NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: tut 08 January 2014 12:14PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (343)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Alsadius 10 January 2014 04:18:53PM *  2 points [-]

It's an argument based on false premises. Limitations on resources have, in past, proven to be fairly meaningless, and there's no particular reason to believe this will change going forward. Every time we think we've hit a wall(running out of wood in the 18th century, whales in the 19th century, food in the 20th century, or oil in the 21st century), we've come up with new technologies to keep going without much trouble(coal, oil, GMOs/agricultural chemistry, and tar sands/fracking respectively). Limitations on space are even less relevant.

Conversely, we've built first-world societies on a governmental safety net that only actually works with an increasing population. If we don't grow, then pension plans will start detonating like someone's carpet-bombing the economy. (Yes, worse than they are already). I think the people who created those pyramid schemes should be taken out behind the woodshed for a posthumous beatdown, but it's a bit late to fix it now.

If you want to know what a negative population growth rate looks like, look at what will happen to China over the next couple decades. It's the biggest demographic time bomb in human history.

Also, if you're bringing sustainability into this, IMO the only truly sustainable option is to advance technology so fast that we can defeat the Second Law somehow. Anything else just delays the inevitable.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 January 2014 06:11:55PM 2 points [-]

We can beat the pension-based need for more people by vastly increasing productivity and ameliorating the effects of old age and/or automating more of the care of debilitated people

Comment author: Lumifer 10 January 2014 08:08:37PM *  4 points [-]

by vastly increasing productivity

And how will this happen? The productivity growth has slowed down considerably and shows no signs of picking up, never mind "vastly increasing".

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 11 January 2014 02:43:22PM 2 points [-]

Well, there was at least one report suggesting that half of all jobs might be automated over the next two decades.

Comment author: Lumifer 11 January 2014 03:11:07PM 3 points [-]

You are overstating the report's conclusions -- it said the "jobs might be at risk" which sounds to me like "we want to sound impressive but actually don't have anything to say".

I've paged through the report and wasn't impressed. For example (emphasis mine), "...First, together with a group of ML researchers, we subjectively hand-labelled 70 occupations, assigning 1 if automatable, and 0 if not. ... Our label assignments were based on eyeballing the O∗NET tasks and job description of each occupation." Essentially this a bunch of guesses and opinions with little support in the way of evidence.

Comment author: Alsadius 10 January 2014 07:57:52PM 1 point [-]

Productivity, agreed.

Ameliorating the effects of old age, disagree - too many people treat retirement at 65 to be a God-given right for any real bump in the retirement age to solve things any time soon. Remember, this was an age set by Otto von Bismarck, and it's remained unchanged since - we've already had massive increases in quality of life for the elderly, and it's done nothing to improve the financial footings of the pension system(Quite the opposite, really).

Automating the care of the elderly will help some, but you're still left with extremely low workforce participation and a very high dependent ratio. That's not a pleasant situation, even if you don't need millions of people working in nursing homes.