Scott has posted a discussion of the conversation about eugenics, framed as an actual conversation. I found it thought-provoking, as he made better arguments for both sides than I am used to seeing from either.
A: Given that mild, consensual forms of eugenics have historically led to extreme, horrifying versions, we have reason to believe the topic is a slippery slope which ought to be avoided outright.
B: This proves too much, as there are plenty of other ideas with similar history but much higher body counts. Thus eugenics ought to be carefully investigated rather than tabooed outright.
In the footnotes, he also presents C: Ehrlich did nothing wrong, and sometimes expected-value calculations don’t plan for the long tails. Democracy, as a form of distributed consent, is our best way to square this circle. This (correctly, IMO) leaves Scott uncomfortable. I appreciate that he included it.
I was not at all familiar with Ehrlich’s work, or with the quintessentially-McNamara history of Indian aid programs. Both add some valuable context for the argument. Oh, and I guess Scott talks about HBD a little bit; that’ll be catnip for this community, but it’s really secondary to the main thrust. Seriously, just read the article for a better version than anything I can write.
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Notes -
If anything, it's worse than that. From Ehrlich's Population Bomb, a book that sold 2 million copies:
Who can say how much of this stuff seeped into popular culture, how many children weren't born in the West due to the influence of this ideology? The overpopulation theory and Club of Rome stuff was also influential in China:
There is some debate about how accurate this is (other historians say the Party decided before asking scientists) but it's interesting that Maoist-era China used to be ideologically pro-natal on the simple logic of population=power. That still makes a lot of sense today. Why would they suddenly change their minds in the 70s and 80s?
It's silly in general terms to implement population control for fear of mass famine - food supply constraints automatically reduce population growth. People suffering malnutrition are less fecund. That's the regime we lived under for millennia. Population only grew like 0.1% a year or less in pre-industrial times.
Stop there!
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I don't understand your argument. Why try to prevent famine when you could just have people die from famine? Why improve living standards when we could just live the same miserable lives that people lived for millennia? Really?
I am also sceptical of the claim that "food supply constraints automatically reduce population growth". The poorest and most famine-prone countries also have the highest population growth rates. Not fertility rates – net growth rates after child mortality and all that. Don't bring up food aid because nutrition is still inadequate even with food aid, yet this hasn't stopped the growth.
Preventing famine by irrigating, storing food better, investing in green revolution tech, educating farmers on better techniques... is all great. Pre-emptive totalitarian population control and forced sterilization (by Alex-Jones-was-right-tier chemicals in the water supply) is not worth it.
Ehrlich made out apocalyptic famines to be a near-existential threat that needed massive government intervention to fix. It's not an apocalyptic-tier problem.
Finally, food supply constraints must automatically reduce population growth is on the same level as thermodynamics. There's clearly plenty of margin where population growth is possible despite having few calories per person, or low quality calories lacking in some vitamins. But a certain amount of calories must be produced to keep people alive. It's physically impossible for the population of Niger or the US for that matter to grow beyond what food supply can be found to meet it. Population growth has a hard cap in terms of food supply but for all modern countries the primary factors are things other than food costs.
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The one child policy article suggests that China mimicked the Western trend of scientific doomerism. Allegedly, it put a missile engineer in charge of population policy, so he tried to apply controls theory. It’s a cute story—“haha, China thought people were electronics!”—which leaves me a little suspicious. It also really leans on one source.
Another article suggests that this was cultural memory of the last century’s horrific famines. It had been 20 years since Mao fucked up the entire economy and caused the deaths of millions. I find it plausible that any middle-aged bureaucrats who came of age around that time were quite determined to avoid a repeat. The fact that lots of Mao-era collectivization policies were torn down around this time supports it. Keep in mind that this is the era of denouncing the Gang of Four and distancing party leadership from the Cultural Revolution.
I would argue that “population=power” didn’t make sense in the 50s. Mao’s attempts to turn that peasant population into industrial capacity were an abject disaster. Subsistence farmers did not provide the surplus needed to support such a population. Any benefit which arose from raising another 10 million farmers was immediately shredded by the inefficiencies of their command economy.
Today an individual farmer can produce a massive surplus, supporting a much larger pool of potential factory workers, scientists, and soldiers. But there are still bounds on how well that population can be exploited! Land usage. Equipment. Training time. Double the size of China’s army, but don’t double their fuel supply, and you get far less than double the return on investment. Population >= power.
China was very hard for Japan to conquer because it was so populated. China lacked modern equipment, funds, good organization and so on in WWII. But they were capable of withstanding horrific casualties because of their high population. In Korea, China used manpower-intensive tactics to largely counter US firepower superiority, things like infiltration tactics and night-fighting. They took enormous casualties but managed to retake North Korea. In the context of a nuclear war, China's large population was advantageous since it would take many many atom bombs to destroy their large, dispersed population.
Even though there are diminishing returns to population size, there are still gains to be had from size. The bulk of China's strength today surely stems from its enormous labour force of about 790 million. If China was a country merely at US size, it would only be a bigger Indonesia and not be much of a threat to the US.
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I'm not interested in sabotaging non-Western civilizations, I'm most interested in the welfare and development of the West. If aliens razed 10 Western cities and 20 non-Western cities, I'm not going to applaud them for being based, just because of that. I think some of Ehrlich's ideology wormed its way into policymakers and the media, that having children became less popular in addition to the ongoing economic trends. Shouting 'you're killing the planet if you have children' is not a good thing to do. Saying 'you should help us persuade policymakers to legislate so there are fewer births' isn't great either. Scott already stated the effects in the 3rd world, I was adding new information.
How can you say that the decline in birth rates has nothing to do with Ehrlich when you quote 'millions of sterilizations' just above? It has something to do with Ehrlich!
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Related discussion of news that the Chinese are refusing to have children.
Plus obligatory Is Yudkowsky the False Prophet Ehrlich was?
Modern East Asian childhood seems like an absolutely horribly unpleasant experience for everyone involved- parent, child, teacher, etc.- from essentially birth-25. Compare this to rednecks, who really enjoy raising their kids at least from the start of elementary school(and red tribers have a replacement-ish fertility rate, in contrast to blue tribers).
It’s not a surprise that people refuse to reorient their lives and those of their entire family around doing horribly unpleasant things.
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Why? Maybe because modern family life, especially modern Asian family life is nothing than endless pain and misery with no light spots and no happy end in sight?
Maybe when you tell people: "You spent half of your life as prisoner, now you have to spend the rest as prison guard", they will start doubting the whole idea?
Maybe the way to make people breed more is to find a way how to make family life more enjoyable and happier?
Or you can double down on "The Chairman Orders You To Breed For The Party And The Race!", this will certainly work this time.
And maybe it's easy to come up with a why that validates your political biases? Anyone's biases, really? Progressives don't want to subject their children to the horror of the environmental catastrophe, and Nazis tell me they won't bring Aryan children to suffer under the yoke of ZOG, and Yud says getting paperclipped is too cruel a fate, and Americans don't want to perpetuate corporate drudgery, and you've got your exploitation stories, and the Chinese have their millenia-old folksy sayings to the effect that the Confucian family unit is irredeemable Hell – sayings which have not dissuaded dozens of generations of their ancestors from acquiring the reputation of disgustingly fecund people in Western eyes. Maybe narratives ought to be checked.
Greer:
And on one hand, there are weird things about this specific form of antinatalism, but on the other I think the boring answer is the correct one. Children aren't worth it. To a childless person in a low-fertility atomized modern society, the benefits of having a child are either invalid (bloodline, dynasty, demographic competition with muh enemies) or unobservable, or dependent on other children in their environment; but costs are obvious and ruthlessly reinforced in public imagination by all responsible people, who only wish to warn you of the potential pitfalls.
Maybe the Party ought to make Kaplan mandatory reading or something. I don't know if that will trickle down to the policy level, though. All Kaplan says concretely is that our way of thinking about it is moronic, our anxious attempts at micromanaging life outcomes have extremely bad consequences, and we should take it easy. This doesn't, as a rule, persuade bureaucrats. Nor PMCs, nor women.
Also, roughly up until the Second Industrial Revolution, or whatever it's called, children normally were net economic producers after reaching the age of 8 or so.
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There are substantial differences between overpopulation and AI though. Populations can and have decreased, thus the problem cannot be permanent. The simple answer to “there’s too many people, so we’re all going to die!” is to either expand your territory (colonization of space comes to mind) or have fewer kids.
AI isn’t the same animal. There’s little chance of keeping a true AGI from getting smarter. And because of economic incentives, everyone will want an AI as smart as possible. This means that AI isn’t something that can be easily undone by human decisions, and will thus keep growing in intelligence as history marches onward. Barring a catastrophic event — like a nuclear war— AI 50 years from now will certainly be smarter than AI as it exists now. So the AI risks wouldn’t go away, in fact they’ll get worse over time as AI itself becomes smarter and smarter.
Doesn't follow. Like Marcus says, past performance is no guarantee of future results; history happens only once. Industrial revolution has happened only once too. Sure, if our civilization collapses (like Ehrlich expected due to overpopulation), Homo Sapiens doesn't go extinct soon. But it isn't clear that a mature spacefaring civilization would be able to rise once more. We have consumed too much. Our era is qualitatively different.
This is just assuming the conclusion, actually ruling out the counterargument by definition: if an AGI is easy to keep under control, then it's just not TrueAGI.
No, I think economic incentives are in favor of the most usable AI, irrespective of smartness. Yud's paradigm insists on distinguishing «capabilities» and «alignment» and I think this is completely wrongheaded. AI isn't some powerful slave we're trying to break in, it is a bag of behaviors.
Doesn't follow, 50 years from now on we will probably have better automated monitoring. On the other hand, a quadrupled population necessarily eats more…
I agree there's a vastly better case for AI threat. My point is to show that it's still not ironclad; here, too, a lot rides on mere unexamined narrative.
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Neither of us like Yudkowsky but that's a grossly unfair and unreasonable article. I think the median motte-user would read it and be swayed in the opposite direction. How is it any better than what LeCun puts on twitter? We both agree those are weak arguments that don't engage with the substance of Yud's stuff. Yud's position makes much more sense than Ehrlich's. It's still wrong but for much better reasons.
Some casual holes I can pick:
Food shortages are not intelligent and cannot plot against us
Yudkowsky's argument never relied on there being no diminishing returns on intelligence ever, only that returns on intelligence were very great
We have not been dealing with AI for millennia like we have with food shortages
Frankly I'd prefer a chad-hominem argument like 'we shouldn't take advice from a man who can't even lose weight - fix your waistline before saving the world'.
So you are saying that if Brad Pitt and other handsome and good looking Hollywood celebrities told you that AI will kill you soon unless you give up your GPU, you will salute, say "Yes, sir!" and immediately smash your high capacity assault computer with hammer?
You do not have to worry, it could happen soon.
No - why would anyone trust an actor, someone who is paid to speak the words of others? I'd trust a healthy philosopher over an obese one.
Edit: Still better would be more substantive counterarguments, such as those Daseindustries has made earlier.
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There are obvious reasons why states would want to limit population growth through means other than having people suffer from malnutrition.
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His 'work' is a 1968 book in which he was wrong about everything, and then a follow-up book in which he is also wrong. At 90 he's still collecting tenure. He epitomizes everything wrong with academia and public intellectuals. Be wrong and still get paid and get accolades.
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