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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

We don't need UBI, because automation will naturally decrease prices, eventually to the negative. That means there will be more stuff than anyone can consume, thus it's less expensive to give it away than to store or demolish it.

I think this will lead to the end of the human race. We are becoming useless, and have already stopped reproducing. Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand. When it fails, the remaining people will die, or start everything again without any technology.

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A species doesn't really need to be "useful" in order to survive. It just needs to reproduce or continue living. We haven't stopped reproducing as a species. I can't imagine a future where humans decide to let ourselves die out just because we've built lots of amazing machines that take care of all of our needs.

> Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand.

I think the human population might shrink to somewhere around 10-100 million over the next 10,000 years. It's hard to conceptualize, but humans were around 10,000 years ago, and we'll be around 10,000 years from now.

I personally believe that we're heading towards a utopian future, although there will be a lot of serious bumps along the way. Maybe we'll agree to maintain a population of 10 million humans on earth, and there will be many more living on interstellar arks that are slowly heading towards distant planets. We will have achieved immortality, so the birth rate will be very close to zero.

The problem might be that 10-100 million people isn't enough to maintain the level of technology or keep it in control. Now we have 7.7 billion people and we can barely keep important software secure. I think we are still way too dependent on a very few exceptional people.

Everything depends on whether the machines can fix and improve themselves, and do we want to give them that level of independence. If they're independent, I'm not sure if they would want to keep us alive.

I think we should aim for as many people as possible, but currently it seems a lost cause.

There's lots of things that are technology that are not all that complicated.

Like a shovel or whatever. If you assume an order of magnitude drop in population, there would be plenty of refined metals just sitting around to maintain quite a base of simpler technology.

I also wonder if we will see cultures/groups emerge that keep on reproducing at high growth even in the face of economic security.

> That means there will be more stuff than anyone can consume, thus it's less expensive to give it away than to store or demolish it.

You could also, you know, stop producing stuff at that point?

Eventually to the negative? We aren't FORCED to create things. Even once the marginal cost is effectively zero, things still have a cost. Just make less of it.

wall-e

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