between Night Watch, Jingo and Light Fantastic. I was a bit surprised to find it was K, but you're right about the similarities!

Such as? And isn't that just that we created more tasks. I don't see it as a given.

It seems counter intuitive to create machines to make more work for yourself

We do but in the past we worked far longer until the working hours directive came in. As the following shows our working hours have fallen considerably since the 19th century

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/10/a-short-history-of-working-hours/

I think whichever way the population swings this is inevitable. My hope is that as an innovative species we can iron out those problems.

Consider this: Elon Musk has said we need a Trillion people. that 125 times the amount of people in the world or in an increase of 12400% Imagine Sheffield with 12400% more people than currently. That is why I believe we need to either find a way to live sustainably or else find a way to live on Mars

It happens all the time in almost every industry.

The more technology we have to save lives, the more doctors and nurses we need to administer these new procedures.

When production lines were invented, we didn't have less people building cars, it brought the sale price of cars down so more people wanted them.

Automation has done the same thing more recently.

There was an odd example in my old office. We brought in a new server that allowed us to share information more easily with other offices. The idea was we could work together more collaboratively without having to drive to each others offices with hard drives and drawings. But the result was our projects were now less constrained to an particular office so we ended up visiting other offices more frequently.

Also in the office, producing a drawing is probably 10% of the effort it was 30 years ago thanks to CAD,  but with recent BIM requirements there is more drafting work to do than ever because the expectation on the level of information has increased.

Think about how many people lost their jobs when automatic switchboards were brought in, but how many jobs have been created by good communication.

Computer chips reduced cost of computers (as in people).  How many jobs have been created by digital chips. The gaming industry alone as a spin of tech probably employs more people than were ever hired as computers back in the day.

Tech has historically created more jobs than it looses. 

Which unskilled immigrants are you thinking of? 

Care workers? Skilled

Hospitality? Skilled

Building trades? Skilled

There are very few jobs which require no skill. And where they exist, we don't have people to do them. 

Indeed it has but then it has never been applied to deal with a shrinking population. We're looking for new solutions to new problems.

I am only saying that a reducing population is a bad thing only if we make it so. Were we any less well off in the 1980's when the world population was half of what it is today? I guess it depends on if you were one of those out of work or one of those making money hand over fist. Things never go the way you expect

We were unequivocally worse off 40 years ago. That’s pretty much everyone, whether in rich countries or most poor ones. Yes, some places have stayed quite poor, or gone backwards and struggled to catch up (some ex-Soviet states) but generally, almost everyone is better off. 
 

May I suggest an hour spent messing around on “Our World in Data”?

This is a different issue in my eyes.

The population number itself isn't what I'm concerned about.

It's the change in population that I'm worried about.

Instead of that secondary school pyramid shaped age demographic we studied where lots of workers support few elderly, we're going to have a situation where few workers need to support lots of elderly.

I don't believe the actual population size in terms of economics matters all that much. Although I could be wrong about this.

On the whole I would agree with you that many things are better, Women's rights, LGBTQ rights are indeed better. Though employment rights less so and the NHS was in a better state. Perhaps 1980 was a bad choice, after all I never saw people begging on the streets until the 80's in my town. yet people still made loads of money (remember the yuppies?). and back in 1957 "we'd never had it so good." And here we are in 2024 talking about a cost of living crisis and people feeling worse off. Perhaps we are all just naturally miserable?

Perhaps there are more nuanced ways of measuring if we are better off?

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/27/are-we-better-we-were-40-year...

The following article argues: If the distribution of income had remained roughly the same over the last forty years, then the fact that per capita GDP nearly doubled would mean that everyone's income had nearly doubled. That's not what happened. Instead, those at the top of the income distribution have vastly more income than 40 years ago while those at the bottom have less. The real income of a household at the 20th percentile (above 20% of all households in the income ranking) has scarcely budged since 1974--it was $20,000 and change then and is $20,000 and change now. For those below the 20th percentile, real income has fallen. The entire bottom 80% of households ranked by income now gets only 49% of the national pie, down from 57% in 1974. That means that the top 20% has gone from 43% to 51% of total income. Even within the top 20%, the distribution skews upward. Most of the income gains of the top 20% are concentrated in the top 5%; most of the gains of the top 5% are concentrated in the top 1%; most of the gains in the top 1% are concentrated in the top 0.1%.

These are things that can be mitigated though and that is the challenge for the future

Just to be clear, these figures are for the US, where inequality has taken a somewhat different path than in the U.K.:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/economic-inequality-gini-index

Sorry, but this is nonsense. Many species of virtually zero intelligence do this. Many bacteria and viruses for a start. Intelligence is about the ability to learn and think rationally. Humans are lightyears ahead of any other species in this respect. You could argue that we are at risk of being potentially the victims of our own intelligence - but at least we now have the possibility of thinking our way out of it.

very Interesting thanks for that

Looking at the mess that we have made of our environment whilst our higher level reasoning to deal with novel problems I am still inclined to think that we are pretty dumb at a species level

Obviously there are many highly intelligent individuals who havn't learnt to solve maths problems, but the potential to do so (at a species level, even if not individual level) is quite possibly an excellent proxy for intelligence.

And yes, I did see your later comment😉

There ,are many ways of defining intelligence, you are looking at this from the very limited confines of whhat we define as human intelligence as defined by the educational sector of our society.

Ok, give me a general definition of intelligence which isn't so wide as to be effectively pointless.

That's not the case at all.

Big crowds of people tend to follow charisma, confidence and the loudest voice - characteristics which are rarely associated with being smart.

Show me which of humanity’s achievements were done by a single human being. 

You’re confusing the abilities of large groups of people with a crowd, which is a large group of people assembled in the same place at the same time. Two different things! 

Show me which of humanity’s achievements were done by a single human being. 

Newton's Theory of Gravitation.

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius.

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci

Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment.

etc.

Yes yes yes, but apart from creating much of our great art, literature, music and some of our most dazzling scientific insight - what has any one individual human ever achieved eh?

Rather relied on Copernicus having demonstrated equal sweep of area (in the orbital elliptic plane) in equal time periods IIRC (that is if I correctly remember what I learnt years ago, I'm not suggesting I was around at the time 😁).

Einstein's 2 theories of relativity may have been bigger individual steps.

Wasn't that Kepler?

Probably.

I actually think all big steps forwards by individuals have probably been standing on the shoulders of others to a greater or lesser extent even if there was no direct collaboration.

Sweeping generalisation.  I suggest some people are smarter in groups, others have their wings clipped.

”If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”

I.Newton

Severely so, sometimes, depending on the dynamics of the group.  It's lead to some staggeringly poor decisions in the past - really important ones - by groups composed of individuals who probably wouldn't have made the same mistakes on their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

All of those people lived on large societies which were the only way they, as individuals, could focus on science, writing or art. The idea that you could separate Dostoyevsky from the wider Christian world, or Leonardo from the intellectual and artistic milieu of the Renaissance, is nonsense. As I said above, I can’t even make a cup of tea without hundreds of other people doing their thing. 
 

So… someone who reworked another’s ideas was all alone? Uh huh. 

You over look their creative step of creating a whole new notation that brought beauty and interpretability to the other person’s work.

You previously said:

Heaviside was smart in isolation, not in a group.  He built on the work of predecessors but that is true of everyone.  He didn’t group with them.  He lived the life of a rather nutty hermit much of the time.  I suspect being in a group would have curtailed him.

There’s a critical and - or so I thought - bloody obvious distinction between people working as a group and people working with access to knowledge and/or art etc previously laid down by others. 

The discovery of knowledge and the furtherment of art is a tapestry woven throughout humanity, but that means people can and do stand on the shoulders of giants.  It in no way speaks to your doubtful claim people are only smart in groups. 
 

No I don't. Are individuals able to be incredibly creative? Yes. Does that mean they are nothing if not embedded in a broader society? Also yes.

Did he grow his own food?

Yes, you have a narrower conception of group both in time and space. Groups can form intellectually amongst people who've never met, no? If you've read Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintainance you'll recognise that situation immediately.

Most people on their own would be dead pretty quickly. It's almost a trivial truism, obviously, but a nice counter to the groupthink of an individualist society

So we’re playing semantic silly buggers over the word “group”?  Most people will have an intuitive meaning of that unrelated to your more set theory approach.  As I say, it’s bleeding obvious people access the consequences of those who existed before them.  I’m out as semantic silly buggers doesn’t interest me.

Not really. The more we can specialise the better we can be at stuff. If you have a society complex enough to support artistically minded church musicians you get Bach, even if he wrote the Goldberg Variations in a room on his own. Humans can never be individual and alone, and if they are, they are usually too busy staying alive to do much else. The only question is how good is our group at fostering new and amazing things.

Yes, my mistake, Copernicus did the "sun at the centre" (Heliocentric) model. Kepler took that and worked out that the orbits were ellipses, etc.

Ooh..  I just thought of a single human who made a pretty big difference.

Stanislav Petrov.

All he did was disobey orders and sit on his hands for a bit waiting to see what was going to happen one day in 1983.  If someone else had been sitting in his chair that day none of us would be here now.  (And "humanity's achievements" would currently mostly consist of an awful lot of radioactive rubble and an ongoing nuclear winter.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

I can’t think of anyone more embedded in a group than a submarine commander in the navy of a superpower. Awesome guy, for sure, but what makes him stand out is that he didn’t do what you’d expect of him… given his position. 

And this is implicitly integrated with Human Rights and why the Good Guys always win out in the end. Some interesting stats here... https://web.uri.edu/artsci/wp-content/uploads/sites/1132/2023-Human-Rights-...

Seemingly when we are extinct, birds will rule the world, if indeed they don’t already.

Search “tedx corvid” to find out how.

We weren't talking about whether people are part of a group, we were talking about whether an individual could be smarter than a group. 

Petrov had very clear instructions from the group, the naval and political hierarchy of that superpower - which he chose to disregard completely and make an individual decision directly contrary to his orders based on his own personal intuition.

I doubt anyone has ever been much more alone than he was, as he waited to find out whether or not those American bombs were real.

Birds are the dinosaurs that survived the last big extinction - if you're right, there's nothing new there.

Newton copied that phrase from Bernard of Chartres, who copied it from ...

Maybe Newton was having another dig at Hook, who was short and crooked.

Whether or not Newton originated it, the quote sums up a specialism of humanity, that of communication and communication not dependant on distance or time. Books, writing, internet, etc. more than any other species we can swap ideas and build on what has gone before. This is a double edged sword though for ideas don't have to be good ideas, you have Newton's "Principia" but also Hitler's "Mein Kampf". For every smallpox vaccine you have a nuclear bomb.

Group living is essential for us now. It has been a long time since we were able to survive on our own without some recourse to the benefits of civilisation. However i don't hold with the group smart idea. I would say instead that groups can facilitate and nuture intelligence but also reject it and be a danger to it. Pol Pot's year zero, Mao's attack on intellectuals, the Rwanda genocide, The Taliban and ISIS.

Except his actual ability to make that decision was predicated entirely upon being part of a group. Part of his “smartness” was his view on the abilities of his group, ie the use of nukes. Yes, he went against everyone else, but rebels, holdouts and wreckers are part of groups too and their actions are completely incomprehensible outside of their social environment. Humans do everything together; if they aren’t doing that, they’re going mad. 

Too many to mention. See lowersharpnose's post. Many of the big ideas were conceived by singular creative minds in a constant back and forth dialogue of refinement with their own work. At a particular stage of refinement, then put in motion in collaboration with others.

In large groups there are too many inhibiting factors (like ego) skewing the thinking downwards to  compromise rather than upwards to ideal. The hackneyed phrase "thinking outside the box" takes place in individual minds, rarely in groups, and is where boundaries in particular disciplines are pushed. It's actually quite rare to find the power of collective thought equaling the sum of minds, even when those minds are above average intelligence.

If the desire to dominate, individual ego, one-upmanship, reputation protection, discriminatory behaviour, judgementalism, personal gain (material or otherwise) could somehow be removed from large groups, then I would probably agree with you.

So a human being can't be smarter than a group, even when they make a smart choice directly contradictory to the group, because their smartness was only enabled by the collective stupidity of the group.  Gotcha.

I'm with Wintertree, that's quite enough of your semantic sillybollocks for me.

That quote always struck me as far too humble and magnanimous for Newton, if lowersharpnose is right about it being a petty dig at Hook that certainly fits his character better.

I don't think there has ever been such a time - we didn't evolve as a solitary animal, humans have never really been cut out to survive alone for long.  I'd say that's something that pre-dates homo sapiens, never mind 'civilisation'.

True in one sense but an aboriginal Australian spent a long time on walkabout armed with a spear and lttle else. Humans have always lived in groups but for a long time could still survive as individuals based soley on what they could construct with their own hands, though admittedly this was based on shared knowledge of how to hunt etc.

True of course.  I  guess the semantic question there is what counts as survival?  Long term an individual can't survive in the group either, it's only the tribe (nation/civilisation/species/etc.) that goes on.  It's impossible for an infant to reach adulthood alone, and at the other end of the lifespan it's also impossible for a solitary human to live long enough to die of old age.

Also, what counts as the 'benefits of civilisation'?  As you say - even though that person going walkabout probably made their own spear, they'd have been taught how to make a good one and how to use it as a child.  It's a piece of technology that's certainly a benefit of society and culture even if not yer actual civilisation.

Oh - as is fire!  Homo sapiens can't survive without fire in most environments, we can't eat the available food raw.  How many humans ever figured out how to light a fire by themselves?  And it wasn't even homo sapiens who invented that.

By your argument, the company that designed the machine that took the ends off Tony Iommi's fingers invented Heavy Metal! Clear and arrant nonsense.

Never wrestle with a pig, you’ll end up covered in mud and the pig enjoys it! 

Your précis wasn’t what I wrote; but no matter. It’s not the collective stupidly of the group that makes him smart, rather his smartness is an expression of the options provided to him by other human beings. His choice doesn’t even make sense “alone”.

Well that’s not my argument, and it shouldn’t be yours either, because the Beatles invented heavy metal as an aside on Helter Skelter. 

Didn’t Aborigines follow strictly defined paths across the desert that had been handed down through their tribe (or whatever the best word of for the Aboriginal collective)? 

What?! If you'd countered with 'You Really Got Me' I might have given you some leeway. As it is you've lost any shred of credibility you once retained.

Yes, I’d read the Hook gibe idea - At times Newton does come across as a bit of a rotter.

Possibly but still no B&B and resturant stops. As I said shared knowledge but still pretty much on your own.

Interestingly there is some research to suggest that in certain respects people are less intelligent in groups.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160113-are-your-opinions-really-your-o...

https://psychcentral.com/news/2012/01/24/iq-drops-when-youre-in-a-group#2

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229690-900-has-social-living-shrun...

Bruce Hood, the author of The Domesticated Brain and a psychologist at the University of Bristol believes our brains, are getting downsized by domesticity. (twenty thousand years ago, the average human brain was 10 per cent larger than it is today.)

Domestication tends to have that effect. According to Hood, every species that has been domesticated by humans has lost brain capacity as a result. Bred for passivity, their testosterone decreases, reducing the size of all organs. Dogs are a good example and the effect on their behaviour is telling: where wolves will try to solve a problem through cunning, dogs are adept at soliciting help from their masters. We are no different. So while as a group we have the potential to be more intelligent (by pooling resources and sharing information.) Individually the opposite can be true by an over reliance on others to do our thinking. Of course it all depends on how one defines intelligence. My personal take is that we are certainly more efficient as a group and this ability has expanded over the centuries to the point where whole countries can work together rather than small family groups, but there is also the possibility that we are less intelligent on an individual basis (generally based on attention span and ability to retain information)

https://www.simplyneuroscience.org/post/technology-s-impact-on-memory

if [knowledge platforms are] used as a replacement for recalling information [they] can negatively impact memory. However, if used correctly, as an aid rather than the first resort to the answer to a question or the way back home, it is very beneficial for the people relying on it.

Depends on the mob (mob is the preferred term over 'tribe') - the term 'Aborigine' covers a hundreds of seperate linguistic/cultural groups across all the varied climate zones of Australia. Some of them were hunter/gatherers, some were not; some were nomadic, some were not. Most of them didn't actually live in the desert at all, but the temperate coastal south/south east. 

In response Duncan's point, even for hunter/gatherers those solitary 'walkabout' expeditions were the exception rather than the norm, often for ceremonial/coming-of-age purposes. Day-to-day practice was overwhelmingly in groups

^^^ THIS.  To answer the OP, the reason why governments (in the west at least) aren't doing anything to curb population is because the majority of voters are older, and the social support model is for the workers of today to pay taxes to fund the pensions and healthcare of today.  Those older voters constitute what we call 'the babyboomer generation'.  As they retire they go from being a positive taxpayer (good career, good salary, own property etc.) to being a tax taker, and a massive one in short order. Some are retiring early because they can.  Declining birthrates has resulted in fewer taxpayers to fund them.  Erosion of pay and conditions mean those workers aren't earning as much as their parents and thus aren't paying as much tax.  Governments don't want to upset these voters - it would be electoral suicide. So they don't do anything about it.

The 'demographic timebomb' is a massive problem governments are generally avoiding. They don't want to tell the public the realities of it.  The 'dependency ratio' is going to change for the worse.  AI isn't going to help because it will only be business that can afford to implement it, and they're going to implement it to save money i.e. cut jobs.  Thus the only jobs left will be ones requiring physical dexterity.  Those care home workers needed to look after the babyboomers will be recruited at low level and kept at that level - no point in training them up when AI can give the answer.  Thus average salaries will decrease, if not jobs too.  Tech has previously resulted in more jobs because many of those jobs are in providing frivolity - console games and other consumerist things.  However, when earnings decrease, so will demand for those luxuries.  People won't be able to create startups because they won't be able to compete with AI and the businesses with the scale to use it.  Governments will lose tax take unless taxation models change. This is where the concept of UBI comes from - people can't earn enough to pay taxes, thus businesses employing robots and AI need to.  As wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, the ability for those without it to do something about it decreases.

That mythical island mentioned upthread?  I live on it.  We've a population of 65k. By 2035 there will be an additional 5k pensioners to support.  We can't sensibly physically fit enough additional workers on the island to support that. People can't afford to do carer jobs because the salaries aren't high enough. The only options are increased taxation and/or immigration.  Reducing pensions paid or healthcare available is politically unpalatable.

The West is going to see some very tough times until the babyboomers are all dead and the dependency ratio recovers.  The graph below illustrates the financial pain the west is going to suffer as the population bulge moves up the pyramid.

Well that did nothing to make me feel better about the situation.

I knew Guernsey wasn't real.

There's bags of room on the island, it's housing that we lack. 

So just to stir the pot a bit, lets remember that lots of those baby-boomers who'll be wanting care from the 'additional workers' that we apparently have no room for are living alone in large family houses.

I agree with much of this and I'm part of the problem I suppose.

So is this also a 'democratic timebomb'? The system of regulated capitalism and democracy that IMHO has been responsible for increasing the welfare of many and reducing exploitation, at least on a national level, is collapsing under it's reliance on often selfish voters.

 However I don't like the way the alternatives turn out.

My island isn't mainland Britain, it's Guernsey. 2499 people/km2. Second most densely-populated island in the world. Biggest wood is 300m across.

There's surely hundreds of islands with higher population densities than that in the world. Do you second most densely populated island in the British Isles?

Ah, my mistake.

A quick google suggests this is nonsense though.  Population density somewhere between 950 - 1000/km2.   Doesn't make this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_by_population_density

2500/square mile I reckon

ah yes, you're right.

I went through that list (albeit looking as far as the ~2000 level) - anything of comparable population (50k+) or larger is attached to somewhere by road i.e. they're not a true island requiring an expensive ferry or flight journey to leave like here - they're somewhere like Macau. I think the only similar self-contained island was San Andrés.

You said Guernsey is the "second most densely-populated island in the world". 

That claim is still nonsense I'm afraid even if you cross off everything with a bridge or a short ferry crossing, and also everything with a smaller absolute population for some reason.  That seems like a lot of work, but scanning down and picking out a few more obvious ones: Java, Malta, New Providence, O'ahu and Okinawa.

Out of interest, which did you think was the most densely populated island in the world?

I ignored those because they're not cut off at all - you can come and go as you please.  If the island is overpopulated you just go and live on the other side of the bridge. If there's a facility lacking you just use the one on the other side of the bridge. Although an island in a physical geographical sense, they're not in a societal sense.

A smaller community won't support self-contained facilities such as decent hospitals. Even our hospital doesn't do everything.

Using my original (mistaken) value of 2,000 they come out lower so I ignored them. Using the correct value means, yes, they're higher.

On my original criteria (a 'proper' island with population 50k+), San Andrés I think.