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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31419 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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There is no substitute for generation of new workforce – whether young people or robots. Debate can only be had about a) the timeline for supplementing people with robots (and, seeing as robots are a software problem, it's wild to me that people look at e.g. Midjourney evolution in the span of 1.5 years and believe this won't move as well as a human in a decade; yes it is the same problem) and b) legitimacy of austerity strategies and, perhaps, as the trendy folks put it now, degrowth. Even Zeihan, much as I loathe him, points out flaws of even highly successful attempts to weasel out of this predicament. Canada imports skilled immigrants, at like 3% of the nation annually now. Is this sustainable? How many skilled Chinese and Indians are out there? And how many Filipinos do you need to replace one Tsinghua graduate in lifetime tax contribution? But Phillipines, too, has only one big batch left; their TFR is 1.9, and given that these trends appear to accelerate for later comers, it's very probable they'll collapse to 1.2-1.5 in less than 10 years. How many countries can hope to do better than Canada does attracting useful immigrants?

I am not sure how seriously and charitably people peddling immigration as a long-term solution should be taken at this point. They seem either in thrall to a bona fide population replacement conspiracy, trying to do maximum damage in the limited time left (thus I suspect they'll side with AI doomers), or just looking for lost keys under the lamppost, suggesting more of the same to policymakers who are unwilling to hear anything else and perhaps unable to pursue it.

I do not notice them actually calculating net expected contribution of immigrants using any realistic trait distribution analysis (of course this is HBD stuff but you don't even need to explicitly acknowledge HBD, tracking results of previous batches and controlling for selection effects would do enough). It's just appalling, condescending arithmetic – here, Europeans (avg age X), here, young Kenyans (avg age X/2); promise old white farts they will be tended to (if perhaps with a bit of ethnic contempt) in their retirement homes if they vote for importing the latter into cities their nonexistent grandchildren could have kept running, mix and blend. Can this promise be borne out? Of course this is just Kirkegaard, the racist pedophile etc. etc. The question is, how do respectable experts like Dr. Myrskylä conclude something radically different from the same research?

What really gets under my skin, though, is how fertility collapse and its implications are suddenly mainstreamed only now. To be specific, I think it started around 2020, with the BBC headline Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born. You don't say?

"That's a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline," researcher Prof Christopher Murray told the BBC.

"I think it's incredibly hard to think this through and recognise how big a thing this is; it's extraordinary, we'll have to reorganise societies."

Strange how demographers took ages to notice that the dreaded «population bomb» had its fuse all pissed over by modernity (Ehrlich was very persuasive with his deep voice, I guess). Strange because all the way back in 2004 (and based on much older data), there's been a book The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by one Thomas P. M. Barnett, American geostrategist. It said, for instance:

THE FLOW OF PEOPLE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE POPULATION BOMB

When I turn fifty, I will worry about my PSA, or my prostate specific antigen. But at forty-one, I worry about my PSR, or what the United Nations calls my potential support ratio. My personal PSR is currently projecting out at 1.5, meaning my wife and I have three kids we hope will be willing to support us in our old age. So if Vonne and I split Emily, Kevin, and Jerome between us, we'll each end up with 1.5 persons working on our behalf after we reach sixty-five. … By the time our planet reached the third millennium, our PSR dropped to nine to one. That's not too bad, primarily because Globalization II (1950-1980) involved only a fraction of the global population (America, Western Europe, Developed Asia). But the decline is accelerating.

My wife, Vonne, and I are in the process of adopting a baby girl from one of the poorer, interior provinces of China. We're not doing this to raise our personal PSR, but it will incidentally have that effect, and in so doing we are—in a tiny way—setting in motion the migration that will have to be repeated millions of times in the decades to come as the Core's population grows older much faster than the Gap's: the movement of people from there to here. This great shift defines the first of the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance.

Sometime around 2050, humanity will begin to depopulate as a species. That's right. In about five decades the world will reach a turning point that, in past ages, would have frightened us if we were able to understand its significance. But in the middle of the twenty-first century, the fact that we'll begin depopulating as a species won't seem scary (though it's never a bad idea to keep a close watch on those damn, dirty apes!), and we should welcome this turning point, even as it presents us and the globalizing world with a task of immense proportions.

What's so amazing about this upcoming reality is how, for decades, all we've heard about from the experts is that overpopulation is the real threat, and how we'd all eventually be eating soylent green or at least some indigestible tofu. I don't know how many frightening educational films I was forced to sit through in grade school, all of which suggested the world was simply going to suffocate under the crushing weight of all these people! Instead, I'll probably live to witness this amazing turn of events, a culmination of tens of thousands of years of effort on the part of humanity to grow its numbers and—by doing so—come to dominate the planet Earth.

…My parents had nine kids, but those nine kids have only begotten eleven kids so far, and except for the international adoptions, my siblings and I are pretty much done. That reduction-by-generation effect is spreading across the Core right now, but the trend will not reach much of the Gap until late in the twenty-first century. At 2050, the UN predicts, the forty-nine least-developed economies will still feature fertility rates above the replacement value of 2.1, meaning much of the Gap will still be growing even as the global population peaks. … Too many of the two billion young will be in the Gap, while too many of the two billion old will be in the Core. Someone will have to turn us over in our beds when we're old, and our population trends simply aren't providing that someone.

most Americans should expect to retire in their mid-seventies, not their mid-sixties or—God forbid—their mid-fifties. The news, unfortunately, looks a lot worse for insular Japan and xenophobic Europe. If America has its problems with immigrants, what with bilingual education and all, our issues pale when compared with those of the rest of the Old Core. Europe already has its share of right-wing, anti-immigration politicians exploiting people's worst impulses, and Japan has such a dismal record of accepting immigrants that the Land of the Rising Sun is heading toward its sunset at warp speed. According to the UN, Europe is likely to let in about 300,000 immigrants per year between now and 2050, when it really needs to let in something in the range of 1.5 million each year if there's any hope its PSR won't drop below two to one by mid-century.

And so on. I like to quote that book. Barnett is a honest-to-God ideological Globalist, so one gets the feeling he'd have cheerfully advised for replacement migration on some pretext even if he were convinced as I am of the promise of automation. But at least he provides evidence that we had decades to discuss alternative plans, and instead we debated (in English, of course, not in Swahili) whether not having a baby is the best way to cut carbon emissions .

yes it is the same problem

No, it is a financially different problem for the exact same reason that hardware is different than software. Software has infinite do-overs at malleable speed. Hardware has to work in reality. Sure, after enough refining, ML will be able to manufacture a complete car. But how many attempts would it have to undergo first? Even ignoring the iterations on the manufacturing hardware itself, how much money would you have to spend on materials and energy in your tens of thousands of attempts to teach the ML how to manufacture a car? And then there is the political cost. What defect rate will people be willing to put up with from entirely autonomous robotic manufacturing? Almost certainly, it will be a lower rate than what we put up with from humans. Especially if it is from a black box like current ML.

It depends on how you’re doing the iteration. It seems perfectly plausible to do 99% of the ML in a good physics engine (where doing as many iterations as you want are essentially free) and only switching to the real world once you have a system that is pretty good at making cars.

Hardware has to work in reality.

No. High-fidelity simulations in MuJoCo and such suffice for the most part, and other kinks will be ironed out with learning on fleet data.

There is no need to solve end-to-end manufacturing first, we already have hardware overhang with robots, they will walk and indeed run soon after ML grants them decent cerebellums.

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