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Fertility just isn’t going to be necessary in the near future with mass automation. Having 300 million useless mouths to feed vs 50 million is only going to be a drag on productivity and prosperity for those left. In addition, tfr in the rich world might well rise when most people are ‘retired’ and no longer have a career to provide a sense of purpose.
A few countries with extreme collapsing rates like South Korea and possibly China might struggle briefly while human labor is still widely necessary, but for the West, where native tfr still hovers above 1.5 in most countries, there’s more than enough time left. And as you note, the Amish, Hasidim and so on are - in a true ‘collapse’ scenario - sitting ducks for faction with modern weaponry.
Useless mouths still vote and affect culture. Enough useless mouths can theoretically reject automation in increasingly violent ways. Useless mouths can do a lot of damage. There’s a reason the Catholic Church wants you to raw dog your wife endlessly and have 9 children before she gets too old.
I agree, I think "a useless mouth and his clout are soon parted". To the extent that competition still operates at any scale, I worry that anti-automators will be eventually marginalized, no matter how many kids we have.
USA imported black slaves to pick cotton, not needed anymore, and they are now a net drain. They are not "soon parted" but have privileged status.
Good point. I agree they have de jure privileged status, and that this leads to some substantial concrete benefits. But I'd counter that, to the extent that competition operates, it naturally disenfranchises them from almost all angles and makes their own self-advocacy ineffective. E.g. affirmative action spots mostly go to non-ADOS, BLM was a corrupt waste of political energy (compared to e.g. the at least-somewhat effective ADL), high-income people move away leaving places like Detroit.
I'm saying that a human worker advocacy org, in a world of more sophisticated machine actors, would similarly end up being a useless skinsuit pretending to advocate on behalf of humans, but wouldn't be able to avoid the important sources of influence all naturally routing around human agency. E.g. if you were a rich human, would you use an inferior (by supposition) human-run investment firm to manage your assets, or a machine-based one?
So my ultimate claim is that we have to choose between freedom and competition versus the continued relevance of humans. I really don't want to have to choose between these things, but I think we do.
They vote. BLM wasn't just waste, it did a lot of damage.
I agree, but I'm saying that it also managed to not even help ADOS. And that a future "Human Lives Matter" movement would be similarly ineffectual at its ostensible aims. And that our future votes would similarly buy us a wretched welfare bureaucracy at best.
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The Hasidim might be up shit creek without a paddle, but the Amish do fine in cartel-ruled Mexico. As it turns out having a big peasant population lets you feed and pay your army better which lets you field a bigger one, and both peasants and warlords can figure that out.
The Mormons seem like they would form a militia that then turns into a garrison state- they do after all form a local majority, or at least notably large minority, in their core territory.
The Mormons would be fine: they’re already very over represented in the CIA and FBI, and gendarmerie and secret service officers tend to do the best after regime change or collapse.
In a regime collapse, yes, former secret police tend to do very well. In state collapse, on the other hand, they don't necessarily(not that anyone does). Cartel-run Mexico and the stateless parts of the middle east aren't ruled over by former spies and secret police officers, they're ruled over by whichever non-state actors have guns behind them.
That being said, cults(which is what the Amish are, even if they're popular) seem to do reasonably well in state collapse- that's where ISIS came from, and as noted the Amish are about as good off under the cartels as they were under the Mexican central government(although organizations which recruit military personnel literally by promising higher-quality rations[that's not a joke; cartel advertising to Mexican soldiers emphasizes better quality meals] will probably give high-productivity peasant farmers a better deal than they normally do).
Of course, state collapse is fantastically unlikely in the US because two levels of government would have to collapse, federal and state. In some areas one implies the other eventually, but not right up front. Regime collapse on the other hand is semi-plausible as a result of mismanaging a fiscal crisis, and just results in balkanization.
ISIS is not an ethnoreligion. It came from former Iraqi army members who happened to be Sunni and saw Shia oppressing them.
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