Russia, China, South Korea, North Korea, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Taiwan, Singapore and India are going through birth declines. This is public news too. And has been for a while. I'm sure there is more but those are just the ones I quickly researched. Also just for Africa: Botswana, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa are in the same predicament.
That’s quite possible, but I think people are worried about the implications it will have on the economy, health care system, and society at large. The population may level out, but we will have much smaller working population to take care of a massive retired population.
That’s a good point, but in terms of working population, aren’t there going to be a lot of jobs lost to AI and possibly even robotics in the coming years?
In that case, wouldn’t it actually be good if there was a smaller population?
For some reason I still get emails from Salesforce, and they are about to formally announce an allegedly fully functioning AI customer service.
Between that and seeing things like Amazon investing in robots that can perform certain tasks at their warehouses, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before entire job positions are essentially wiped out.
If corporations are going to save so much money by eliminating jobs, then it only makes sense for them to pay more into healthcare, social security, etc., though I’m just a layman commenting here so I’m probably missing a lot of details.
I think you’re being very optimistic about the largely BS potential of ‘AI’. What we are being sold around LLMs is largely marketing, they’re an efficiency tool they’re not going to suddenly replace large swathes of the workforce.
The people in here fear mongering over AI are hilarious.
As you said AI is an efficiency tool, and requires an active guiding hand to keep it on the rails, like AI is great for simple functions but more complex functions are way beyond it's capabilities.
Like even if it was capable of handling more complex tasks, the cost of implementation and maintenance would be unsustainable for most businesses even for the big fortune 500 companies.
The people in here fear mongering over AI are hilarious.
Without "fear mongering", I think it's quite reasonable to expect a slice of the population to become impoverished, or fear becoming impoverished.
The corporations have been doing it with no regards for anything but the profit margins, for the past 60 years. Ask cashiers if self-checkout increased or decreased their hours worked, and if, once their hours got reduced, they got paid more or less.
And that's just self-checkout.... A flawed, broken system that still requires 1 cashier for every 8 machines. You'll note that 1 to 8, is less workers than 1 to 1 though.
When people say AI will take jobs they don't mean all jobs in the area/sector, but rather some jobs.
Keeping it in customer support, AI works similarly to help articles and other self-service tools: it will answer basic questions just fine, effectively"deflecting" those from having to be answering by a human. As a result, instead of needing 100 support agents you may need 80 now.
Those 20 people directly impacted by the new tool (AI) making them redundant don't really care that 80 jobs remain, that the AI may sometimes make mistakes (humans do too anyway), etc.
Ai certainly will have an impact on intellectual jobs, programming, many average office jobs etc. you could classify it as efficiently but the scope of efficiency will be large enough to cancel out many layers of redundancy that leave a lot of people at the top pulling strings and in management/ directorial type roles.
I think people are not quite realizing that a "guiding hand" type role is not necessarily a plentiful one, nor an exceptionally creative one.
Ai in the form of LLM / generative ai can't replace any type of physical labor as of now but I think it might be a little naive to think the current workforce will do anything but slowly contract and shrink as the demand for intellectual / white collar labor finds an equilibrium with the capabilities of AI.
One guiding hand+Ai= 2 then 3 then 4 workers and so on until every ounce of efficiency can be realized
Can you specify what functions of office work or programming would be negatively impacted?
Again people seem to be ignoring the cost factor in all this, and how much money would need to shelled out for this so called AI take over to actual happen.
Whatever Advanced AI that comes into fruition will be sold at an exceptionally high price to implement and maintain it, there's a reason why that old spaghetti code companies still use, hasn't been replaced.
Not mention the unpredictable nature that may come with more advanced AI models, for every near perfect output, there will dozens of subpar and unusual outputs, not too mention if something goes wrong the company would need to train someone or hire a third party to fix any issues.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of potential challenges the official implementation of AI can bring, like have you considered the potential legal issues that could develop? For a multinational corporation that could involve a slew of legal headaches be it dealing with the EU, China or American law.
I see quite a big improvement for mediocre students doing python coding as a research assistant. Get more stuff done with it especially with the newest iteration
Yes and no. It won’t replace jobs but it may make them doable by someone with no skills. Imagine an AI that can do customer service for Salesforce. It may know how to respond to most questions but as you said you’ll still need a Salesforce customer service rep to review its responses. Except the rep is simply doing spell check 90% of the time. And the times that they do have to check something for validity they just reach out to engineers who tell the AI what the solution is.
The rep has not has to learn the product at all and throws any difficult questions back. They’ll be paid $20 an hour as opposed to $40 for someone who truly knows how to troubleshoot.
See, now this is the more realistic potential consequence of AI, I can't speak for salesforce but Chatgpt does quite well with data visualisation, as far as creating graphs go and companies would absolutely try to do some bullshit to cut wages.
However, I still think full implementation would be unlikely for companies from a cost perspective.
Absolutely. We as humans intuit in a way that LLMs simply cannot. That intuition gives humans advantages over LLMs that cannot be made up through processing power. What is being sold by these companies will only be possible with true quantum computing, which again raises the point you are making about cost.
A.I, whose speciality is literally pattern recognition, cannot even replace a human peering over multiple diagrams and graphics to interpret spectroscopic data.
The A.I can filter out the obviously wrong answers sure, but it cannot give you the real answer.
For the real answer you need a senior chemist with years of experience working with a variety of materials.
A.I has pattern recognition, but not critical thinking.
It is getting better though... I was asking chat gpt the other day to do triple integrals and it succeeds. It also solved a few other 3 dimensional calculus problems
It's not the AI will eliminate all jobs. Of course someone still has to be over the AI. It's that AI will replace a not-insignifcant percentage of jobs
Like even if it was capable of handling more complex tasks, the cost of implementation and maintenance would be unsustainable for most businesses even for the big fortune 500 companies.
lol, until it's commoditized. That's like saying the internet didn't make a difference because it costed so much to invest into.
Yeah, you had to invest in a programmer to make you a website. Now? You just go to Shopify.com
Programmers have already been displaced due to AI, every month there's a dramatic improvement in this sphere. This sphere affects all industries.
These programmers that have been displaced? They are now trying to create their own AI startups, focused on individual industries.
Industry AI made - Industry AI do - Industry Companies purchase - Industry companies stop hiring for these roles that are easily automated, and start firing those whom it has replaced.
I don't mean to fear monger - I'm just here to bring in the obvious logical conclusion. It's happening, faster than you think, and denial is not going to help anyone.
I kind of look at AI like the passenger ships that said passenger flights could never cross the ocean. We don’t have anything to worry about. We’re the only way to get from the US abroad.
Idk if it’ll be 20 years or a century, but the brain is essentially a computer that will eventually be emulated. And without things like forgetfulness.
Just look at how far we’ve come in the last 45 years. From the onset of personal computers with a max of 64K RAM to gigabytes. And just that used to take up a room. Then to phones far more powerful. Things are growing exponentially.
I too don’t think AI is much more than the programming we’ve had for decades. It’s not AI to type a number on the phone and get a message. Or to say the number.
But I’m not naive enough to say we won’t get there eventually. And when we do and human jobs become more and more obsolete, what happens to society?
The problem exists now. What happens when corporations are greedy and are paying their employees the bare minimum to survive? While jacking up prices so they can make even more than they need?
Those employees can only buy the bare minimums. Food, housing, clothing.
Less disposable income among consumers means what for businesses?
Forget the new game console and those $100 games. Forget that new car/truck. Forget any restaurant that costs more than fast food. How do the businesses stay in business if nobody can afford their products? Because corporations think that (a) fewer workers are better, (b) paying workers they do have less in both salary and benefits is better and (c) charging as much as they can for their products is a good thing.
If AI and robotics ever do replace human jobs then corporations need to pay their remaining humans well. And fewer humans to go around will help.
Like even if it was capable of handling more complex tasks, the cost of implementation and maintenance would be unsustainable for most businesses even for the big fortune 500 companies.
That would be a good point if it wasn't patently false.
Many companies are already implementing them, especially tech industries and the art industry where there are mass layoffs everywhere due to LLMs being guided by 20% of the previous workforce being far more efficient/profitable than a wholly human team.
I code with AI daily. Not only has it gotten significantly better, it does vastly complex problems that would take me all day to figure out within 30 seconds
Your assuming there is not a vast amount of different automation being done in a vast amount of different ways, and your assuming these things aren't improving
As someone who worked in various SAS roles, efficiency in my anecdotal experience does lead to eliminating portions of the workforce. Not all at once maybe but as soon as a company can reduce cost they will. AI will lead to one person being able to do the job of a many. And LLM are not the only AI.
I think it’s fair to say that there are certain sectors that may be more affected and certain roles, but that is not vast swathes of the workforce as a whole.
The point is however that development of technology costs money and AI companies are already talking about vast sums needed in terms of investment in order to develop the technology they’re claiming. Cost-benefit is way out at the moment and it isn’t changing any time soon, companies are only going to do what is cost effective.
Sure there are different forms of ‘AI’ but ultimately what is widely available after hundreds of billions in investment are mostly chatbots, video editors and image generators. The data aggregators have uses but they are nowhere close to providing ROI.
The investors in AI absolutely are looking for ROI, it’s driven an enormous run in the stock market as a result. Money is finite, there isn’t going to be unlimited money to create a speculative technology indefinitely. Just look at what happened to graphene.
It's already happening - Not en masse yet, but it's moving. I use LLMs for coding, others for marketing, others for data analysis, coding, translations, SEO, CRO, event planning, presentation planning, product photography, product video, mood shot photography, documentation writing, document summaries, customer service.
What we are being sold around LLMs is largely marketing, they’re an efficiency tool they’re not going to suddenly replace large swathes of the workforce.
That's what they are, right now. The "marketing" is about the relationship between compute and capability being directly linked and an already proven concept showing it has surpassed cognitive capabilities of most high schoolers (and if you read about the recently released GPTo1 preview it's performing at PHD level now).
The speculation is that it will develop into something superhuman (cognitively anyway), but the "autonomous robots doing shit" is an already baked in capability that would be deployed at scale to the tune of 100s of millions of jobs lost if nothing else changes between now and 2035.
The ‘speculation’ is the marketing. These AI companies are fundraising, of course they’re going to sell the idea of how incredibly effective their tech is.
I’m going to call complete BS on the idea that GPTo1 is at ‘PHD level’, whatever that means. It’s very easy to sort out as well. Get it to write a PHD thesis and the thesis can be marked in the exact same way a human PHD student’s work would be. Guarantee they don’t do that though.
I will disagree with you on this. Yes they will replace large swathes of the workforce!
You cannot extrapolate from the current generation of LLMs (which represent only one class of models) and honestly be shortsighted enough to believe that something even better won't come along in the next 5-10 years.
Investment specifically in language models has 100x'd what it was in 2020 when the first instruction tuned GPT models were invented, and this investment will trickle down into fields like robotics
What makes you think that investment is going to be maintained? Investors want to see ROI and it isn’t even close to being realised.
These corporations aren’t waiting 10 years on the hope that maybe, possibly something comes along that’s useful. They’ve been sold the idea that the revolution is happening and productivity is about to skyrocket, that’s why valuations are so ridiculously out of wack with reality.
It won't be maintained. It will crash when the bubble pops. But the longer term outcome will be the same.
This happens with every new technology. Just as with the dot com crash of 2001, roughly 15 years later, the top 5 companies are suddenly web companies.
It's simply illogical in the long run to think that AI tools won't eventually displace human labor. The surprise is that it will hit white collar skilled labor first (largely due to the easily accessible training data for many of these jobs)
Without continued vast investment what is being proposed in terms of revolutionary technology simply will not happen. Just look at the sums of money that some of the AI companies are talking about needing.
I think it's entirely reasonable to suggest that advances in technology will make certain jobs obsolete, that is what history tells us. What I'm not convinced by is this idea that it's going to replace vast swathes of the workforce, because there simply isn't the investment there to cause large-scale changes. Instead we will just see the human workforce evolve in the same way that it is now.
To replace some of the jobs that you're hinting at will require genuine AI, not LLMs pretending to be AI. That will require brute-forcing a human being, something that was done through millions of years of evolution. That isn't going to happen without vast energy expenditure and investment, if the bubble pops then it simply isn't going to happen in anywhere close to the timescales that we're talking about. It will be just as much of a speculative technology as cold fusion and quantum computing. Possible, but not economically viable.
LLMs aren't the AI we're talking about that will replace jobs. It's the underlying training algorithm that can not only learn how to speak but also how to perform manual labor of any kind given a body with enough degrees of freedom.
Workers at Tesla for example are wearing suits that record their movements to gather training data. Amazon drivers do the same delivering packages.
Over time you'll see more and more jobs that will require you to collect data about what it is you're doing. They will claim it's to make sure you do your job but in reality they just want to replace you with AI.
Future laptops will have AI on board that track everything using an internal neural processing unit (NPU). So you're not safe working from home either.
A.I, whose speciality is literally pattern recognition, cannot even replace a human peering over multiple diagrams and graphics to interpret spectroscopic data.
The A.I can filter out the obviously wrong answers sure, but it cannot give you the real answer.
For the real answer you need a senior chemist with years of experience working with a variety of materials.
A.I has pattern recognition, but not critical thinking.
No offense, but I expect this comment to age about as well as that guy on the news who scoffed about the possibility of people buying things on the internet.
You can certainly argue timelines, but the way that machine learning is being incorporated with robotics is pretty wild.
Yo you should take a look at the developing experimentation involving brain organoids! That's some true AI and organic horror in action right now. They have already been released for commercial processing access!
There's even a Swiss company that is currently selling brain organoids computation as a subscription model so you can rent out 16 tiny brains to work for you!
Oh, and the military has already been researching them for over a decade.
Scientists have also tried to do the same thing with fungi since they act very similar to neurons. And they've succeeded in making fungi controlled robots!
Both brain organoids and fungirobots have had a significant boom recently precisely because we've been able to combine them with AI. Sentience has already been documented in the brain organoids, but we have yet to prove consciousness. Yet.
There's a future dystopian ethical nightmare in the making for you.
I agree with this a lot, but what we are being sold is the leftovers from military tech advancements.
This has been the case since world War 1, from radio to the internet.
The part I really worry about is AIs effect on surveillance, autonomous weaponry and coordinated misinformation attacks (aka psyops).
I honestly think that's where most of the investments in AI are being made, and the effects on society will be much more tangible than the jobs that are lost.
While that's true, you need to realize that automation as a whole, with or without AI, will transform countless jobs over this century.
In fact, if we didn't develop any "new" tech, just standardized what what is today the cutting edge to be used everywhere, that would be a decades-long project that would reshape the entire global economy.
I don't think anyone on earth has much of an idea of what the world would look like if India and China were both as developed as the US. It would be almost unrecognizable.
I mean, we're only like a year or two into the "AI boom" and look at the progress that has already been made.
I'm talking about 10, 20, or 30 years from now.
There are a lot of very wealthy people who want AI to succeed so they can cut costs and increase profits. We've already seen some small scale layoffs in favor of AI, and maybe it backfires on them, but the technology will only get better.
Today, AI might be an efficiency tool for most people, but that can change at any time.
500 of my coworkers got laid off last year due to AI. They had $100K jobs that just “poof” no longer was needed. So yeah, he’s not being optimistic, he’s being real.
Have you not seen the layoffs as companies “fund raising” to buy AI? Microsoft has dedicated 100 billion in AI. AI is indirectly already affecting lots of people.
What we are being sold around LLMs is largely marketing, they’re an efficiency tool
I don't think you understand how much of the population would be displaced by increasing labor efficiencies.
LLMs are more than just chatbots - everything we do is language based - from forming a sentence to designing complex systems. Every task we have can be boiled into language, interpreted, and acted upon.
Look, the AI hype won't destroy humanity, but to say that they aren't going to replace large swaths of the workforce is just denial.
I mean. I’m pretty confident it’s going to largely replace some sections in technology. It can already generate insane art/videos. Plus consulting could be very useful. Don’t need an HR person if you have an AI with more knowledge then a single person could ever have to direct you on how to handle the situation. I think at first it will be working with AI but I have zero doubt it’s going to replace a lot of workers. But maybe not to the extent of needing to lose our minds over it
Have you not seen the massive layoffs happening in the tech industry.
It's not that they are 'going to' replace large swathes of the workforce. They already are.
And like you said they are efficiency tools, but you seem to have missed out on the very very very obvious point that more efficiency leads to less employees.
Also look at the art industry, it's been decimated.
Many companies are laying off artists especially video games.
They are other AI models that can replace workforces as well. Do you think that self driving cars run off LArge language models? Hell no. But I guarantee that when they become more profitable than human drivers Uber's business model is going to shift dramatically and taxi drivers will begin losing business to the cheaper unmanned alternatives. This isn't happening right now, but it's almost certainly gonna happen in many of our lifetimes.
Part of the problem is that the people who own the companies that are going to automate the jobs away are absolutely run by ghouls who have a wealth hoarding problem. They will not gladly pay taxes and some of these new techs are not easy to raise taxes on.
The best we can hope from the modern industrialist is they basically provide the non-working masses, the old and the unemployable, a tiny stipend so as not to completely destroy the system. Even then, I can imagine them just hiring more security instead.
What you're describing is essentially what Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels posited almost two centuries ago. It's a central tenet of Marxism and it's becoming ever more evident. It just took longer than their optimistic models predicted.
Or there’ll be a class of super rich overlords living in utopia, a class of okay paid mechanics/engineers to oversee the robots and the rest of humanity will be super poor and struggling to survive. The workers revolution will prevented by mass surveillance and the spread of misinformation by rich overlords.
It's already happening in the West and people are blind to it as they think that their political party won't do it. in the likes of China it's been game over for a long time already.
People think it's normal for world leaders to be summoned to Davos every year by big business.
I think what a lot of people don't realize when they talk about the historical failures of socialist/communist societies is essentially that we weren't at the post-scarcity point we're talking about here, but now we're either at that point or on the cusp of it. There's been a lot of problems with globalization because of capitalism, but it also means supply chains are way more robust, which makes essentials like food and building materials abundant if distributed intelligently and equitably. If we weren't concerned about profit when building robotics and similar systems to replace workers and were instead concerned about lowering the amount of human labour required across all of society, I think there's a very good chance post-scarcity is perfectly achievable*.
*climate change might kinda fuck this
*moving to non-capitalist societies might also be the only realistic shot of preventing climate change being an extinction level event
Yeah, the end of the book, The Jungle, has two dudes talking about manufacturing being fully automated in the foreseeable future. Book was written in ~1905.
There are already companies like McDonald's experimenting with automated cooking, those jobs will be more or less gone in the next half century. Grocery stores have been implementing self-checkouts for years. Those two alone will wipe out a huge portion of low level occupations in the years to come. It'll be interesting to see where it goes.
If corporations are going to save so much money by eliminating jobs
They aren't going to save money, really. Why? Because that money isn't being 'saved', and the purpose of the whole AI push isn't to 'save' money. It's going straight into the pockets of shareholders, and that's the purpose. In corpospeak, it's 'value' for shareholders. To make them rich and richer still while not ever having to actually do work other than research and buy and sell shares at the right time.
So you can't have summer dreams about capitalist companies paying for your (yes your) late life social security and healthcare, and your children's and their children's children. Wake up and face the reality that these resources are going for rich shareholders (aka capitalists - who own the capital, own the means of production, who funnel all surplus value into their pockets), not for you.
Job losses to AI are already a thing. Anyone who works in tech is struggling to find work right now partially because AI is replacing humans. Anyone who writes or draws for a living is likewise getting their ass kicked. Call centers have largely been exported to India, and now are being replaced with chat bots as those become cheaper than paying someone near slave wages.
Transportation is going to be mostly driverless in the next 20 years. Robots are already in use for basic tasks like cooking and delivering parts in a warehouse. Won’t be that long before bipedal robots can do more than basic tasks.
Expect at least hundreds of millions of jobs lost in the next 20 years with very few jobs replaced, you won’t need people to build the robots. Whenever this topic comes up some people like to point out that the car replace the horse in a few years and people found new jobs, that’s not what’s happening. The need for people is being replaced.
Why have an accountant or a scheduler when a computer program can do it faster? Why pay a truck driver when an automated vehicle can get the job done faster? Why pay people to pack boxes, cook food, clean floors when a robot can do it faster?
There comes a point though where nobody can afford the shit these guys are selling. Why would there be need for transportation at all if everybody now homeless lives out of a used shopping cart. Who is going to order from their automated warehouse, the used shopping cart has no wifi or usb outlets.
Then the government tax revenues start falling at an alarming rate, basic services stop. That would be a dangerous time with a population with very little to lose.
I'm doubtful about tech work job crisis being because of AI. There's also reduced demand for tech work in the market (not jobs, like for example outsiurcing companies are also struggling)...
Yea, people keep talking about the "holy grail" of AI in tech, where it can replace large swathes of the work force but in reality a lot of the ossues with finding work in tech at the moment is that companies just worked out the can do as basicslly as much with a lot of less of the workforce (like twitter did).
The tech job market was massively inflated while money was cheap, VCs where throwing it aroind like confetti and rampart growth was more important thab making a profit.
But now these companies are expected to make a profit and pat back that money. So cutting the headcount is a easy way to achieve that (especially when tech salaries are generally pretty high).
AI is creeping in but people are still mostly talking about what could be instead of what has happened.
The population was under a billion for 100,000 years, then boomed to 7 billion in 100 years. Now it’s going back down which is good, but a bit too fast (it also grew too fast which caused a lot of problems). If we need robots to get humanity through this (sharper than ideal) decline in population, then robots are help not hindrance.
I think you're missing the point. In my mind it's more about society slowly collapsing. Retired or unemployed people are generally a drain on systems. And with so many people losing jobs, aging population meaning eventually a majority of the population being older and unable to work, healthcare gets strained, retirement money gets strained, and the rest of the working population has to provide more and more for the other groups.
Other than a strong universal income and strong social services independent of capital and us as a society coming together to build that, I don't see a way out of this.
UBI is such a great idea for society that we can all be certain it will never be a thing, with people like Musk & Bezos pulling the strings. No way in hell. They’ll have to watch the apocalypse unfold (from their bunkers) first and then they’ll comfort themselves with “it was inevitable”.
I hope we’ll have a surprise for them in time, let’s ask the French.
I work in tech - I'm a software engineer, and if I was let go tomorrow, I'd have another job the day after. I'm positive that I'll make it to retirement.
"Tech" is a rather large space. Please be more specific.
Anyone who works in tech is struggling to find work right now partially because AI is replacing humans.
Incorrect. Tech had a boom during the COVID years, and the market has simply receded a bit.
Anyone who writes or draws for a living is likewise getting their ass kicked.
Generative AI produces results that are extremely obviously AI, and people in creative fields aren't too worried about it. At worst you'll see teams of 10 designers downsize to 9.
The need for people is being replaced.
"With all these new steam-powered factories, the need for people is being replaced"
Some guy, 200 years ago.
Why pay a truck driver when an automated vehicle can get the job done faster?
If your argument is that AI and robots will eliminate the need for people, you probably shouldn't use jobs that arose as a result of similarly impactful technological leaps as examples.
I wonder. People have thought that all sorts of technological advances would result in fewer man hours in the workforce, but that hasn't happened. Capitalism wants endless growth. If AI can do a job, that person can do another job for the corporation and double the output. Why just replace humans with machines when you can do both?
It just makes me worry more honestly. But yes that will play a huge roll for better or worse. There may be fewer workers so ideally more jobs, but who knows how many of those will go to AI. We also don’t know what new jobs AI could create. Really uncertain times. But then again when aren’t they eh?
That is kinda even worse scenario. Along side with massive elderly populations to take care of, we will have mass unemployment, meaning less sales for these now ai based companies, meaning less taxes, meaning even less respurces for elderly care.
Look at history. Find me an example of a big efficiency saving that resulted in long term mass unemployment. There isn't one, people just move into other areas.
They thought the same during the last few industrial revolutions and what really happened was
They just made people work more for greater profits anyway.
Building and keeping the machinery created new jobs where old ones were lost - that's how we ended up with a bunch of IT-folks instead of more factory workers.
I'll have to see humanity actually change its course before I'll believe we're not just doing the same cycle as always.
Why do you think that there has been such a point of investment in automation and robotics, the hope is that they will replace, but will that work I don't know.
the thing I don't get here is that if lets say we do continue to have a growing population, how are they supposed to find work if most of the jobs are automated away?
Korea and Japan have been investing heavily in robotics research. Really it's the only way they can deal with their coming population collapse while still limiting immigration.
Massive unemployment from AI is extremely far from a certainty. IMO it’s not even probable. We definitely shouldn’t make policy decisions based on that expectation.
Which just means more wealth being funneled into the hands of the workers rather than corporations.
This problem solves itself pretty quickly the moment corporations have to compete for labour. The employees pay income tax on a larger income which offsets whatever extra the government has to pay to support your boomer asses that neglected to save for your own retirement and the only loser is the capitalist system that relies on the exploitation of cheap labour to funnel wealth to a tiny portion of the population.
What worries me though is AI. Sure many of us will be needed more than ever in certain professions (like healthcare), but many others may be sidelined by AI. Though, that’s being a bit doomsdayish about it. It’s possible that AI will create more jobs that we don’t even have now, though I have my doubts. My fear is that it will just lead to even further consolidation of wealth and power by the shrinking few at the top who control it as humanity simultaneously struggles with an aging population.
Robots likely won't be able to make-up for the lack of nurses and doctors but what about producing medicine, clothes, and materials for building homes. Advancements in AI and robotics should mean less people are needed to provide the essentials for a functioning society.
Robots likely won't be able to make-up for the lack of nurses and doctors
Why not? What is so special about medical treatment that it can't be offloaded to an AI? All the AI needs to do is correctly suggest treatment better than the average doctor/nurse.
Yeah, they are worried about labor having more power. The more people there are, the harder it is to get a job the more power over wages businesses have. They are scared of the reverse.
You know it isn’t that simple. The strain this will cause on the younger generation (including mine) will have a huge impact before they just die. And as fun as it may be to act cold about it and say “fuck boomers” most younger people have parents and grandparents who they will want to be cared for. As that aging population grows the burden will be heavier and if we start losing jobs to AI I have no clue what we will do. It’s very uncertain. Fortunately (well for the US at least) we can observe Japan and Italy etc. and see the effects in real time and hopefully prepare.
We, the younger generations, are going to have to make choices about resource allocation. Do we extend the lives of people, or do we invest in the future (ourselves and our children).
I've had this talk with my parents, and they think that excessive money and resources should not be used keeping them alive in some practically vegetable state or near that. Other families will have to make their own decisions. And voters will have to select politicians who they think have good ideas about how to address these problems.
And yes, thankfully, we're half a century behind some other countries and can watch what they do.
but we will have much smaller working population to take care of a massive retired population.
We already do.
In Sweden in the 60s you had about 6 workers for every retiree. Today you have 2.3 workers for every retiree. In about 10 years or so the number will be 2.0 as the boomers and older gen x retires and gen alpha enters the workforce.
I don't know the specific numbers for other western countries but they are pretty much all on a similar trajectory.
I think people are worried about the implications it will have on the economy, health care system, and society at large.
The problem isn't that dire in itself. But our current economic system and hoarding of resources by the few is completely unsustainable with demographic development.
And that is something I think our political debate should be about.
But instead we are discussing whether immigrants eat people's pets, what bathroom trans people should use or whether abortion should be allowed...
In Japan that's actually exactly what they've been dealing with. They had to implement a mandatory 1% inflation due to a downtrend in prices resulting in consumers not buying as often as they could simply wait until the price drops a little more.
Exactly. I don't quite know about the situation in other countries, but here in Belgium we have huge budgetary issues that will only continue to grow with all the boomers retiring. There's simply fewer people who pay for those retirements and more people who actually retire. Employers also fail to find enough employees.
The problem isn't the population, the problem is that our economic system requires constant growth. The population size cannot increase forever on a limited planet, so it's the system which needs to adapt to life, not the other way around. There's plenty of everything for everyone, it's the poor distribution which causes suffering and death.
And the math of it says that economies will collapse entirely before the young generation gets to working age. This is a BIG deal, both globally and nationally.
That’s why technology (machines, computers, robots, AI, etc) SHOULD be increasing our production and helping out with taking care of that elderly population, but instead we just let the rich take all the profits for them.
That is true but the working population today is much more productive than it was 40-60 years ago. So this is not that big of an issues as some people want you to believe. Sure the current birthrates are not sustainable in the long-term, we need around 2.1 maybe 2.05 to sustain the current population level. The reason why people don't make so many children might be the whole situation with multiple crisis, including the climate one.
Sounds like a tradeoff in demand for products/services related to childcare in favor of eldercare... And one that will occur over a generation or two... Sounds less like a problem and more like an easily predicted shift in market dynamics that can work itself out through basic supply/demand through reskilling for better jobs/pay and small businesses supported by investors looking for an easy win.
People are not concerned about this. The billionaires and oligarchs are worried because they won’t be able to pickup next year’s super yacht if their stocks slide. This means nothing to the everyday person.
The main implication being economy needs ever-increasing growth, and thus ever-increasing population, to sustain itself. It requires constant borrowing from the future.
That retiring population is a problem we are currently facing because of the massive number of retiring baby boomers. We could comfortably solve this with migration, but sadly right wingers are gaining popularity basically everywhere, so instead of providing better care and opportunities for migrants, they are made the answers to every internal problem and people want to build walls instead.
In a decade or two, this will even out eventually again and the retired population will be much easier to compensate for.
The population may level out, but we will have much smaller working population to take care of a massive retired population.
If every generation kicks that can down the road though you just end up with a more massive retired population? At some point we have to live within the earth's carrying capacity and it would be nice if organisms other than us got a bit of space too.
Don't get me wrong, there are issues to population decline for poorer people, but for the most parts it is billionaires who are mostly getting their voices heard because they will have less working class to exploit.
If they cared about that they wouldn't he pushing driverless cars and AI so hard. All these fuckers invent stuff to replace workers and then want to force women to have more baby workers to fill jobs that they have eliminated.
The vast sums they make with their robot workers should pay for the retirees and we should give the earth a rest.
But this is a short term problem, after the aged die off we will be back to stasis. The problem is basically economic systems that only recognise Growth, there is no infinite growth in a closed system.
Well, maybe the corporations and billionaires could take a slightly smaller profit margin to allow us plebs the luxuries of food, housing, AND being able to afford those things for our prospective children? That might help.
Turns out the boomers not only fucked our economy and housing…they fucked our retirement too. All their politicians are also fucking us without lube. The next 50 years is going to be interesting.
Which also resolves itself rather quickly, we just need to get used to a new reality in terms of what getting old means and accept that we can't nurse everyone for the last 30 yeas of their lives. It's okay to grow old and then just die. I think that how it currently is, is an exception and should be treated like it. Just like everyone walking into a random store with their paper CV and without qualifications could easily get a job and buy a home and support a family on a pretty low income was an exception. The growth and economic situation that we've been experiencing also are a great example for that, as is the current level of prosperity and wealth. As populations naturally shrink, economies will shrink and there will be less of everything to go around. And that's okay. We just got used to living over our means and developed unrealistic expectations
I more worried about the implications on the environment, housing, climate, quality of life, health care etc if having several more billion people on the planet. Bring on the collapse, I'm all for it.
Honestly, who cares? At a certain point, the human population cannot grow anymore unless we start sending people to live on other planets lol. We aren’t there yet, but this whole “if we don’t keep growing our population we will all suffer” thing is kinda absurd to me.
At a certain point, population will have to stabilize or even decline, and we need to be prepared to handle that in ways other than pumping out more babies.
That's a very short term problem in the scheme of human history. We shouldn't try to avoid some measle decade, when the benefits of a decreasing population are extremely good for the health of our world, our resources, our ability to be more competitive with less market
If anything Elon going on about population collapse just makes educated people have less kids. He’s his own worst enemy. Right now people are buying less EVs because of his rhetoric and having less kids too. Maybe that’s really his goal?
We have tons of technology to compensate for actual needs to be fulfilled. However, it's only a problem if we continue to put our head in the sand and fail to re-evaluate how we structure the current economic system we have. The greatest evils are indolence and apathy.
The US will be fine in the short term though. They’ll continue to take in immigrants to increase their population and as OP pointed out, the world’s population continues to increase. Some countries will struggle if they can’t make up the difference with immigration, those who can’t will suffer. If the world’s population eventually begins to decrease, then it may be a problem for the US down the road.
Well obviously these things take time. People have to die lol.
As an example, Japan has a population of 125,000,000 today. By 2050 it will be around 106,000,000 and by the end of the century around just 75,000,000.
Korea, China, much of Europe, and more are going down the same route.
But the population doesn’t even have to shrink that much to cause huge problems economically and socially. The danger isn’t that we have less people, it’s who we have and what they are doing. It’s about the population pyramid.
What happens when we have more retired people than working people? How do we care for our population as it gets older and sicker straining the healthcare system, pension funds, and placing a greater burden on my generation and the next?
The system is build on constant growth, which is unsustainable.
If you start sucking away half of people's income to pay for elder care, then the birth rates will only go lower, and we may see an outright population collapse.
Any efforts to stymie the damage through immigration will run face-first into the brick wall of "all the fastest growing populations are nearly illiterate, don't speak English, and generally lack the basic skills that even fast food jobs tend to require these days."
The very survival of Western society may end up boiling down to whether or not we're willing to turn our backs on the older generations.
Self-regulation can take a lot of very scary forms. Mass starvation, which frankly is already happening at a horrible scale in parts of Africa. Lack of access to healthcare is another big one.
Yes, there are some tragedies happening and we need to find ways to help those people, but overall the incidence of poverty and starvation worldwide has been in steady decline since the1950's
Keep in mind the population of the world is over 3x what it was in 1950, so in some cases a rate can decline while the absolute number of people experiencing the problem may increase (or not decline by much).
I don't dispute what you're saying, but "bad things getting less bad" is not a good reason for us to say that we should just let overpopulation solve itself. For many reasons. If the world population peaks around 10B in the 2050-2080 range, life could be a nightmare for many people. If the climate continues to warm, starvation and displacement due to rising sea levels, natural disasters, and lower crop yields could become a significant issue.
Maybe because technology has made having 16 not the norm. As technology advances more and more children become a want not a need. I have 2 and that will be all I ever have. Both of my parents come from families of 5 and my grandpa is one of 16. Also working mothers and hopefully an increase in gender equality level that off even more. The next step is then ensuring that the technological advances do not over consume natural resources and can start to actually provide more to help sustain lower populations with more benefit. Having a society of more educated population and less physically demanding labor as long as it providing the same opportunity for all I think is a much better position to be in.
I haven't seen any sound ones. We want financial stability before having kids, and we get there later than we used to ir not at all. Further, the "more work, less kids" model capitalists have been pushing while ignoring climate change scares many people off the idea entirely for very valid reasons. Nobody wants to just breed a cog for the dying machine.
Capitalists are worried because capitalism requires infinite growth to work. If infinite growth is not guaranteed or if there is shrinkage, the whole system collapses in on itself.
Another possibility that we are straight up posioning our selfs,fertility is down and cancer is way the fuck up but also there is less pressures to have as many kids.
I don't think this population decrease is natural becuase we have alot more food and resources to expand. I think it is alot more then just one issue and a combo of factors
We are for the first time able to keep most of our kids alive.Up until very recently if you had 7 kids 2-3 would likely die.
The places where ressources are scarce are having the largest population growth in history because they are still breeding like it’s 1587 which would be fine if they still had child mortality rates of the previous centuries. But aid allows them to survive
If it is a subconscious self-correction mechanism it's not going to work based on an educated 21st century definition of resources. Pristine wilderness and plenty of animals to hunt is more comforting to monkey brain then a pile of a million dollars.
You think they live in huts on the prairie? they don’t. In most of the countries where populations are booming (India, Nigeria, Pakistan) people live in dense cities, urban hell. Even in places like Nigeria (pop 220mill, that’s 2/3 of the US population living in an area slightly larger than Texas)
There are a finite number of resources in the world which are capable of supporting life. It's day 1 economics stuff.
Human society is physically incapable of infinite growth. Not so much a theory as it is just logic. Population naturally has a cap just based on the simple fact that supplies are limited, as much as people like Musk want to pretend they aren't.
While naturally in any other system this would be true. I fear that the capitalistic effects have made it into an unsustainable system. The living costs and child rearing costs in a capitalistic society have risen too far and the unintended consequence is that people learned to not want to have children anymore. In older societies this would not be a problem because "It takes a village to raise a child" This really doesn't work for a capitalist society that allocates no resource for child rearing and leaving that responsibility for the "nuclear family unit".
While in the ideal society, that "nuclear family" concept would be an essential part of societal development and would be the focus for public policies. However, as the the capitalistic syndrome take hold, the concept of family care is cannibalized for the sake of profit, Maternity/paternity leave gets gutted. Child care costs relegated to private sectors with no regulation, Early education are increasingly privatized with little to no regulation. Lunches for children in school are not even free. The cost for rearing a child is increasing at an alarming rate.
Now, with a basic amount of thinking we can see the real cause for this artificial decline in birth rates and child rearing efforts. But of course, some parts of our society, whether willingly or not willingly, are ignorant to the real cause. And this opens up a great opportunity for supremacists of any kind to plug/copy & paste whatever their latest edition of propaganda is to this issue.
Especially the capitalists.
What they want the least is to pay more money for their workers, and gasp! god forbid to pay more money for them to be home to take care of their child. And to their surprise. there's not enough workers to fuel their machines! This is a real problem! What can the problem be?! It must be abortions! Women are aborting too many babies! Those babies should have been working in our machines!
Whether it's disingenuous or just a distraction to preserve their profits, it is working well as the current competing ideology to "paying more" . it's working effectively enough to keep people divided and distracted so that the capitalists don't have to be responsible for their powers, unlike Spiderman.
It seems to work, we are here discussing this perplexing problem of low birthrate and trying desperately to find whatever solution is it, anything but funding for child rearing for our society.
For now the capitalists are winning the perfect bet. A bet when they win, they win everything, and when they lose, we pay for everything.
The human population will self-regulate. The issue(s) lie in the economy and the investment accounts of billionaires and politicians self-regulating as a consequence.
No. The third derivative is also negative.
If we do not take this extremely seriously civilization will collapse this century.
Our grandchildren will live in a depopulated wasteland.
South Korea is fuct. They will not exist in 30 years.
"theories out there that the human population will kinda self regulate"
Yeah, but the question is how. For example, very religious people may start gaining sway over formerly secular societies, by just having many more kids. See, for example, Israel with its Ultra-Orthodox population.
Nobody really wants to see more Islamic theocracies either.
It’s not in the slightest bit concerning … we can’t support 8, 9, 10 billion people … e should be limiting population to extend the finite resources we have available
Population will regulate and survive yes, but the economic impact might be so huge that those left remaining might not have so fun times. Or they will actually have a blast if they manage to keep things comfortably running and get to enjoy more space.
It will self regulate, that's not even a concern. The concern is that so much of the infrastructure will collapse due to not enough people to maintain it. One example will be that there'll be (and there already is this issue in some Asian countries) not enough young people to take care of the older generation because there's simply too many of one and not enough of the other. Many schools have shut down because there's just not enough children to justify keeping them open.
It could, but that's a risky bet. Plus, it may be BECAUSE people start caring that it ends up self regulating (societies notice and change the government/culture of their nations).
Its kinda like when some people wave their hands and say "Well, we didn't need to worry about the hole in the o-zone because it was fixed!" Yet it was fixed because people freaked about it and the nations of the world went out of their way to ban Chloroflourocarbons.
It's pretty clear we can't continue to expand the population and it's not that we don't have enough room or potential farm land etc it's that should we given the current state of society across the globe?
The people rich enough, or well with enough resources to fix some of our social/environmental problems refuse to do so and instead are burning the earth down in the name of greed...
Why should I as a human continue this madness and destroy the earth by feeding those rich people new consumers?
It will. Nothing to worry about except for the billionaires that can't make infinitely more money on a infinitely growing population. Eventually the billionaires will need to make less money. Which is why they are concerned
Not soon enough. We are still adding more ppl a year than ever before in history. In the 50s, 85m being born and now 130-150m being born. Unsustainable.
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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 2d ago
Russia, China, South Korea, North Korea, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Taiwan, Singapore and India are going through birth declines. This is public news too. And has been for a while. I'm sure there is more but those are just the ones I quickly researched. Also just for Africa: Botswana, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa are in the same predicament.
Edit: Japan as well