[X] My Assistant

Government corruption, improperly regulated corporations and logistical problems are bigger issues than population.

I've heard of an economical model that suggests that this is intentional. That the current circumstances are a goal to reduce the world population and replace everyone with AI (not trying to fear monger). A few years I heard this and thought bull; however, more recent events are convincing me more and more this may very well be possible. Honestly, this enrages me at the thought people at the top 1% may very well have the insidious thought to reduce mankind to ash just so they could trade between each other with their obedient robot servants as their noble goal of making a greener planet by the most atrocious means possible. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/cry.gif) I feel we're all on a crash course to oblivion and America's intellectual AI war with China, Russia, etc. may never end with anyone having a peaceful future.

I've heard of an economical model that suggests that this is intentional. That the current circumstances are a goal to reduce the world population and replace everyone with AI (not trying to fear monger).

Sustainable population collapse model from organisations like the WEF, called for a 20% reduction in population, with economic measures similar to 2008 / 2021 that lead to a massive shift upwards in wealth towards the rich.

As for AI, it varies significantly. We do not know if we are at the start of an economic boom or if we are the horses about to be replaced.

how many of a species could possibly exist is not a metric of overpopulation
ya don't have to have starvation to be overpopulated

when a species uses so many resources that other species die off, that is one indication of overpopulation

there are others
look it up

" More than half of earth's landmass is still classified as "untouched" nature,"
nope
less than 5%

[earth.org] https://earth.org/half-of-earths-land-surfa...ched-by-humans/

The 5% is a meme figure environmentalists use because it makes for a catchy headline. If a human has ever set foot on there they considered it spoiled. Deserts alone make up 1/3 of earth's land mass. Just Antarctica and Greenland combined are almost 5%. I guess that means there is no untouched nature left in places like Siberia, Canada or the Amazon, then.

[earth.org] https://earth.org/half-of-earths-land-surfa...ched-by-humans/

The 5% is a meme figure environmentalists use because it makes for a catchy headline. If a human has ever set foot on there they considered it spoiled. Deserts alone make up 1/3 of earth's land mass. Just Antarctica and Greenland combined are almost 5%. I guess that means there is no untouched nature left in places like Siberia, Canada or the Amazon, then.

Thats not what the article you linked said.

They conclude that just over 50% of Earth’s land surface can be classified as having low human influence or being untouched completely, with a range of 48-56% depending on the type of human influence map used.

Importantly, the level of human influence varies significantly from biome to biome. Cold landscapes such as boreal forests and tundra have experienced ‘very low’ to ‘low’ human influence.

By comparison, temperate grasslands, tropical coniferous forests and tropical dry forests have experienced much greater levels of human influence with less than 1% of these regions being classified as having ‘very low’ human influence. For these ecosystems, it is a grim illustration that human civilisation has completely altered the natural environment.

So in some mapping, Arctic and Tundra areas are 'relatively untouched' and even here that depends on the type of map you use to classify that, while the areas where most animal and plant life actually occupy is in biomes such as forests, grasslands, wetlands that are in high human influence areas, with only 1% of those regions being on the low end of that spectrum.

So in essence, where ever humans live, they have expectedly taken over those biomes, and in places where only reindeer play their games and Santa's elves make their toys, there's far less human activity which should be obvious.

Next time try reading what you post first.

Thats not what the article you linked said.
So in some mapping, Arctic and Tundra areas are 'relatively untouched' and even here that depends on the type of map you use to classify that, while the areas where most animal and plant life actually occupy is in biomes such as forests, grasslands, wetlands that are in high human influence areas, with only 1% of those regions being on the low end of that spectrum.

So in essence, where ever humans live, they have expectedly taken over those biomes, and in places where only reindeer play their games and Santa's elves make their toys, there's far less human activity which should be obvious.

Next time try reading what you post first.

How does any of that contradict anything I said? By the way, I live where the reindeers live. Humans survive just fine here.

As for AI, it varies significantly. We do not know if we are at the start of an economic boom or if we are the horses about to be replaced.

Yeah, the situation around AI is uncertain at the moment. My belief is that neither will be the case -- AI might just flop and fail to address anything (or worse, AI slop could be a liability itself).

How does any of that contradict anything I said? By the way, I live where the reindeers live. Humans survive just fine here.

oh, you live in the artic circle do you? because the point you missed from the link is that IF you include land habitats of low density like the deserts and the ice covered regions, you might get something like 20 to 40 percent of low impact areas left, and even then its because the methodology used to count those areas include things like low light pollution and road networks, so even in those areas there's human impact because of air and water pollution of human industrial activity even far from the original area of effect.
But most nature lives in temperate areas, and those are the areas most impacted by human activity and its in those areas where the number of 3 to 5 percent of unmarred nature remaining comes from. This should be obvious.

oh, you live in the artic circle do you?

Yes.

because the point you missed from the link is that IF you include land habitats of low density like the deserts and the ice covered regions, you might get something like 20 to 40 percent of low impact areas left, and even then its because the methodology used to count those areas include things like low light pollution and road networks, so even in those areas there's human impact because of air and water pollution of human industrial activity even far from the original area of effect.
But most nature lives in temperate areas, and those are the areas most impacted by human activity and its in those areas where the number of 3 to 5 percent of unmarred nature remaining comes from. This should be obvious.

What's your point? I already said we've developed technology to farm food even in underground caves. Or in buildings without sunlight, or the arctic. It's just not done because it's still cheaper to import from places where it's easier. If we wanted to, we could easily inhabit and grow the necessary food to sustain a population nearly anywhere on earth.

Part of me want to say it's "expected" because productivity rises and we don't need that much work force, while we do need few population to consume limited resource... part of me is afraid this is all planned by the super riches so that only a few of the super riches and their descendants can monopolize all the resources.

Part of me want to say it's "expected" because productivity rises and we don't need that much work force, while we do need few population to consume limited resource... part of me is afraid this is all planned by the super riches so that only a few of the super riches and their descendants can monopolize all the resources.

Everything that money can buy, even labor itself, will be solved with automation. But the vision of people as necessary because they fill a role in the workforce was always perverted to begin with. Human surplus time will be properly spent on the things money can't buy. The ones who believe AI-generated product will replace the need for art, society and culture do not genuinely interact with these things. They can be ignored. Of course the elite fantasy where only the ones who exited trade successfully will get to survive and reproduce is also a possibility, but I don't think they can win. Their numbers are too few.

Tbh I don't think we'll live long enough to enjoy a world without so much people on it


-----


meow_pao edit: Merged this post from a separate but related thread.

This post has been edited by meow_pao: Nov 26 2024, 04:10

Isn't it what the elites want? The Georgia Guidestones said to reduce the world population to 500 million.

Edited...

This post has been edited by N04h: Jan 14 2025, 03:56

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

[en.wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guide...es#Inscriptions

Fixed

Well the actual models that they are using is a 20% reduction in population with wealth being extracted upwards.

I can't say much about the Economical/Logistical perspectives, since it simply isn't "my Metier".
However I can say that sociologically, this demographic shift causes some heavy issues.

In my country, there are almost thrice as many 50-90-year-olds than there are 20-50-year-olds.
I took that cutoff point because the likelihood of a citizen above the age of ca. 40 being capable of understanding and comfortably navigating the internet and modern digital media drops drastically, but not to zero.
Anyway, this causes several major issues:

With the skyrocketing cost-of-life and housing prices, the "fit to work" are already overburdened but have to prepare their asses even harder because, within the next decade and onward, their tax money has to support several times the amount of pensioners per capita.

Pensions have also not been properly inflation-corrected, so an overwhelming amount of elderly live in abject poverty despite having wasted their lives to wage-slavery. That, understandably, causes them to be rather disgruntled.
Unfortunately, that absolutely justified anger gets vented on unjustified targets, such as immigrants, the disabled, the sickly and communists (It's always the commies ffs) because it's a lot harder to question the fundamentally unjust and exploitative system we live in, and even harder than that to reflect on your own life choices and concede that you yourself had a hand in your lot, having wasted your unfulfilling life being a wage-slave for said exploitative system. (It's more complex than that, but you get my point.)
In contrast to that, hating on the Foreign and Different™ is just so, so much easier and satisfying, as Warhammer 40k has taught us. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

Let's get back to that cutoff point I made, grouping people into being "digitally native" vs. not knowing how computer work:

The lack of Information Hygiene and Media Competency in this clear majority of the population presents a very potent Petri dish for the spread of disinformation, emotional/alternative facts and socially destructive radicalizing stances.

To speak plainly:
The elderly are endangering civil liberty and the foundations of our democracy because their burgeoning senility, coupled with a stubborn entitlement and a refusal to learn new ways is met by predominantly extreme-right-wing/Fascistoid/anti-democratic Actors, who use a type of Grandchild scam to instrumentalize stupid crusty boomers into giving their Votes to said Actors' troublingly inhumane agendas because said crusty boomers can't tell apart an AI image with reality for shit.
It wouldn't matter if everyone across the ideological/philosophical spectrum would "play dirty" that way. That would return things to a halfway normal distribution, but as it stands, Nazis are excellent at making old men yell at clouds.

This issue has gotten rampant enough that some circles seriously start thinking about revoking a citizen's right to vote at the age of about 80.
That is its whole own can of worms and from my POV could only solve surface-level issues temporarily, with the whole point becoming moot in a generation or so, when digital natives have become the new elderly. And the state wouldn't be capable to implement this change within the next 5-10 years since it would be a deep cut into our "unalienable" part of the constitution. So IMO that debate seems rather pointless.

Anyway, I wonder how that translates to other nations with a similar demographic trend.

OH!
And one other, totally unrelated, but incredibly funny tidbit:
Females between the age of 17 to 24 currently represent the absolute smallest group among the totality of humans capable of consenting to (from ~16y/o) and following through with (to ~80y/o)sexual activities etc.
That means that being a young woman in this day and age means getting unprecedented amounts of sexual attention, be it wanted or unwanted, from a pool of several dozen times over more people that "would like to bag that fresh-smelling ho".
Inveresely, if you're above the age of 25 and managed to bag one of them fresh-smelling hos, you can count yourself privileged (For what it's worth, anyway), because competition has literally never been this stiff before. Pun intended.

This post has been edited by Cloudkitty: Feb 7 2025, 16:55

The ones who believe AI-generated product will replace the need for art, society and culture do not genuinely interact with these things. They can be ignored.

The problem is the ones in charge don't believe you need people who genuinely interact with art and culture. All you need is consumers. They're not really concerned with how deep your appreciation to the cinematography of Doctor Marvel 8 is.

With the skyrocketing cost-of-life and housing prices, the "fit to work" are already overburdened

The reason for this, and some of the other points you raised, is simply compound interest. The capitalistic system we currently have is inherently designed for wealth to accumulate in the hands of the few. That's just what it does. Where as the average middle class worker looking to buy a home would've bid against other middle class workers in 1955, now they're bidding against trillion-dollar investment funds. The physical person who actually needs a roof to live under is not in the same position to negotiate as a banker thinking of buying his 1000th house. If the bank pays too much for a house, well that's a 0.01% difference in the end-of-year statement. If the actual physical human can't afford his mortgage payments he might go hungry or bankrupt.

What this means in the grand scheme of things is that over time fewer people will own things and the ones who do will own more. It won't get better by itself, because it's something so fundamentally baked into the core of the capitalistic world order that doing anything about it would require massive fundamental changes to how modern economies work.

[www.goodreads.com] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3194507...n-of-capitalism this is a pretty good book on the subject, and I'm not even a dirty commie or anything.

Every country has it difficulty.
But all the same reason is downfall of economy

[www.sciencealert.com] https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-could-ha...e-ever-realized

It's likely we've severely underestimated the human population due to discounting rural areas. While I'm not going to give any specific figure without more evidence, it's likely above 8.2 billion (which is already not a small number!)

I don't think the world is going to be a very nice place to be born into in the near or long term future. For that and other reasons, I got sterilized a few years ago. I also donate to charities to educate girls, as educated girls will have fewer, healthier children. There's a lot of horrible things going on that I, unfortunately, have no control over. This is one of the few I can control in some small way, so I've acted in what I believe to be the most ethical way available.

It's also worth noting that the Global North (distinct from the Northern Hemisphere) consumes far more resources than the Global South does. Waste generation correlates heavily with wealth, and yet with climate change, the poorest countries will bear the worst of it despite having the least responsibility for creating it. I also expect this to be exacerbated by recent elections.

[en.wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South