Murder fanboys are fricking creepy

If you are not fat, you are hotter than your ancestor from a 100 years ago. Yet you are still dying out, because consumerism and capitalism has made reproduction even more competitive than it previously used to be.

We are already expecting global population to shrink by 25% by the end of the century. Assuming that it peaks by 2050.

As developed economies continue to get richer, their fertility rate continues to go down, even long past the replacement fertility level.

Globally, more than half of the world population is now urbanized. Urban populations have been population sinks since time immemorial. On top of that it has never before been more profitable to not have children when it comes to income accumulation.

What this means is that humanity would have to evolve a strain of humans that like to have more than two children even when they are wealthy and packed together like sardines.

For such an evolutionary trait to emerge would take centuries if not millennia. That is the time scale on which we can expect the human population to keep consistently declining over time.

Lithuania's population has been on the decline since 1991. Their fertility rate today is below 1.3. Globally such a trend holds in the majority of the cases, and the exceptions are found in extremely conservative or extremely poor societies.

Humans are not like grass or trees or fish. Humans do not benefit from a planet covered by themselves. The reason for this being that humanity never grew past the federal union state as their highest functional unit.

Human population would decline until only those remain or evolve that can enjoy each others company long term.

As of now, Netherlands is the smallest unit of collective humans that can contribute positively and heavily to the world. Their population is 17.9 million and rising, and they are already a trillion dollar economy that's not slowing down anytime soon.

We can take this as the assumed minimum human population required to keep moving science and human capabilities forward.

That is, if human population over time shrunk to 0.2% of what it is today, before rebounding, humanity would still be fine and dominating this planet.

This fact alone justifies the amount of competition among humans to separate the wheat from the chaff, again and again, generation after generation.

Conclusion:

Developed world fertility rates are not going to go above replacement for centuries. World population is going to move in the order of "poorest countries --> lower middle income countries --> middle income countries --> upper middle income countries --> high income countries --> developed economies --> Richest developed economy --> Richest developed economy state".

If at any point one of these is having negative population growth, that means something is not working correctly and that part of the world is in decline.

The world population is going to move from the global South to the global North even as it keeps shrinking over time. Expect countries stuck in the middle income trap to split from within into multiple countries as all the rich occupy one side of the country while the poor occupy the other.

Humanity would have fallen to 1% of the population that it has today by the time the global human population begins to rise once again.

The global millionaire population of today is the global total population of tomorrow.

John D. Rockefeller, the first billionaire in the US, is believed to have 150 descendants alive today. That's 150 people descended from one billionaire in 180 years time.

Elon Musk already has 12 children and its safe to assume that all of those children together are going to end up with more than 12 grandchildren for Elon Musk.

In the long run, the millionaire class of today, is the average of tomorrow, as humanity continues to evolve upwards.

Moore's law is going to be obsolete by 2036. LLM's increasing computation to develop new capabilities appears to have nearly reached its end point. Vertical farming appears to be a partial replacement for contemporary farming rather than an upgrade over it. Cultured meat never outcompeted normal meat prices, but appears to have become its own luxury meat market. Self driving vehicles appear to be improving linearly rather than exponentially. Same for Robotics. We were hoping for robot nurses by 2030 but it looks like it will be decades more before a humanoid robot can move faster than a human child in an uncontrolled environment.

Everything appears to be moving at the speed of "you will notice the difference in 30 years time." Which is exceptionally slow compared to the pace of the past century.

For all intents and purposes, we appear to be reaching the end point of what is possible in a species scaled up into nation-states.

Where does humanity go from here? It's not like we are technologically in a position to colonize the moon. We at current levels at best have the tech to set up one or two functioning moon bases. Space mining is still generations away.

We are stalling. What is the solution to this problem? It's not just a numbers issue. Research Productivity has been halving every 14 years. We would need to double the number of researchers globally every 14 years to balance it out. A 5% manpower growth rate for researchers globally annually. The world is very obviously not able to keep up with such extreme demands.

The only remaining solution is to increase human intelligence, but even in that the global population is nearing its peak point. In the developed world IQ growth appears to have stalled. Meanwhile in the developing world, IQ appears to be still growing at a rate of 1-3 IQ points per decade. A growth we can expect to stall by the end of the century, based on historical trends in the west.

Currently, the smartest man alive who can add to human knowledge is Terence Tao, and even he is barely able to solve maybe one or two unsolved math problems per decade at his best, then too collaborating with others.

Humanity does not just want intelligent AI, it NEEDS intelligent AI, to continue the growth that humanity has reached the peak of and cannot go any further.

Humanity is once again stuck in competition with one another for resources, until it can figure out a way to continue growing once again. A golden age for the species is coming to an end, unless it figures out a way to revolutionize growth once again.

Industry 4.0 isn't enough. All it did for the developed world was to take it out of the 2008 financial crisis, and that too barely. If the world is to grow any further, it needs something truly world altering. Something that would explode in its reach, and would keep scaling up at that same rate across generations.

So what is that something?

It's not AI. It's not transistor chips. It's not industrial automation, because South Korea is the most heavily automated country in the world, and they are still slowing down. So what is it?

What is the secret to rapid economic growth in the 21st century? Is it to just throw all the technological know how to the developing world? After all, the developing world is all that is growing now. Even so, global growth is still going down.

There is the answer. A problem without a solution. So what's your suggestion?

Factoring in that tech is slowing down not speeding up, these robots are not going to be replacing humans for general purpose work for another 30-40 years if at all.

What's instead going to happen is that we are going to keep getting better at making niche task robots to replace the human from random places. It's going to be a very drawn out iterative process.

We are still just making better cowtools over time. Nothing that can replace us.

Even AI is hitting a wall now, probably got 3-4 more years left before it too hits the wall and is again stuck for another 20-30 years of time.

Additional fun fact:

Japan's life expectancy has begun to go down. 90 might actually be the limit even with all the medical care in the world. Cancer or brain worms just catch up in the end. Nothing is forever repairable. Even stars die.

Tech is hitting the wall, and having only one or zero kids may be the only way left to keep getting richer in a developed economy.