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Manfred comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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Every single time the subject of overpopulation comes up and I offer my opinion (which is that in some respects the world is overpopulated and that it would benefit us to have a smaller or negative population growth rate), I seem to get one or two negative votes. The negative karma isn't nearly as important to me as the idea that I might be missing some fundamental idea and that those who downvote me are actually right.
Especially, this recent thread: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jgg/we_need_new_humans_please_help/ has highlighted this issue for me again.
So, I'm opening my mind, trying to set aside my biases, and hereby asking all those who disagree with me to give me a rational argument for why I'm wrong and why the world needs more people. If I stray from my objective and take a biased viewpoint, I deserve all the negative karma you can throw at me.
I don't recall downvoting you, but I think that there is a very high chance technology makes the problem moot - either by killing us or by alleviating scarcity until a superintelligence happens.
I agree with you that future technology will probably allow us to sustain far far greater population than we can now. However, my view concerns problems were are creating at the present, and not all present problems can be retroactively solved with future technology. For instance, if you value biodiversity in the natural world (and there are good, practical reasons to do so), and biodiversity is lost, it's irreversible. Once the gene pool of a species is wiped out it is extremely difficult to restore it again. And sure, even though species go instinct all the time irrespective of human activity, throughout the history of the planet, the long-term trend of biodiversity has been to go up.
Now, as to whether human activity is decreasing biodiversity, it's a complex subject and I don't claim to be very knowledgeable about it. As far as I've heard in the scientific literature, humans are negatively affecting biodiversity.
A very nice review of human activity and socioeconomic progress and their impact on biodiversity is given in this paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X11001051
This book does a nice job of explaining the interrelationships between biodiversity, poverty, and overpopulation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=111842848X