China is special compared to the other examples you mentionned because it has the possibility of employing draconian measures like taxing the childless, imposing a child quota as a prequisite for promotions or even nuking womens rights if the situation becomes extremely critical. Democratic nations, especially those controlled or influenced by the west, have no way of doing so.
China demographics thread.
- Thread starter gadgetcool5
- Start date
Once again for the hard of comprehension, what's the number of children in China in 2100 going to be when the technology exists where people can be essentially manufactured?
That it's a massive country developing the most advanced technology on the planet (including biotechnology) and it isn't a thrall of the West.
Like I said before those number are way off.
Even then, China TFR just a few years ago was like what? 1.8. that why these predictions makes no sense. I think the recent fall was due more the Covid restrictions, is even possible that TRF increase in the coming years due low housing and food prices, so if the next 5 years the TRF increase from 1.24 to 1.8 due low prices, all the sudden the predictions change?
In 2010 you would have say he same about Hungary when the TFR was 1.20. now is higher.
But I said before if the situation become extreme that threaten China as a country they will likely force motherhood or adopt measures like banning contraceptives or taxing the childless or pressuring women to pursue motherhood instead of careers.
I thought we'd determined that a big part of the drop in China TFR was a huge increase in enrollment in tertiary education beginning 2017?
It was about the change in TFR pre and post covid not comparing countries to each other. If the trend continues then Iran and Turkey are just going to be the same as China and Chile in a decade.
Limb replacement is an example, and it's definitely a huge goal people have been chasing for decades to enable people to live longer and happier (more productive) lives.
Which exponential advance in biology are you talking about? The "humanization" of tissues and organs that is being talked about, has now been underway for 3 decades, with barely anything to show for.
This is the famous from the 1990s. This created a sensation, with a frenzy of expectation (from respected scientists) that eventually we will use non-human substraits to grow human organs within a decade, but this has never come to fruition (and it's been almost 3 decades). Why? Because Biology is insanely hard and complex and messy. There are huge issues when it comes from taking stuff from lab to actual humans. Everything that you see in science journals is heavily overhyped because of wrong incentives -- scientists are incentivized to hype their research because it helps them get citations, funding, media, etc.
If life expectancy was a predictor of medical progress, our medical progress has actually slowed down in recent years.
Humans are not codes that are solely driven just by genes in the first place. There is a whole field of epigenetics that is also essential in how genes express themselves. Gene editing in humans is for the next 20-30 years just a mirage in my opinion.
Saying that anything is an absolute impossibility is just plain wrong. Nothing can have a probability of 0 or 1 in this universe. Most/Many AI researchers (Yann Le Cun, Andrew Ng, are some examples) know/believe that current architectures have huge shortcomings which scaling won't fix. AI has deliberately been hyped because it benefits companies to have better funding, more market, etc. etc. etc.
As for the issue on population: you don't have to compete just with the US, but the West in general. The West -> US + Europe + 5Eyes + Japan/SoKo have a lot more people. To top that, the population projections by UN show China's overall population decline to 767 million by 2100 in median variant, and 488 million in low variant. But they are assuming that TFR would actually rise to ~ 1.5 in medium variant, and are assuming that it will fall to ~0.95 in low variant. Both are severely optimistic if nothing major is done. Already SoKo is at 0.72, major Chinese cities are around the same level. UN population projections have always been too optimistic.
Apart from that, this is the total population, the ageing is severe in all scenarios. With the low variant, > 50% of your population would be 60+. So in terms of demographics like children, and middle aged people, you might end up having lesser number of people compared to US.
I think child birth should be completely divorced from marriage as an institution. Because marriages are even harder to recover than child birth.
Agreed, there will be destruction of old jobs, but through out the world history, there have been whole new segments that have open up, new industries, new trends. With every old job that is demolished, a whole new industry would be created, some of which we possibly can't even imagine right now.
I agree that this tech is advancing at a blistering pace. I actually work in this industry. However, there are limits to this stuff that's clear. So LLMs will be able to generate very high fidelity videos, create art, but they won't be able to understand concepts, especially stuff that is completely new and unique and not in their training data. They are also not good at understanding symbolic stuff like concepts etc. Obviously there's research ongoing in this area, but the word AI is perhaps the biggest misnomer out there. A better word would be Stochastic Parrot, Deep Learning Machines etc.
Don't get me wrong, they are indeed hugely consequential and will change the world in a bewildering variety of ways, but their advent (even in the most optimistic scenario) will be akin to electricity or the steam engine, the advent of a new world, but a world where humans are now free to do even better/greater things.
Just a little, a better example is actually Israel, where Israeli Jews are perhaps the only population in the developed world with above replacement fertility rates.
IDK about this one. The average skill needed for a job has gone up and there is just a smaller % of population that can do those skills. There has to be something for the average person to do that leads to a better life, or there will be 2 options that will be imposed, 1 way or another:
1. the average skill required for a job will decrease - positively by making jobs more worker friendly, negatively by economic decline.
2. the number of humans competing for a job will decrease - either slow and steady, or fast, violent and catastrophic, population decline.
They underestimate the power of policy, is not always a smooth curve, in 2010 people would have said the Hungary would have gone extinct in a few years, still no replacement levels but they manage to extent the decline, the UN is a political correct institution, they know the solution and you too, they expect the countries do not hit the panic button and adhere to their policies who is usually in the political correct side. A lot of countries are not hitting the panic button...YET but Japan could add 15% a year in births and probably even more if the do the politically incorrect thing.
Who said it's a huge goal? How much money has been invested in it over decades? How huge a goal is it versus heart replacement?
This exponential advance:
I was mistaken in calling it an exponential advance. It's actually super-exponential.
I've already shown you clinical trials of humanized organs. I don't care how many decades it's been underway, it's breaking through now. Human flight had been a goal for thousands of years before it was achieved. Why? Because flight is messy and hard... until it wasn't because the tools we have to address the problem matured to a sufficient degree. If you don't understand that basic fact, it's pointless to continue this conversation.
You had better hope a scheme like the one I described works because it's either that or accept extinction. Social incentives or taxing people or Handmaid's Tale garbage people talk about in this dump of a thread isn't going to work.
The reality is that it is infinitely easier to regress than to progress and sometimes you need to step back to see the bigger picture.
Imagine being at a crossroads. One side was a barren grassland promising hard work but survival, the other was this paradise of milk and honey. You go down the obvious paradise route. But now the road is going off a cliff into a river filled with sharp rocks.
Tech solutions are like, trying to buy a helicopter or a cliff climbing ATV. On a loan. From a shady dealer that may or may not just take your money and not deliver.
There's always the possibility of loading up on supplies on the way back and then going to the grassland instead, and get more with the knowledge and wealth from what used to be paradise.