Wouldn’t it be better for the post-AI earth to have fewer people?
I dunno. I don’t want Children of Men or anything. This is an issue that bears scrutiny but also count me as suspicious of those who want to use this to drive a return to a more patriarchal society where women’s opportunities are circumscribed by an obligation to reproduce at a mandated level.
Also an interesting note for the current moment from the article:
“… To maintain a stable population — no growth, no decline — the average woman needs to have roughly 2.1 kids. In the U.S., total fertility began dipping below that 2.1 threshold decades ago, and then after 2007, fertility rates
plunged rapidly to a record low of roughly 1.6.
… There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth.
"The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist.
… But many countries,
including China, Italy, Japan, Russia and South Korea, have already seen populations begin to shrink.
China alone is expected to lose more than 780 million people, more than half its population, by 2100.
… A
2023 study by the Brookings Institution, meanwhile, found that
without significant numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. in the future, the country's population would plunge by more than 100 million people this century.…”