"i assure you". Provides no tangible evidence. Ecosystem breakdown is much more of a tangible societal risk than whatever those infantile LLMs are at this time. Like it or not (unless you are a bot), you need to eat, have access to clean water. Not a huge challenge right now if you live in the western world. Not so much already in other areas on this planet. I smell hints of technosolutionism in your answer and I don't like it a bit. We won't SaaS our way out of the ecological mess we're creating.

Please try to answer this: how did poverty and hunger reduce so dramatically in the last 100 years.

I'm reasonably extrapolating much like most economists would.

Also here's my other bet: even the WORST areas in the planet would see prosperity and better living conditions in 100 years compared to today. That's how it has always been, unless you come up with tail risks due to climate change which I don't personally buy.

Try extrapolating like climate scientists do.

Trad econ has as much predictive value as fantasy football.

I won’t extrapolate toy models that predict end of human civilisation due to tail risks. None of that is going to happen.

even if the tail risks do happen like ice sheet melting, it is over 1000s of years before it truly makes an impact. And even then the impact is minor in grand scale of things.

You could always find some looney model that predicts the world would end if we don’t control emission. Agree to disagree on that.

The only "looney model" is thinking "AI" poses any existential risk while ignoring the coupling of food production to heavily threatened biophysical systems.

[delayed]

1) Development of industrial processes for the production of ammonium sulphate and other synthetic fertilizers;

2) Development of internal combustion motors and their application in agricolture.

> 2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc

Overall maybe, even if 2 or 3 C more in the average temperature can be hard to bear in summer in some places or require much more energy to cool us, which means that we won't be as adapted to those places as we used to be.

In some spots of the world, tough luck. I would like to see (actually I don't) what happens if the sea rises a few meters. Will the people in the north east of Italy and China build coastal dams and raise river beds or let those regions go underwater and migrate somewhere else? There are certainly some areas of the USA that will go underwater too (Florida? NYC?)

And what if the Gulf Stream really stops and Western Europe gets the same climate of the regions of the USA and Canada at the same latitudes?

I’d like to compare the standard of living for the median person in your hypothetical situation where sea level rises.

In 100 years our technology would be so advanced that people would be much much more prosperous. Ok sure a few cities drown but people move and adapt.

I still hold ground on the fact that people will be more prosperous in 100 years with sea level rising - in the sense that a person would prefer to live then rather than now

[delayed]

Yes, but I guess that some people could pedantically argue that a human kind of one billion people living only in a few acceptable areas will have a median standard of living much higher than a human kind of eight billion people spread all around the world. After all, all those millions of displaced people are going to die of old age and their pains will go away with them /s Sarcasm apart, we don't really care much about the pains of the people who were displaced millenia or centuries ago. That's history.

The point of view changes according to the sets of people one belongs to while still being alive, eg living in a warming Denver or attempting not drown in NYC?

Yikes, might need to send you back to the books to see what happens when a large number of people are displaced all at once.

Look at America/Trump right now with economic immigrants alone. This caused half the country to go "Yea, locking up people in cages and letting losers with guns shoot whoever they want while supporting an authoritarian regime is perfectly ok". Just what do you think it's going to look like when the numbers are 10x that from inside the country alone (a huge amount of the population lives close to the ocean).

Advanced technology has nothing to do with wealth equality and with the costs of making said technology it may be even further reverse correlated in the future.

I know this is HN, but this is such a technocratic view. “Technology is both our savior and the only risk we need to be concerned with.” Even the AI risk you outlined is exceptionally narrow. Even without AI, we still face significant nuclear technological risk.

Per Claude, if you use Chinese prices for the metals (especially tungsten) Simon still wins from 1980-2026. If you use US prices, Ehrlich wins. Copper is the only metal with a market price above the 1980 value, but tungsten is export-controlled by China, so much more expensive in the West.

I think directionally Ehrlich was quite wrong, given that he expected widespread and crippling shortages before 2000, with a much lower population than we actually have, and there's no sign of such shortages being inevitable. In particular, we are opening new extractable oil sources and switching to solar fast enough that pure market actions seem on track to where we'll be leaving cheap oil in the ground in a couple decades absent AI X-risk, and this is after we politically killed the previous tech that would have produced this result earlier: widespread fission.

> I know this is HN, but this is such a technocratic view.

I really don't understand how after these last 30 years were the Internet freedom dream became as well an en-masse surveillance and mind-control nightmare, there are still people with such a blind faith in technology and technologists that will save us all. I mean, in general I think we move 1.3 steps forward and 1 step back, so we do advance, but if we were just a bit let careless we could move the whole 1.3 steps forward without going back.

"we have more people, more intelligence and more technology created thereby."

If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution? I'm not even a believer that general intelligence brings out more technology creation, we've had rising university attendance in the west since the 70s but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century.

I do agree that some of the overpopulation rhetoric is anti-human but at the same time there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries like Netherlands/South Korea/Israel where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable. There's also some goods which have become increasingly expensive because of a higher population like hardwood where technology can do only so much (of course there's ersatz goods). If somehow the whole world were to live more like Americans and the population would grow even more you would increasingly see more products where tech can only do so much (e.g. copper, real red meat, fish ...).

While housing may be specifically costlier today, overall people have much more to spend, even in the Netherlands after accounting for inflation.

This is the case almost everywhere in the world.

On the topic of why China or India didn’t bring many innovations: I fundamentally don’t believe in blank slate theory. But I do believe that China is better off with higher population. I also hear that China regrets its one child policy. Good to understand the reason behind this

While they regret it, it doesn't mean that they could have done nothing at the same time. Quite often in life you have to choose between many bad choices and no good ones.

> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution

There is a case to be made that the opposite is true. Labour scarcity in Western Europe meant significantly higher wages than in China which made investment into automation more profitable.

One reason the Romans didn’t invent the steam engine is that slaves are much cheaper.

> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution?

This sounds like asking: 'Why did I get heads when I flipped a coin? Why didn’t I get tails?'. Innovation happened everywhere (examples: printing technologies developed way before in China than in Europe, Arab numerals and others)

> but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century.

Not sure anybody can make an honest comparison. Sure, maybe that’s your opinion, but without some thorough analysis, I think it’s just an opinion.

> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution?

England had high population density concentrated in towns, trade with different cultures, high demand for labor after they banned slavery, a tradition of craftsmanship and invention, and a class of people who had a secure income but couldn't grow it easily. All of these factors came together at a time when modern science was becoming established.

India at the time had a rigid social hierarchy where it just wasn't possible to move up no matter how rich you got, and everyone was used to that so there was no real attempt to change things. China's population was high but too evenly distributed and they never had as much cultural diversity as Europe.

> there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries ... where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable

Worse quality of life for you. I would take a cramped studio in the most notorious neighborhood over a nice house in a village where nothing ever happens. Boredom would kill me. If it was up to me I would have everyone live in cities and leave the countryside for agriculture with workers coming there on month long shifts as needed. And I think there are more like us.

Economist Julian Simon was an energy advisor to the US government and said that if we use all the energy in the Sun there may be other stars out there.

As Prof. Bartlet wondered, would you base US energy policy on the plan to go and get another Star and drag it back to the Solar system?

Talk: Arithmetic, Population and Energy from 20+ years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY

Beaming energy across interstellar distances is much easier than moving stars.

Sooner or later, climate change will end humanity. It has been responsible for nearly every other extinction, it would be silly to think ours will be different. It's really just about whether it's sooner or whether it's later.

> Sooner or later, climate change will end humanity.

What makes you think this? Even in the worst case scenarios, I can imagine a smaller global population surviving in what remains.

Depends what timeframe you're talking about. As stars burn they get hotter, and eventually bigger. So yes, climate change will eventually end humanity though this would be the later scale.

>smaller global population surviving

This is just an unfound assumption on your part. Passenger pigeons went from billions of birds to extinct in less than a century. There are hundreds of different scenarios around climate change and disease evolution alone that could wipe us pretty quickly and a rapidly falling population would make it worse quickly as things like new medicines could not be developed quickly enough, or more technology couldn't be created fast enough (unless we have full AGI working on itself, but then you have alignment being its own problem).

Passenger pigeons did not have the capacity to alter their environment.

I simply find it unlikely that any amount of climate change (beyond the eventual death of our sun) will result in the complete elimination of humanity.

Yes, there are many likely bad scenarios that would drastically reduce the population.

Forever? I mean we'll probably be long gone by the time this happens but eventually changes to the nature of the sun will strip us of our atmosphere. That too will be climate change.

What sort of non-climate-threat do you suppose will take us out?

2. A big change in the climate will end humanity one day. I am skeptical it will be human caused climate change. Much higher probability it comes from asteroid or another exogenous event. The climate has always been dynamic, and it has been much more dynamic in the distant past.

> 2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc

That is a very specific version of "better off". There are many versions for which this is quite obviously not true. Anybody who wants to take a walk in pristine nature in Europe or large parts of NA needs to travel far to even have a chance of doing something resembling this. Not important you might say, well, that's your personal value judgement. Liberal democracies might also just be a temporary glitch and we're all back to dictatorships 100 years from now and I don't know how that would make us "better off" necessarily. Though that's not very related to overpopulation necessarily.

Even for your metric, life expectency has been stagnating in substantial areas. It's not a given that tech will solve that.

> 3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years

US water aquifers are approaching irreversible depletion, so I'd be careful with such statements.

This feels like a version of the Nirvana fallacy, asserting that unless things are better off by every metric, then they are worse off.

It's the metrics that you ignore that kill you.

Building anti-fragile systems is something capitalism has been ignoring for a bit and Covid pointed out quite a bit of that. A lot of things have got better off, or at least cheaper, but at quite a cost of fragility. For example, more high technology created in one place in the world or controlled by a few people. Higher amounts of energy required to extract ever difficult resources. World wide manufacturing pipelines that are ripe to be disrupted.

Two hundred years ago you didn't give much of a shit what happened on the other side of the planet, unless it was a huge volcano it wasn't really going to affect you. Now some dipshit 8000 miles away can cause you to lose your job and send you into bankruptcy.

I didn't say they are worse off in sum. Just that it depends on which metrics you pick.

There should be space for nuance in HN discussions.

"2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc"

I highly doubt that if we don't do ANYTHING about emissions. Much of world's agriculture depends on predictable weather. If world's big bread baskets get disrupted badly enough, food prices will rise so much that starvation becomes a big problem in much of the world. Rich people may be OK, others not so much.