Elon Musk published a few hours this tweet:
"Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming"
Robin Hanson, who is something for whom I feel a lot of intellectual respect, liked the tweet.
In my model of the world works, overpopulation is in fact a big problem. In general, the more people you have, the less resources you have to share among those people. A decreasing population would be in fact good news, although maybe not in the short term.
Can you help me understand what are Elon/Robin seeing that I am not?
A couple of extra points for the sake of clarity:
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I do understand that, in the current system, having an aging population is a problem because many resources go toward people that reach an old age
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AI might or might not end the world. Let's assume in this scenario that it does not and we have many more decades ahead
I think this is both trivially true an irrelevant. The fastest car that we can build is only limited by the speed of light, but we can't really make cars that fast for a vast number of reasons that I am too lazy to spell out. I am not interested in a theoretical world where if we run out of phosphorus on Earth we just make new atoms using fusion or we make rockets to mine distant asteroids. I'm interested in Earth on the 21st century, where if you interrupt the transit of boats in the Black Sea people in Africa die of hunger. We are, in fact limited in the amount of food we can produce, and although we could increase the amount of the Earth surface devoted to crops, that comes at a high ecological cost. Same thing for many other resources.