Permanently secure my position, if i ever become god. I think that will be the rational (and common) choice of the gods. Wether that means gods killing each others, killing all humanity, or something completly different i have no idea. I guess they will all ask the AI for the best strategy.

There could be some terrible nash equilibria in that game, but who knows if the AI can solve the game changing it for all partecipants or something like that. There could be some equilibrium in which it makes sense to massively increase humanity numbers.

We are in uncharted territory when we start thinking of the real consequences of AGI. Some speculation sounds more realistic than some other, but we literally never experienced higher than human intelligence, and in some sense it is impossible to imagine what it means, because if we could really model a super-intelligence we would be super-intelligent ourselves.

So all the people you know and love live in a shack. Then maybe it's time to all move togheter to greener pastures don't you think?

As far as the future of humanity goes, I am more worried about birth control killing off humanity than AI or a small set of humans wiping the rest of us out.

I am not particularly worried about the AI scenario i described because i think it to be very remote in possibility. But it's the only scenario i can see plausibly if a strong AGI arises, which is necessary to justify the full-automation / labour productivity goes to 0 doom that many people share.

I don't see how birth controll can kill off humanity. I can see it decreasing humanity numbers, but killing it? if you mean voluntary birth control how can you think 100% of people would want to use it?

Observations suggest that if human beings are able to choose how many offspring they have, human beings will reproduce at a rate that is not able to sustain the population. Could this change in the future? Sure but Why should it, it is easier to rear a child today than it was 50 years ago yet women are having less babies when they have access to birth control.

Perhaps all the secular people will breed themselves out of existence leaving only religious people who have more babies, but this is not guaranteed. Birth control has a down side that people don't see.

This means population gets reduced though, not that it disappears.

Btw it's not easier to rear a child today than 50y ago, by any mean. It's actually far harder. Let me list why that's the case, in western society:

1) childcare costs increased more than inflation
2) education costs increased more than inflation
3) opportunity costs, thank to women emancipation, increased absolutely out of proportion more than inflation (= women have many more things they can choose to do with their life than before, and with far better potential results)
4) societal pressure on parenting (which is a cost) increased in a way that has no precedent in human history. We now ask from parents incredibly more than what we asked from them a few decades ago (and more than what humans ever asked). And we force them (sometimes at gunpoint) to a hand-on parenting approach that increases the costs of parenting immensely. People are going to JAIL in the USA because they let their children walk to school alone.

All this could change, and pressure on that to change could come if population decrease becomes a danger for society.

No, not me, but I don't come from a family of baristas.

If the barista only knows and love poor people, and they love each other but all have a terrible time in that place (= living in a shack), they can move elsewhere with an UBI.

You are born and grow up in an extremely expensive city. Neither you nor anybody whom you love (and reciprocates) bought a house. All poor with bad income and terrible housing prospects.

WTH you still do there if you all get an UBI?

LOL, you mean white-humanity though right?

Simulated that is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Trust me, I do not throw that phrase around lightly. People still voluntarily want to have kids and start a family, actually, the majority do.

Yes they want to have kids but not in sufficient numbers to sustain the population. Sufficient numbers to sustain the population is what you ignored. Look up fertility rates and see what they have been doing especially in countries where birth control is widely available.

You should read some of his earlier work from the past 24 hours.

Just a few kinda off-topic points about starbucks:

* I work from home, if I have a couple of hours without any calls I'll go to bux for a while

* their coffee is not terrible but it's not great. the main thing is that it's way too strong and way too hot.

* I always get tea, their tea game is extremely underrated. Their teavanna green tea is probably the best (and most consistently good) bagged tea I've ever had. The chai is slightly above average.

* there are a lot of other people who are in the same boat with me, I see the same regulars all the time, I should start a coffee-time friends thread because they're all weird as ****

* the baristas all know me but most of them don't know my name since you don't need to write a name for tea (and I use my own cup anyway). I ordered an americano to go for my wife when I was leaving one day and the girl at the register grabbed the cup and had this weird look on her face and then sheepishly said "uh... I should know your name?" Another time I put in a mobile order when I was driving by and when I walked in and asked "is this the americano" the barista (a different one) said "yes but that's not yours its for pvn" and I was like "yeah that's me" and she said "I thought your name was Matt."

* speaking of bringing your own cup, I have been complemented by two different baristas there about how clean my cup is. apparently a lot of coffee-time friends bring nasty dirty cups in???

I travel a lot too, and most of the time I'm in city centers, where there are more options for coffee/tea. I rarely if ever visit starbucks when traveling. Mostly it's because I just want to try different places, not because they're necessarily better (lots of them are worse than a replacement-level starbucks).

Having a good barista who can tell you when the beans were roasted etc is definitely a plus but there's no reason (as others in this thread have mentioned) that you couldn't have one coffee-master-level person running the whole store with lots of automation and still have a high level of customer service.

Just FYI, some good coffee places from recent travels that have stuck out in my head:

* Chicago: Dollop (north river, vv good chai latte)
* Dallas: Flying Horse (main street near the eyeball)
* SF: David Rio Chai Bar (Market street, absolutely off the charts, literally the only place I've ever gone to twice in the same trip)
* Manhattan: Honestly this is the best city overall for coffee but everything is at a very high level and there's no one place that sticks out in my head as way above everything else

A lot of counter service places have used automation to reduce need for human employees but not totally replace them.

I went to the bank today and had to use a human because the machine that you can make deposits with was broken.

Human ****ed up.

Cant be long till SBs and its analogues have a machine for express service or whatever and you can use a barista if u want.

But as i said, even if population gets reduced that is not the end of humanity. It can be a problem for many reasons but it's not the end.

Maybe, or maybe it wouldn’t have any volition or will to power at all. But you’re somewhat conflating that sort of AI with full technological automation of the sort that replaces the bulk of human labor. I don’t think the latter necessitates the former. Nor do I think its emergence would necessarily be monopolistic. The way the model of full automation runs out (in my head) — outside of human life, creativity, artistic expression, social interaction, etc., the only thing of intrinsic value left is land. Basically, the value of everything else including housing reduces to near zero, i.e., free.

Unless the nature of humanity changes substantially a permanent fertility rate of 2 or lower means humanity will eventually die out. This is a brute fact. The math does not lie. Two children must be born to replace the mother and father that beget them.

Now maybe humans become immortal somehow, or start cloning themselves, or upload their consciousness into computers and make back up copies etc. But barring some radical change to our nature. We can't hand wave away the logical consequence of a sub replacement fertility rate.

Well my scenario doesn't require AI volition, because i talk about controllers of the AI will to power. I said AI could overcome the creators but that's mostly irrelevant for the masses. Anyway we don't need to discuss that, in the sense that even if the AI is entirely without will its controllers do have will.

Yes it's not necessarily monopolistic but it's very hard to think it won't be. In order for strong AGI not to be monopolistic it should be developed at the same time by different groups and with the same power/potential, if one is slightly better it becomes exponential (because the first task you set it at is to increase itself).

Yes i am conflating AGI with full automation of human tasks. Because that's what you need to fully automate human tasks.

Think of building: even if the manual labor (brick laying and similar tasks) is automated that's mostly irrelevant for human labor and costs (after some re-arrangements). If you still need all the rest, architects, planners, people to find financing, people to sell the houses after you build them etc etc, automatizing the physical building part doesn't destroy demand of jobs.

Full automation comes if all the intellectual tasks can be automated as well and the only human interaction is "i want a 3 stores house there", and after clicking some buttons building starts with no humans involved until it is completed.

Still, please be careful about NOT thinking that solves scarcity. Because it doesn't. That 3 stores house still has value, in the sense of the costs to make it, in resources. Which don't disappear. The fully-automated process still consumes energy and materials. Which aren't free and aren't infinite.

But anyway nothing even close to full automation can come without strong AGI. Or without dedicated "local" AIs that are better than humans at specific tasks, for every single task where we now use humans. All included, regulation compliance and so on included.

It's not impossible that we don't get AGI, but we get thousands of dedicated AIs better at every human task. But in a practical sense those thousands of AIs, in aggregate, will be an AGI. Except it helps a lot toward the monopoly thing you mentioned before, if that's the model the risks are lower.

Btw if we reach the point where an AI (wether AGI or dedicated to a single task) is better than human at planning a building it's almost impossible that we don't also have a dedicated (or AGI) AI that is better than humans at social interaction, and creativity.

Dunno why we still think those are "impossible to replicate" tasks.

So, wrapping up:

1) Full automation in the sense of human labor mostly becoming completly irrelevant (this inclued fully automated repairs) requires AGI/thousands of dedicated AIs
2) Full automation doesn't solve resource scarcity (unless and until the AGI does it for us)
3) Whoever controls the AGI has absolute power over humanity, unless there are several competing AGIs at almost the same identical level of intelligence, or the thousands dedicated AIs are owned by many different groups
4) Having absolute power over humanity, in a world where resource scarcity isn't solved, imho is GG for most of humanity.

You cant take a trend that is recent and linked to hundreds of current elements of society and extrapolate it in the future MILLENNIA needed to go from 7.5 billion human beings to 0 with a fertility rate of (say) 1.6.

Let's say fertility stay lower than 2, without life expectancy increasing, so human worldwide population starts to decrease. It's practically obvious that when we are "far less people" some resource constraints are lower than they are now and so it's easier (more convenient) to have more children in some areas of the world.

Also direct, explicit social subsidies would come in such a world. If we go from 7.5 billion people to (say) 5, don't you think countries would start to subsidy having children more and more, and spending less and less for the old?

And so on and on.

Birth control is only one of hundreds of elements concurring to the present fertility rate, and it's useless to extrapolate a social trend for millennia when it is clearly endogenous, as the trend itself if ongoing changes the cost-benefit analysis of future people decisions about procreation, so the future fertility rate is a function of present fertility rate among other things, so extrapolation is not only useless, but logically wrong.

This is only a problem in rich countries. Poor people tend to have more children for obvious reasons (not birth control).

If we ever reached a world where there wasn't any absolute poverty (fat chance of that), a decline in population from present levels would be a good thing, putting less of a burden on the environment, government and UBI.

Or are you only concerned with falling birth rates in the West?

actually things are currently less obvious than it seems.






I think you would be very, very, very hard pressed if you tried to demonstrate that american hispanics in the 90s were a lot poorer than current bangladesh or paraguay residents.

Something else, something pretty big is going on (almost certainly many different things at once) that goes over and beyond the old "rich country low fertility, poor country high fertility" simplification.

This is moldova, 1900 USD per person of GDP

EDIT: source is FRED, can't seem to be able to link to the pic, anyway fertility is 1.25.

This is ghana, 1500 USD per person of GDP



If at the same level of gdp per capita you get both the highest fertility rates in the world, and the lowest, maybe, just maybe, it's time to drop that direction of analysis.

Also saying that low fertility is exclusively a "rich country problem" means not having a clue of the topic.

Btw puerto rico has the lowest fertility rate in the US

Life expectancy in Bangladesh has risen during the period of your chart from 47 to 71, so yes it is markedly less poor than before.

Moldovan life expectancy is 72 - no surprise the birth rate has dropped - but an even bigger factor in the low fertility rate is the exodus of young people to Russia and Europe.

Birth control as part of government-run public health programmes is a factor in some countries but doesn't explain falling fertility rates as your pal Simulated wants us to believe.

You mean White humanity don't you. There isn't really any fertility problems in the browner parts of the world is there?

why is racism allowed in this forum? Puerto Rico, I repeat, has the lowest fertility rate in the USA. Lowest than every single one of the 50 states.

lol, dude we're not bumpkins fresh off the turnip truck.

does this dumb tactic (straight out of the stormfront playbook) actually work elsewhere?