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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse

This can only be true for the definition of collapse that doesn't matter. Those groups and types of individuals you yourself find distasteful will be becoming more and more prominent parts of our lives. Those nice clean neighborhoods of prosocial, functional adults will be shrinking over our lifetimes; every institution that stull works well will be slowly turning into what Americans call DMV; then go lower and lower. This gap will not be plugged by technology because this technology will be at the disposal of rapidly degenerating human stock that has less and less good political sense. Certainly it will not have enough decency to tolerate more successful people going off grid.

You seem to enjoy having moved to the UK. Will your quality of life be significantly degraded by the worst aspects of India catching up?

And that's still only the differential collapse. Because then these people, too, get old and even less capable.

What are your AI timelines? As far as I'm concerned, I expect ~30% unemployment rates within 5 years due to to automation, and an outright Singularity (in the sense that superintelligent AGI breaks all the charts, not that it necessarily goes FOOM) within 10.

I specifically said significant population collapse because I don't see the problem becoming noticeable within 10 years, and certainly not 5.

I strongly disagree that technology can't mitigate or even reverse the negative effects in said time frame. The primary concerns of demographic collapse are loss of tax revenue to prop up social security and pensions, and insufficient productive workers to maintain infrastructure and care for an aging populace. In a largely automated economy, those are moot points, and the latter can be mitigated by caretaker robots.

If humans become obsolete, then I don't see how a decrease in their number matters!

Also, in the particular case of the UK, it's multicultural enough that I genuinely don't think I could even tell if there was a 10-20% change in demographic ratios in said time frame. From what I can tell, they're finally cracking down on illegal immigration, so I have reason to expect that they'll largely take productive, reasonably prosocial immigrants in the future.