Much of this is just repeating things that others have said, but my initial position here is skepticism.
The model is based on a fertility trend that has arisen in a very specific cultural, economic, and technological context. I’m very skeptical that we should take it to provide any sort of reliable guide to the long term future.
It seems to me that there are plenty of ways that projecting forwards underlying trends could interrupt the fertility trend. For example, perhaps as you increase per capita wealth you get decreased child mortality, increased costs of educating children, and so on, such that having less children becomes incentivised. But if wealth continues to grow then perhaps there becomes a decoupling between economic incentives and decisions about how many children to have (because marginal wealth becomes less important so costs in terms of marginal wealth matter much less in terms of their impact on utility).
Low fertility itself seems likely to lead to cultural changes. I feel pretty sceptical of the idea that we end up in a world with a radically shrinking population where we can carry forward the trends that are familiar from a world with a growing population.
AI could easily change the connection between population growth and innovation, in a way that means progress could continue absent population growth (and this progress will plausibly itself gives the tools necessary to resolve issues of population if we become worried).
AI might itself count as population in whatever sense matters.
Fertility technologies might change how easy it is to have children and might lead to a decoupling between parental choice and societal birthrate (for example, you could imagine a world of artificial wombs where the government is responsible for creating the next generation, and where children are co-raised by society; clearly there might be issues with such a world, but the fertility rate itself is not the issue).
I believe that evolutionary pressures tend to push genes responsible for fertility to evolve to fixity. The genes now responsible for fertility are increasingly those related to wanting children. We should expect these genes to evolve to fixity.
One might retreat to saying we should have a small credence in the relevant models but claiming this suffices to justify action. I’m skeptical that we should even have a sufficiently high (small) credence for this argument to go through. Projecting this population trend forwards 300 years through the radical change we should expect over that time seems to me not very informative.
I recognise that the people working on this are better informed than me on this topic, and that seems like a relevant consideration. But I worry this is… kinda EA nerdbait. Clever big picture thinking, backed by quantitative models, revealing a hidden catastrophe that others have not foreseen sufficiently clearly. I’m not saying such things never get at the truth, but I do think it’s reasonable to approach them with an initial attitude of skepticism, even in the face of the existence of enthusiastic proponents.
Much of this is just repeating things that others have said, but my initial position here is skepticism.
The model is based on a fertility trend that has arisen in a very specific cultural, economic, and technological context. I’m very skeptical that we should take it to provide any sort of reliable guide to the long term future.
It seems to me that there are plenty of ways that projecting forwards underlying trends could interrupt the fertility trend. For example, perhaps as you increase per capita wealth you get decreased child mortality, increased costs of educating children, and so on, such that having less children becomes incentivised. But if wealth continues to grow then perhaps there becomes a decoupling between economic incentives and decisions about how many children to have (because marginal wealth becomes less important so costs in terms of marginal wealth matter much less in terms of their impact on utility).
Low fertility itself seems likely to lead to cultural changes. I feel pretty sceptical of the idea that we end up in a world with a radically shrinking population where we can carry forward the trends that are familiar from a world with a growing population.
AI could easily change the connection between population growth and innovation, in a way that means progress could continue absent population growth (and this progress will plausibly itself gives the tools necessary to resolve issues of population if we become worried).
AI might itself count as population in whatever sense matters.
Fertility technologies might change how easy it is to have children and might lead to a decoupling between parental choice and societal birthrate (for example, you could imagine a world of artificial wombs where the government is responsible for creating the next generation, and where children are co-raised by society; clearly there might be issues with such a world, but the fertility rate itself is not the issue).
I believe that evolutionary pressures tend to push genes responsible for fertility to evolve to fixity. The genes now responsible for fertility are increasingly those related to wanting children. We should expect these genes to evolve to fixity.
One might retreat to saying we should have a small credence in the relevant models but claiming this suffices to justify action. I’m skeptical that we should even have a sufficiently high (small) credence for this argument to go through. Projecting this population trend forwards 300 years through the radical change we should expect over that time seems to me not very informative.
I recognise that the people working on this are better informed than me on this topic, and that seems like a relevant consideration. But I worry this is… kinda EA nerdbait. Clever big picture thinking, backed by quantitative models, revealing a hidden catastrophe that others have not foreseen sufficiently clearly. I’m not saying such things never get at the truth, but I do think it’s reasonable to approach them with an initial attitude of skepticism, even in the face of the existence of enthusiastic proponents.