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How can you strongly disagree to me saying 'we have no choice but to pick one of these options' and then say 'oh they'll follow the life-extension path', when that's a path I mentioned? Do you have a different path in mind or do you strongly disagree with the premise?
Demographics is destiny. You can't do anything if you don't exist. Numbers are power, though not the only source of power. In geopolitics, there's a struggle between the 1st and 3rd most populous states as to who will rule the system. There's a reason that Iceland and Monaco are not in the running and it's because they're not populous!
Even once we establish life extension, demographics still matter. The most populous states, ceteris paribus, will be still be stronger, have more geniuses, more capital, a bigger internal market, more resources... Exponentially growing populations of immortals can burn through a lot of resources very quickly.
Human values must ultimately be in accordance with the basic structure of the universe. Whatever else we do, we must not be diminishing in number, our civilization must not be unsustainable. When there's a conflict between memes and reality, reality wins. If knowledge, understanding and love are useful (and I think they are) in sustaining our species, then great! But if they or anything else is sabotaging us, then let's discard them before nature forces the issue.
The short answer is that I just get annoyed by the 'demographics is destiny' crowd because, as @self_made_human points out, I don't think that will be true for much longer.
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This seems to assume that humans will be net economic positives in the future, which I think is highly doubtful myself.
I suspect that in a decade or two, the power of a country will correlate far more strongly with the number of data centers and automated factories it possesses rather than the mere number of people living off UBI.
After a certain point, you don't need more people around, though as a person myself I'd rather we stay in charge.
In all likelihood, it's a battle between the US and China as to who'll have more automated factories. Surprisingly, China is ahead of the US in robots per worker (and so hugely ahead overall) despite the US having a head start. China has a more aggressive attitude towards manufacturing and industrial efficiency than the US.
Maybe South Korea is a competitor, they're well ahead in the 'robots per industrial worker' index of everyone except Singapore. But can South Korea secure the input resources needed, given their declining demography? Robots need iron, chemicals, mines, logistics, scale, young people to innovate with them. There's probably a critical mass of market size, brainpower and resources you need before you can develop a world-class robotics industry like China or America. It would surprise me if a small country was able to leapfrog the big powers. Can South Korea supply everything it needs domestically, or even most things? Can they compete in 'let's throw 10 billion at this gigafactory/huge research project'? I don't think so.
I reckon technological advancement and capital development (robots and datacentres) stem from high population + a bunch of other things like organization, IQ, geography and so on.
I think Asia has a distinct advantage here simply because they culturally value education far more than most of normie Americans. We don’t push our kids that hard even compared to European states. We don’t worry too much about grades and achievement, in fact we are often destroying our education system in the name of student’s feelings, or racial disparities. A lot of schools no longer have “gifted” programs to develop potential minds. There are schools no longer pushing to get kids into algebra before high school. If we weren’t attracting our engineers from abroad, we’d be even farther behind because of how bad our K-12 system is compared to Europe let alone Asia.
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I agree, but I also expect automation technologies to diffuse quite fast, such that after a period of time economic progress will depend more on total resources available to a nation (perhaps surface area covered by a nation would a half decent proxy) instead of human-driven progress.
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