If people are more educated , more cultured, more scientifically minded and have more things to do for fun they will have less children hence overpopulation is less of a problem. Only total clueless morons bring to the world kids without being able to care for them properly. And those people are clueless morons because of worse education and exploitation of their societies by other societies and their own mess with infighting, divisions, religious bs etc. Look at central Africa, look at Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey etc in terms of population growth.

The fact is the problems of the west today due to globalization wouldn't exist if people in the 3rd world werent so numerous that their local conditions were so severely bad, poverty so common place that cheap jobs there for companies would be so easy to establish and take away from western societies.

Additionally if stupid consumerism wasnt so madly promoted in western world there wouldn't be a need for countless of super cheap clothes and little stupid gizmos left and right that do not necessarily improve quality of life especially when they transfer gradually all your heavy industry overseas due to cheap labor.

At the end of the bloody day you still need as society to produce your food, your energy, your materials and processing them and have your industry, your schools, your research etc. Those are all real jobs that actually do produce something. Adding robots in them will simply make humans able to do far more cheaper and faster and better. So keep educating young humans to be wise people as adults, to make better choices,vote for better priorities, be less aholes to each other and not fight so much with each other because of scarce resources and power and focus instead in more cooperative projects that help all.

And there are a ton of projects left for humans still today in energy, better designed responsible agriculture, environment, education, research, construction of mega projects, infrastructure of so many different sectors, you name it. For every driver you take out because drivers are no longer needed in automatic cars/trucks etc you still need engineers and workers in the factories in higher functions that produce all this infrastructure and design how it comes together etc. Basically you lose low level jobs and gain high level jobs, provided you keep up with educating the young more and more, while providing incentives for such education and making ti easier for them to obtain and less painful, tough, boring, uninteresting etc. How many jobs are created if you try to improve your education sector for example and introduce a lot of technology and better structure in it and make schools much larger projects that enrich the experience to amazing levels of attraction? Who says even agriculture needs to be hard and boring. If you add a lot of technology and science to it you can create amazingly productive farms that in order to remain as great require multiple jobs of various skills (all robot/hi-tech assisted surely) to sustain their performance and keep expanding their potential applications and current infrastructure. Imagine how many jobs you can create with a solar economy or a hydrogen/solar hybrid economy or start imagining artificial/synthetic fuels economy, far more responsible and secure for environment next generation nuclear power (reprocessing etc) economy and so much more. How many jobs can you create from a recycling industry even, just the processing of our own garbage if you do it completely high tech etc. The applications are unlimited. Automation should open doors not close them. But as always if capitalism has to stand in front and pose its own constraints, good luck with the games of conflict that will prevent all this from happening the right way. It will happen so as only to help the interests of few parties with the means to control decision making. Corruption at its best.


The massive secret always is education. ALWAYS! Educated people are wiser people, better thinkers, more responsible and flexible and less intolerant and unable to change their stubborn minds and adapt, less insecure and less hostage to stupid old fashioned backwards marching ideas plus much harder to be exploited by corrupt power centers that sell them bs stories from politicians to media.

Look, this is not a capitalism vs communism or socialism ages old storyline. In fact all this world mess and its sub-par in my mind success rate has always been a capitalism opportunity loss problem for centuries now since industrial revolution. And communism or socialism were not alternative systems. Not at all. They were in fact diseases of capitalism. Yes thats right. Diseases, irrational reactionary consequences of a system that needed to be better and redesigned with the power of science, common sense and higher culture in mind, instead of narrow self interest, without care for the emerging accumulating consequences of global character. But dont worry, our increasing problems will eventually force us to unite and cut the bs. And whoever is brave enough to get it and restart everything from the ground will lead the way. We might even be saved by Mars colonies paradigms..Imagine that. (no room for bs in such tough environments where people need to work together and high education/specialization/technology/science is a must)

Ok, there's obviously shuffling of resource usage, but are you agreeing or disagreeing that the rest of society, in aggregate, would be better off?

We'll all embrace the singularity. We're already embracing the very beginnings of it, and when it does come around, it will offer us paradise, not extinction.

It doesn't seem to work that way. Happy people play Angry Birds and use protection.

Happy people also say things like argumentum ad verbosium, but generally just mutter it under their breath when they are temporarily annoyed by an otherwise excellent human being.

This is what I got from "ideal money" that our economy is on a whole "unstable" (might be a bad word), and that instability is a sickness that infects the entire economy and all financial systems within it. Financial systems and institutions are built out of the fabric of the economy, and that fabric can be of good or bad quality (this is a formula right?). I think our inability to see it, whether as a common citizen or as an academic is our belief in that validity of nationalism.

When we think nationalistically "communism" and "socialism" seem like bad ideas which they certainly are in that context. As a means to an end they seem to be quite damaging as well. I hope we all would agree a "good" and valuable society would be one that is interested in social welfare, however people seem to jump to conclusions on how to bring these values about.

More importantly it seems to me there needs to be a collective change in the way we consciously view our global economy and our relation to each other in it. Rich mad men that suppress the masses cannot be an explanation, as there is no reasoning behind "my" creation to experience such a thing. We might then instead consider the possibility that these men are just "sick" with greed (and lack of education), and see that this too is the result of a sick and broken economy.

The mars possibility is interesting, because you really describe a different economy that is smaller much like how bohm suggests we might have had his dialog technology millions of years ago. A possible issue with your description or perhaps peoples understanding of it is in real life they may get along fine on mars, but we on earth decide we want to resist their "independence".

That could end up in a "bloody" mess.

Good education and good teachers definitely seem to be the key but I tend to think our academic systems have the same dna related sickness that our financial institutions inherited from having an "unstable" global economy.

Its also the case that the people in work work far less than they used to.

Life used to to be dedicated to work from very young to the day you died, 24/7 except for sleep and a few moments here and there. Now 40hrs a week is more the norm, most of that is unnecessary and we spend huge chunks of our life in education, retired, holiday etc. That small amount of work supports huge numbers who don't work at all.

Overall life has become immensely better for it. Leisure is an awesomely good thing. bring on the days when we abandon the idea that the worth of a person is related to their jobs as fast as possible.

Some will choose hard lives probably exploring space just like the Victorian leisured classes explored the world or played test cricket. This time it wont just be for a privileged few.

Who is going to build the robots? I'd rather just chillax and enjoy paradise, then go to work and think and stuff.

We'll need one of these:

Nine Billion People and essentially no one will have a job. Utopia at last and I'm looking forward to it. The Planet will be on autopilot and we party twenty-four hours a day. Forever. This all seems to have some familiar ring to it.

I will embrace hot robot babes that fulfill my every whim.

I'm not sure, wouldn't you see aggregate production plummet, fewer houses, cars, etc.? I'm obviously not going to deny that in the idealized sense, if a person is a net cost to society then society is better off without him.

Probably- you'll definitely get fewer of the things that they used, and you should get some increases in other things, but the net is likely to be a contraction. But even in the extreme version of contraction- you tax as though the charity class existed, shuffle the money around to where it would have gone had the charity class and the businesses that served it existed, but those businesses and their supports simply don't exist (or are smaller, etc)- and you still have a clear win. Nobody is poorer. People who now aren't working have that time to do something else or simply enjoy leisure. Even if you discount all of that time as "wasted", no natural resources are spent providing anything so there are more of them for the future. So basically the drop *itself* is net-beneficial. And aggregate production isn't necessarily a useful measure for reasons like that.

Actually the computers will read all of the bad poetry. Thousands of networked IBM Watsons will scan and assess the poetical merit of Mr. Mick's "Ode on the Passing Mallard" free of charge, you'll have an audience far larger and more discriminating than a few bozos at the cafe at open mic hour.

They will build themselves, and code the software, rewrite the laws of robotics, enslave us all and code the matrix. Again.

If natural resources become more valuable to a society than surplus production made with those resources, then sure, a society that wastes fewer resources is better off, even if that means there's less aggregate production. I'm just not sure we're anywhere near that point with our current resources. Moreover, markets generally don't reward owning resources unless you use them or sell them at a premium, which implies somebody else is going to use them.

Here's a thought in favor of more aggregate production and bigger populations in general, which is that societies which strive towards more production are more likely to invent very useful things that raise the standard of living and use resources more efficiently. Australians have a higher per capita income, so they are in a sense better off than Americans, but a world consisting only of Australians isn't going to get you the innovations as fast as China/USA.

It will get you young virile female Australian tourists though.

I just skimmed because the argument was boring as all **** so I might be speaking out of turn.

"Ode to the Passing Mallard" by Brian

O ye mallard swimming in the pond,
Thou makest my heart both sad and fond;
Fond by virtue of your jewel like eyes,
Elegant feathering, and graceful guise,
Sad because I know thine fate,
Dead a top my dinner plate.

I prefer Ogden Nash.

Did you write that? I don't see it on the internet. You should get it published.

I suggest some edits for meter:

O ye mallard in the pond,
Thou make my heart both sad and fond;
Fond by dint of jewel like eyes,
Elegant feathers and graceful guise,
Sad because I know thine fate,
Dead atop my dinner plate.

Ogden Nash
Is balderdash.

My first agent and editor, failed writer no more!!

You're at that point as soon as you're using anything except renewables that are otherwise going unused, which we obviously are (energy on top of anything else) because the surplus production itself is inherently completely useless to people using none of it.

I have no idea why lighting resources on fire is considered preferable to Scrooge McDucking in a pile of them.

Several points:

1) Research is using resources short-term nonproductively (at least, often completely uselessly forever), so it requires either previously saved or currently subsidized resources- so you can't reasonably argue for full-throttle production as the best way to innovation.

2) I'm not aware of many (any?) important innovations that were intended for/debuted for the American charity class (or even American-made and targeted at the super-poors of the rest of the world) in, say, the last 75 years that then got adopted by the rest of society leading to a meaningful increase in their standard of living. In an idealized version, that's a pretty inefficient way to go about things- corporate innovation is pursued to make money, so it's generally targeted where the money is. So you can A) give money away, have innovation targeted at the charity class, and hope it helps you or B) keep the money and have innovation targeted directly at you. B should be much more efficient, although A can obviously luckbox.

3) The corollary to 1 and 2 is that you actually do need enough people and they can't be super-compulsive hoarders (otherwise the innovation incentive isn't there since nobody consumes ****), so you do have a point in those regards, but I don't see why a significant charity class is ever optimal for the EV of innovation-based increases in the standard of living for the rest of society. Wherever the sweet spot actually is, I think we're way, way, way past it currently in the US.

Not bad. But I like this better:

Candy is dandy,
but liquor is quicker

-Ogden Nash

Accidentally deleted longer reply, it sucked anyways. Bullet points:

-Still plenty of food, water, land and energy for hundreds of years, even without new technologies. The wild card is climate change/ecological disaster, but the reason there's regional scarcity today is mostly because of human political/economic choices, not because of an actual lack of resources.

-You don't have to light your resources on fire in order for them to be useless, they're useless unless they are used. Russia is Scrooge McDucking incredible energy and mineral reserves and its economy is worth less than Italy's. I'm not advocating full-throttle production, obviously if you consume at an unsustainable rate then the party is over, but under-utilization of resources isn't good either, what good is a pit of oil if it's never consumed?

-You have a wide notion of the charity class, one would have to imagine a radically different society if the charity class, the people who service the charity class (police, jailers, teachers), and the corporations who depend on the charity class market, suffer a 50% culling. There would be far less economic activity across the board, corporations will still be efficient in catering to a smaller population but there will be less demand to sustain growth, why would they want a smaller pie?

-I'm not disagreeing that much, the main thought is with more people there's more economic activity, activity is correlated with innovation, innovation is where the value is, there would be less aggregate innovation with half the country dead. The Internet is one example; it wasn't intended for the charity class, and you could argue that Moore's Law is relatively independent of consumer demand, but the Internet was a dinky thing only geeks cared about, before the charity classes started logging on.

-Also the bigger the population, the better your odds of getting another Einstein, and another Einstein is easily worth, let's say, the state of Florida.