Re:The Global Fertility Crash
by jelliclesfarm on Friday November 01, 2019 @06:01AM
(#21417351)
I think AI would change this. We will eventually have ‘artificial persons’. I can guarantee that once global population starts to taper off, the decline in population would make us a less interesting and dynamic species.
Complex systems need a large number of people. We will have to create some version of the missing billions. Perhaps robots or AI personalities or mash ups.
As a casual example..a personal story: I recently had this revelation when I met someone from a small western country with a population of about 5 million. This person was incredibly smart, highly accomplished, well travelled and older than me.
But I still found that he was somewhat oblivious to what I call ‘nuances of human nature’. I have never considered myself a particularly perceptive person or highly tuned into human personality, but because of the accident of birth in a country that has over 1.3 billion people now, I was exposed to a wide circle of different people..and even though this other person was far ahead of me in every way, his exposure was limited to a smaller cocktail of human natures.
Did it make me smarter? I don’t know. But I sure was exposed to so much variety that I could at least detect differences and variabilities..even minute ones. I think my view of life is richer, more colorful and interesting.
To bring up another example: a larger population is like being a native speaker of Cantonese with its eight tones vs being someone who can speak a language with exactly 100 words. Entirely different worlds and one is vastly richer than the other.
So to combat this, we just have to create artificial people and virtual world when we finally achieve the carrying capacity of about one billion people(the population of the planet in 1600)
Complex systems need a large number of people. We will have to create some version of the missing billions. Perhaps robots or AI personalities or mash ups.
As a casual example..a personal story: I recently had this revelation when I met someone from a small western country with a population of about 5 million. This person was incredibly smart, highly accomplished, well travelled and older than me.
But I still found that he was somewhat oblivious to what I call ‘nuances of human nature’. I have never considered myself a particularly perceptive person or highly tuned into human personality, but because of the accident of birth in a country that has over 1.3 billion people now, I was exposed to a wide circle of different people..and even though this other person was far ahead of me in every way, his exposure was limited to a smaller cocktail of human natures.
Did it make me smarter? I don’t know. But I sure was exposed to so much variety that I could at least detect differences and variabilities..even minute ones. I think my view of life is richer, more colorful and interesting.
To bring up another example: a larger population is like being a native speaker of Cantonese with its eight tones vs being someone who can speak a language with exactly 100 words. Entirely different worlds and one is vastly richer than the other.
So to combat this, we just have to create artificial people and virtual world when we finally achieve the carrying capacity of about one billion people(the population of the planet in 1600)