Non-Malthusian Scenarios

My claims are mostly about median income, not average.

Why do you care more about median income than average?

I am not making strong 99.9% confident claims; I am making my best estimates. So even if I cannot prove that any future physics will limit economic value per atom, I can use our best understanding of physics today to estimate such limits.

Yes, I guess I'm more interested in exploring the full distribution of outcomes rather than the best estimate.

On your capital argument, I think you need to learn more econ growth theory.

That argument has been bugging me too as not being quite right, but I'm having trouble articulating why. Can you say a few words about why it's wrong, or do I really need to read another literature to understand the error?

And why can't having kids be a good way to push memes?

Suppose such memes do dominate the meme pool. Still, at any moment a new meme may arise and succeed in diverting resources away from having kids and into reproducing itself, and cause a drop in population growth.

Strong security might allow high median income in the nations that limit population, but that would not assure the global median remained high.

Strong security by itself may not be enough to ensure a high global median income, but strong security plus some other effect which causes a large majority of nations to adopt population controls, would. (Without strong security, every nation would have to agree to adopt population controls, which is much less likely.)

Future intelligences may demarcate identity in such a way that the members of the 'proletariat' are just components of 'capita,' without independent desires.

So in this scenario, a "capita" would be like a hive mind? Interesting, but what prevents such "individuals" from being driven to a subsistence standard of living by Malthusian dynamics operating at this higher level of organization?

Or labor might be done by independent systems that we would not classify as capita for other reasons, e.g. the workforce of Bostrom's "uninhabited society" in his Future of Human Evolution paper.

This one seems to be covered by the "Non-Human Capital" scenario.

Being able to create new universes isn't the same as being able to push 10^70 creatures from our universe into each new universe. You could still have subsistence income for the creatures in each universe.

Memes are not really a solution to Malthus's dilemma. They are just a different type of substrate for inheritance. The world filling with memes might indeed prevent the world from filling up with DNA - but then you have the exact same Malthusian problem all over again with the new medium of inheritance.

But memes are not morally relevant entities. Who cares if they suffer from the Malthusian problem, as long as human beings can have a high standard of living? (I'm assuming a non-upload scenario here, in case there's any confusion about that.)

The standard of living for those that remain could be high, though.

Yes, that was the point.

The world filling with memes might indeed prevent the world from filling up with DNA - but then you have the exact same Malthusian problem all over again with the new medium of inheritance.

I don't see how the problem would arise. Genes replicate by increasing the number of people. Memes (of the kind we'd like) replicate by infecting existing people. So by diverting human efforts from genes to this kind of memes, we reduce population growth.

what if children get enough rights that they can choose whether they have siblings?

This might or might not have much of an effect. I requested a new baby sister when I was four (clarifying that if it was a boy he should be "sent back"). I got one. (I honestly don't know if my request had a thing to do with it.) I proceeded to regret it for about the next decade (no longer), but she was already there. That having been said, I do plan to consult my future kids before giving them siblings or (should the situation come up) stepfamily. It'd be interesting to see how, if at all, that affects the makeup of families should the practice become widespread.

In the long term (and I mean the very long term) people will evolve to get around the obstacles that stop them producing the children they could.

If contraception decouples sex from reproduction, people will evolve to be less interested in sex and more directly interested in babies.

If entertainment proves more compelling than having kids, people will evolve to be less entertainable.

If being a responsible, well adjusted person is limiting family size, people will evolve to be irresponsible, poorly adjusted people.

This occurred to me too, but on second reflection this seems like a special case of the "Selfish Memes" scenario. The meme being "the costs of (marginal) children are not worth the benefits".

For what its worth, I also think wealth-induced population stability is a real possibility.

Surely we have good evidence that the growth rate in income per capita was very near zero over a million years The Malthusian theory clearly predicts that near zero number - what other theory do you prefer?

taw, on OB:

If Malthusian hypothesis was true, population would stay stable and slowly increasing with agricultural productivity increases, and most of all, it would very rapidly recover from population shocks like wars and diseases.

No, I don't think the Malthusian hypothesis says that; in particular, it doesn't talk about rapidity of recovery, only that population will keep growing in the face of any excess food.

no recovery during 400-1000 in spite of ample available land (against Malthusian hypothesis)

Yes, that would be evidence if there were truly available land. But the wikipedia article you cite seems to say that the land was not safe to farm. It took the shift from "mobile bandits" to "stationary bandits" to have a real supply of land. (Maybe this is what you say about slavery.) I don't see this complaint as very different from saying that the 400-600 population collapse disproves the malthusian hypothesis.

more or less doubling of population 1000-1350 ... and supposedly with increased quality of life, and increased wages etc. relative to previous period (against Malthusian hypothesis)

I think you are misreading wikipedia. I think that the establishment of law lead to higher quality of life, which lead to expansion, driving down the quality of life. That happens to fit the malthusian hypothesis. In particular, that article says that Europe had run out of food by 1350. This could be for malthusian reasons or it could be the exogenous shock of the end of the warm period. I think some people claim that the black death lead to higher per capita wealth than 1200, which suggests malthusian poverty after 1200. Wikipedia merely says higher wealth than 1300, which isn't saying much, since the climate was deteriorating by then.

The failure of Tuscany to return to its 1350 peak until 1850 is a serious problem for a malthusian hypothesis.

The faster climate, war, and disease change, the less important malthusian effects are. I think that they are visible in midieval european history, at least in the 1000-1300 expansion; others claim to see malthusian poverty in the following expansion. But perhaps they are not important; malthusian effects should probably not be blamed for the poverty of 600. China has a more stable history and, I am told, more visible malthusian effects, particularly the exploitation of poor land.

Any theories about why human populations typically don't get near Malthusian bounds?

In the very long term, concepts like "population" may be hard to measure. The clear identifiable edges between humans may be historical accidents, sometime around the evolution of multicellularity and/or immune systems. Accidents, that with careful refactoring, might be smoothed away.

Do you count bacteria as individuals? Or is the line drawn better around bacterial colonies? For a boundary-blurring example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvox

The Gaia hypothesis argues that our ecosystem as a whole has some aspects of homeostasis, making it in some ways similar to a single organism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Suppose that in the future, civilization as a whole has some aspects of being a single organism, but also some aspects of being composed of a small number of separate organisms. Suppose that each of those components are similarly blurry, and could be construed as being composed of subcomponents, and so on.

This "fractal population" scenario demonstrates that, in order for the prediction "population will probably grow until it reaches subsistence" to be falsifiable, the notions of "population" and "subsistence" need more explication.

This is like most of the responses to Robin on OB; extreme examples of wishful thinking.

Singleton isn't. Robin both hates it and doesn't think it's likely. It makes me very uncomfortable... but a Singleton is clearly not subject to evolutionary pressures.

The only two that seem to have a chance of avoiding Hansonian scenarios in the very long term, IMO, are the "unlimited economic growth is possible" scenario (which requires us to be wrong about physics, AFAICT) or a very powerful and far-thinking singleton. The selection for expansion is an incredibly strong optimization process, and it could only be kept in check by a stronger optimization process with a goal of keeping it in check. But that's not a priori impossible, nor an especially unlikely subgoal for (say) a FAI.

Given current cosmological theory, our access to negentropy is limited, so that we probably won't get to see the effects of natural selection go to the limit as generations approach infinity.

Consider the scale of the living standard drop Robin is predicting: roughly an order of magnitude. That's much larger than the great depression - which set the stage for WWII. A prospect of an order of magnitude drop in living standards would probably be enough to trigger wars of extermination. To put it another way, a cross between "Strong Security" and a policy by population-limiting nations to limits the populations of neighbors as well (with nukes if needed) could be stable.

These arguments all fail for the same reason.

Superstimuli: "most people" is an important qualifier. The Permian mass extinction eliminated most life on earth, yet it didn't take long for those life forms that did survive to multiply back to malthusian limits. So in a superstimulus scenario, (like virtual reality/wireheading, etc.) the people who opt out and keep reproducing will continue increasing exponentially, until they hit malthusian bounds.

Default birth control: No-brainer. The people who turn it off have high genetic fitness, those who keep the default birth control have zero fitness. The only difference is the selection is for pronatalist sentiment instead of forgetfulness/irresponsibility.

Nudges: modern society already is punitive toward having many children, as they are essentially consumption goods and not productive capital from their parents' perspective. Even though children are already costly non-producers, there are sub groups that highly value producing many kids. This cannot change through "gentle" approaches. Natural selection is a powerful force.

These are answers to a different question: how could a singleton limit population? More precisely, they're answers to the question of what a singleton could do now, since in the long run, people would evolve around any particular mechanism that doesn't wipe them out, so the singleton would have to adapt.

You could take the current splitting as showing there is already a vast rate of population increase. However, the analysis of per-capita income is robust to splitting or joining individuals across quantum branches. If people can grow kids within a branch faster than they can grow wealth within a branch, incomes fall regardless of how fast the number of branches grow.

I don't believe in MWI, but I try to understand it, and I can't get this to make sense. Reproduction is made conditional on some quantum event, so that it happens in some futures and not in others - OK. These futures are supposed to be in coherent superposition - not sure what the point of that stipulation is; is the idea that the separate futures are given a chance to recombine at some point?? But they can't recombine unless they come to resemble each other, which is a bit of a problem when one future contains lots of people who don't exist in the other one! And finally, doesn't this situation result in a Malthusian scenario in the branch which does reproduce??

it has to be stable essentially forever

Not necessarily. A singleton could come to power, genetically engineer humanity with a fertility cap, then fall. In the long run, evolution will probably find a way around such a cap, but in the mean time another singleton could arise and reset the clock.

Yes, I think to a first approximation it's equally hard to have confidence in either of those predictions. Which is why I'm not arguing for "future people will be very rich" but rather that Robin may be too confident in "future people will be very poor".

In other words, when it becomes clear that the next generation will be worse off than the current generation because there are too many people, it is very likely that anti-fertility memes and possibly laws will become prevalent.

I don't know about laws, but I don't see why “high fertility decreases happiness of humans” necessarily implies “low-fertility–causing memes have a reproductive advantage”. Nor why that advantage would shadow that of other memes.

Insofar as people are mortal, significant changes in fertility and population can happen extremely quickly.

Local (time-wise) changes can be quick and large in any direction, true, but I thought the argument was that as long as fitness selection works, in the long term, it always finally pushes them back towards the Malthusian limit.

So even in an extremely sane and hedonistic population (say, immortals who mostly never choose to reproduce), as long as some inheritable trait (genes, memes or something else) [a] increases the likeliness of reproduction relative to the average and [b] varies among the population, eventually individuals with that trait will dominate because... well, they're the only ones who reproduce.

(Of course, if society can perfectly control all such factors, then the problem disappears. It's just that it doesn't seem possible even in theory.)