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We’re less than 20 years from the vast majority of labor being automated by AI and robots. A huge proportion of white collar jobs can already be automated by LLMs, SDCs are working fine in San Francisco, warehouse automation is proceeding at pace, in many cases we’re just waiting for regulatory approval, better wrappers and some minor improvements to multimodality in practice.
The problem with low tfr in the West is mass immigration, not labor shortages. If natives in Germany or Sweden stop reproducing, they’re going to end up being 30% of the population by 2100 and they and their descendants will be living in somebody else’s country, forever. Korea and China will likely still be 90%+ Korean and Chinese, there will simply be fewer of them. This is no major issue.
Depopulation itself is completely fine, the US is pretty sparsely populated but Western Europe is very dense and could easily benefit from an 80%+ drop in population over a couple hundred years (deflationary impact can be managed in various ways, including rising consumption). The issue is that if mass immigration continues, the population won’t drop, just change.
You are aware that productive labor depends on people physically doing things? Fancy computer programs cannot do this.
A fancy computer program in a fancy robot might, though.
Well, the fancy robots already exist and are already doing productive labor, the only question is how much productive labor they can do.
A more relevant question is what kind of productive labor they can do. If the price of low-skill labor gets high enough, just adding more robots will be a possibility.
A shortage of robot technicians might be a problem, but it will be less of one than ‘oh no, robots that can pick peaches without destroying them are impossible’.
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I beat this drum on occasion but we absolutely aren’t. I’m directly involved with this sort of thing and absent a paradigm-shifting in improvement and robot hardware (possible but far from guaranteed) we cannot practically automate much more than is already automated.
AI is a probabilistic inference machine. It’s not suitable for doing physical tasks with a high degree of accuracy at >99.9% success rate. At 1 part per 6 seconds, even that figure means a line failure every 1000 parts ie. about once every 2 hours.
And robot hardware isn’t up to performing constant physical work with soft bodies like cloth or complex shapes. Anything more complex than a suction gripper or pinching fingers has failed to take off in a factory setting because it’s not reliable enough or because it wears out too quickly.
Starting to see recognition of this in fiction now. Just translated something with a few lines like
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There is no guarantee of this happening. Progress in AI could stagnate. I don't agree that very many jobs can be automated with today's technology. We may be close, but progress is already slowing down. There are a number of problems limiting progress that might not be overcome. Returns to scaling are starting to plateau, we're running out of data, and Moore's Law is coming to an end. It is definitely possible that we will find solutions to these problems and I know some think they've already found them, but nothing is guaranteed.
I think they can, not in the sense that you can automate away everything a single person does, but rather that you can automate part of what many people do, to the point that you can manage workloads with much smaller teams.
I think the reason that not that much of this automation is happening right now, is that fast progress in the technology means that you might be commiting a ton of capex into a system that might be "obsolete" in a couple of years.
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It’s definitely a problem if you need lots and lots of disposable people to stand in a trench and hold rifles.
We’ve barely even entered the drone swarm age where your shielded underground factories can pump out millions of kamikaze drones to blacken the sky and scour trenches to find enemies to kill, all autonomously even if a signal with a base station or satellite is lost.
It remains to be seen whether we can actually bridge the gap between our current situation and that eventuality. It's entirely possible that our current system suffers catastrophic collapse before it achieves full automation. Given the likely outcomes of the sort of future you're describing, such a collapse might even be preferable.
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Ah yes, the glorious technocratic future of South Korea where the wasteland is viciously guarded by an autonomous kill swarm. Nobody knows if a single South Korean yet lives. But trapped, deep underground, is one last 300 year old South Korean, asshole destroyed beyond all recognition by the ass wiping robot made to purpose that has desperately needed maintenance the last 78 years. Truly a bright future South Korea has in store for themselves.
The competitive pressures that cause South Koreans to not have any children may well be destroyed by a 50% drop in population or fully automated luxury capitalism.
Maybe, maybe not. What started as competitive pressures could rapidly become cultural or just generalized dysfunction. What happens when a society forgets how to have and raise the next generation of itself? Once that institutional competence is lost, can it be relearned in time? Will anyone even want to?
"society" is to some extent a fiction. There's a range of fertilities in Korea with a long tail. The people who aren't having any kids aren't going to be represented in the future, so their inability to raise kids doesn't matter.
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Come now, if you know anything about Korean youth culture, surely you must know how enamored they are of broadcasting the most mundane of activities for all the world to see.
If you want a picture of South Korea’s future: I have no ass and I must stream.
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Except the remaining 20% would consist of infertile middle-aged and old people who'd also die out in a matter of time. A collapse in fertility, unless reversed, inexorably reaches a certain point where it becomes irreversible.
Maybe, but when most people are unemployed for life I think more will have time for parenting, too.
Uh, isn't the core of SK's low fertility based on competitive pressures to get one of the few socially respected jobs before shacking up? These aren't western trailer trash who will breed on the dole.
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Historically depopulation has been a pretty significant problem, and I think it's very likely to continue to be that way unless robot automation leads to such a wealth boom that the population transitioning from net producers into net consumers is alleviated. (Even if that happens, nations with solid birthrates are likely to have a comparative advantage all other things being equal.)
I'm not convinced it's impossible, but I'm not convinced it's a cinch either.
How do you mean?
All the examples that come to mind from the classical period have a ton of confounding factors. Were the Romans out of money because their tax base died of plague, or because they wasted too much on panem et circenses, or because they just had too many enemies?
By the Industrial Revolution, population is definitely less important than development, natural resources, etc. I think this probably dates back to the late medieval period, but I don’t know enough about the history to pick out key trends on graphs like these.
I guess I agree with the “all else equal” statement. It’s just rare.
Well I mean you are less likely to have too many enemies if you had lots of young people!
I think the experience of France during the World Wars would suggest otherwise (or, at a minimum, it would suggest that more people means you can better develop your natural resources!) France - which had a higher population than Germany and the UK in the middle of the 19th century - had already started suffering from a comparatively low TFR going into the First World War, where they suffered horrific casualties. Their lack of desire to run another meatgrinder the second time around is probably at least somewhat related to their population woes: note by contrast that the Germans suffered higher casualties numerically in the First World War, but were willing to bleed white in a multi-front war. (And for all the talk of GERMAN WONDERWEAPONS, Superior German Technology was more a late-war thing - I don't think it was dispositive in their struggle with the French. In fact, France's biggest mistake may have been failing to substantively attack Germany while the German army was deployed fighting in Poland - the farce of the Saar Offensive makes a lot more sense if you model the French as having a lot of unwillingness to incur casualties.)
I definitely agree that in this case (and most cases where population decline occurs) there are cofounding variables. But an older population makes pretty much all of those problems worse, and more people can be deployed to solve almost any problems (particularly now that agriculture is so efficient!)
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All the technologies you listed can automate genocide too if push comes to shove
Personally speaking, I oppose genocide, so I hope that doesn’t happen.
It is a blunt, inefficient instrument. I agree.
That... is not the problem with genocide.
What is the problem with genocide?
Killing people is intrinsically wrong. Killing many people is even more wrong.
Is this just your opinion or what? I don't think most people who have ever lived would agree with you. Modal human morality is that someone who sails down the coast to where people talk different, kills the men, rapes the women, and enslaves the children, and brings treasure back to benefit his own tribe, is a hero.
What most people who have ever lived would think is irrelevant. In our time, with our society and morals, someone who does what you describe is considered a monster.
Also, I meant what I said about "this is intrinsically wrong". Even if society sanctioned it, that wouldn't make it OK.
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