Still, it's definitely worth it to continue research along these lines and plenty of other ridiculous lines. Even if they don't come to anything. We have such a tremendous abundance of intellectual capacity as a species. If we dedicate all our intellectual capacity to solving the low-hanging fruits in healthcare (or to increasing the click-through rates of ads, among other things) it would require us to allocate many people to no task at all, just because there was already an excessive abundance of resources already dedicated to the tasks.
It's a little fun and encouraging to think about, but the more people there are alive, the more important unimportant things become, because with more people there are more problem solvers.
I really appreciate this perspective. More people is fundamentally a good thing. Some would vehemently argue otherwise, but I believe the problems they bring up come down to a calculus that depends first on other things, like profit vs. environmental stewardship, etc., not primarily the birth and death rates.
Seriously, until we don't reach 100% of well-fed educated people, demographic growth will be more of a problem than a solution to anything.
- What do you consider a bullshit job?
- What level of education would you prefer everyone in the world have? Basic literacy, high school, college?
- What problem will be solved once everyone is educated (at the aforementioned level)?
The level education people should have is the one that allows them to become useful problem solvers. Depends on character and domain of problems considered.
I am not saying reaching 100% education will solve a problem. I am saying that before that point, population growth will feed more problem making than problem solving
In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, because of "bullshit jobs": workers who pretend that their role isn't as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. Graeber contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
- flunkies, who serve to make others feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
- goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations
- duct tapers, who fix problems that shouldn't exist, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code
- box tickers, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
- taskmasters, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
Graeber argues that these jobs are largely in the private sector despite the idea that market competition would root out such inefficiencies. In companies, he credits "managerial feudalism" as employers need underlings to feel important.
In society, he credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labor of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless. Graeber describes this cycle as "profound psychological violence".
Graeber holds that work as a source of virtue is a recent idea, that work was disdained by the aristocracy in classical times, but inverted as virtuous through radical philosophers like John Locke. The Puritan idea of virtue through suffering justified the toil of the working classes as noble.
As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure
If we're allocating a portion of production to all people, but have finite energy resources (e.g. current state), then there exists a range of population (and demographics therein) where this is practical.
In that in non-communist allocation systems, if one does not produce value (somewhat arbitrarily defined, but usually semi-attached to actual value) then neither one nor one's children eat.
UBI fundamentally changes this, in that hypothetically people could do nothing (and reproduce), thereby eventually exhausting available energy resources.
If your point is that everything has an absolute carrying capacity, then agreed. But here I'm assuming UBI is implemented before resource scarcity is truly eliminated by technological progress.
Thereby leaving the equation in an "It balances, but only if these percentage of people work, age demographics don't get too out of whack, and population growth falls in range" state.
"Fundamentally," perhaps. In all other cases, not so much. Having more people in my house or even in the city where I live would be a bad thing.
Isn't the question whether or not we can affect the odds here? If we can increase it to 75:25 at this plateau, then we also are also increasing the age longest lived of these people are predicted to live for immensely, and the last person of this example group of 1 million starting at age 105 you give would expect that last person to die not 10 years later (at 115) on average as with a 50:50 mortality, but around 48 years later, at 153. Every slight change in that mortality rate affects that long tail quite a bit, relatively speaking.
I for one believe that might have an immense effect on how people view their health and longevity. If people believe that taking care of themselves might give them many decades of additional life instead of a few years, that could lead to a wider shift.
In [2]: def reduce_pop(pop, prob):
...: if pop <= 1:
...: return 1
...: return 1 + reduce_pop(pop * prob, prob)
...:
In [3]: reduce_pop(1000000, 0.5)
Out[3]: 21
Please correct me if my math is wrong or if I'm miss interpreting how to calculate this.
I did have the wrong number of years for 50:50 though, it's not the 10 I stated. This problem is the reverse of binary doubling, and I knew 10 bits are a needed to get to 1024, and my brain just sealed out thousand and million. It takes 20 bits to get to over 1 million, so 20 halvings from exactly 1 million should get you to less than 1.
Vastly more people die each year of age-related causes than obesity, heart disease, and diabetes combined. It's an unrecognized holocaust inevitably terminating the potential of all humans on this planet, and it is going entirely unrecognized because if you work on solving aging you are a crackpot, whereas "obviously" obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are more deserving of our time and grant money.
I would agree with you if the common experience of old age was positive and healthy; but it seems to me that the priority for research should be to alleviate the problems and suffering we will all face should we be lucky enough to get there, especially now that the majority of people are lucky.
Perhaps healthier older people will live a lot longer as well?
It’s not positive and healthy because you age. You fix aging and people will have a physical age of 25 forever and do all sorts of fun things with perfectly capable bodies. That’s the point.
I don’t know what sort of counter factual world you are describing where we have “alleviated aging” but people still age...
My daughter would say "ew"
No, it's not. Cancer is just a form of malfunction of cellular machinery, and as such, can certainly be mitigated or cured at some point. There's already lots of promising research in eliminating it, such as by re-purposing viruses to program the body's immune system to recognize and eliminate the cancerous cells.
It might require artificial intervention, but I believe cancer will be mostly eliminated before too long. And artificial intervention shouldn't be a problem: we have to do this on all our other machines too, we just call it "repair" or "maintenance". There's no such thing as a machine which never needs maintenance from an external source.
Oncology + new genetic tools (just sequencing, not even CRISPR/CAS9) is making amazing progress.
Things that would have been a death sentence 20 years ago now have reasonably hopeful mortality rates.
The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.