Тег: NTP

The Illusion of a Satiated Demographic Sunset: Why There Will Be No One to Fix Robots in a Half-Empty World

We always say that if you regulate every step, burden a person with a million prohibitions, licenses, and fines for every sneeze, people will simply stop having children. A human is a biological being, and animals in cramped cages do not reproduce. But the response we get is simply, “So be it; there are too many people as it is, and if there are fewer, there will be no traffic jams, nature will cleanse itself, and silence and beauty will prevail.” Usually, we counter with economics: infrastructure will collapse, the solidarity pension system will burst, and markets will shrink to the size of a street stall. That is exactly what will happen. But behind this facade hides something far more terrifying—technological regression and the risk of a slow but certain extinction of humanity as a species.
 
Population reduction enthusiasts stubbornly see a human only as an “extra mouth,” a “source of carbon footprint,” and a walking problem. But a human is not just a mouth, but also a brain. It is the entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity, and labor. So let’s break down in simple terms why the dream of a “small, cozy humanity” is a most dangerous illusion.
 
First, rare talents. Geniuses capable of driving fundamental science do not appear by government decree. They are born statistically rarely—roughly one in a million. If you have a population of 8 billion, you have a pool of eight thousand potential Einsteins, von Neumanns, and Turings. Cut the population in half, and you cut that pool by exactly 50%. Cut it even more, and breakthrough ideas will become many times fewer. And yet, it is these individuals who create the technologies that later feed and heal everyone.
 
Second, the specialization trap. Modern scientific and technological progress relies on an incredibly deep division of labor. In the 18th century, an erudite person could understand mechanics, botany, and philosophy. But today, the low-hanging fruit of science has already been picked. To move the edge of knowledge even a millimeter, thousands of ultra-specialists are needed. One person cannot design a lithographic scanner for chips, synthesize a molecule for a rare cancer, and build a thermonuclear reactor all at once. The larger the society, the more unique, niche professions it can afford. A small society, even if everyone has three higher education degrees, is physically incapable of maintaining millions of complex competencies simultaneously.
 
Thirdly, economies of scale and technological accessibility. Developing a new processor or medication costs billions of dollars. In a global market of billions of people, these colossal costs are spread thin—resulting in penny-priced pills and affordable smartphones. Shrink the market, and the most complex projects will cease to be profitable. Businesses simply will not invest in something they have no one to sell to. First, niche drugs for rare diseases will disappear, then specialized equipment, and eventually entire industries. The state, of course, will attempt to save the situation with “subsidies,” but taking money from a shrinking economy is a path toward an even faster collapse.
 
Fourthly, knowledge does not live in books. Blueprints without a living chain of succession are just dead terabytes of data. Complex technology lives only in the hands of practitioners: when a gray-haired engineer passes on implicit skills to a young graduate student right at the machine tool or in the laboratory. If one generation is replaced by a much smaller one, the chains break. Humanity has lost technologies more than once—from the recipe for Roman concrete to the ability to quickly reproduce the rocket engines of the moon program.
 
And finally, we cannot simply stand still. Nature does not take pauses for a “cozy life.” Bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics. The climate presents surprises, infrastructure decays, and space threats have not gone anywhere. For civilization to simply maintain its current level of security, it must run as fast as it can forward—discovering new energy sources, creating new materials, and new medicines. If we slow down the scientific and technological progress due to a shortage of brains, we are not staying in place, but beginning to slowly slide into a new dark age.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

A few words about scientific and technical progress and modern civilization

Voluntarist, Bitarch

There is a position based on the idea that scientific and technical progress and modern civilization are an evil capable only of making humans unhappy. Of course, this position is not very popular and is unlikely to ever gain significant support, but I would like to say a few words about how untenable it actually is.

The conversation can begin with the fact that the opponents of progress themselves have survived largely because of it, rather than having a high probability of dying from hunger, cold, or disease in early childhood. Moreover, the drastic increase in human survival rates and the accessibility of benefits is an obvious consequence of progress. However, it is sometimes less obvious that only thanks to progress does humanity have any chance at all of surviving in the long term.

Some may argue that progress has created means capable of severely harming all of humanity (by destroying the environment or even serving as weapons of mass destruction). However, it is pointless to argue against the fact that it is the lack of progress that could harm humanity the most. In such a case, it would be 100% unable to leave the boundaries of its home planet and would perish during the next planetary-scale catastrophe. The Earth is not eternal; furthermore, some catastrophe could happen very soon, rather than hundreds of millions of years from now. It turns out that opposing progress means advocating for the complete annihilation of humanity in the future. Is any of the critics of progress ready to openly support such an idea?

Another argument against progress is the alleged suffering of people in an urban environment that is unnatural for them. Instead, a life close to nature is proposed, to which the human psyche is best adapted, and for the sake of human happiness, the possibility of preserving humanity in the future can be sacrificed now. Of course, in reality, prehistoric people suffered greatly; archaeological evidence often shows traces of prolonged physiological stress from hunger and disease on their remains. The transition to primitive agriculture also did not fully solve this problem; just a few centuries ago, crop failure (for example, due to climatic factors) was a common cause of famine, and peasants of the past regularly suffered from food deficiency and monotony. An average resident of a modern city, who is constantly fed, kept warm, and fairly healthy, will clearly be happier. But this is not even the point; the point is that, according to the opponents of progress, the human living environment must be frozen in time.

One of the most natural processes for all living things is adaptation to changing environmental conditions. And modern urban civilization, like any form of potential future civilization, can easily be called a new living environment to which one simply needs to adapt. Moreover, humans also gain an advantage—they control how the new environment will be structured, which makes adaptation easier. Without progress, the change in the environment would still happen due to inevitable climatic changes, but people would have to do without such an advantage, facing an increased chance of premature extinction instead of adaptation.

An opponent of progress is ready to appeal to the naturalness of a certain living environment for humans. But why then does he deny such a natural process as adaptation? Why does one kind of naturalness satisfy him, while the other does not?

Finally, it should be said that opponents of progress simply have no chance of turning their ideas into reality. They will not be able to convince everyone, and their only way out is to forcibly compel others to renounce progress. But without progress, there simply will not be significant means to carry out such compulsion, especially on a global scale. And groups of people promoting progress will always have an advantage in terms of the means allowing them to protect themselves from such violent coercion. Thus, any ideas against progress are simply stillborn.