↔️ Is progress possible in an empty world?

I think you can guess what the answer to that question might depend on...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

Call them super-optimists, singularitarians, or collectively the San Francisco Consensus. If these folks are right about the ongoing pace of improvement in AI capabilities and the nearly limitless upside (or downside from the doomer perspective) of those capabilities, sometime sooner rather than later, we will enter technological Terra Incognita, an undiscovered country for which we have no map.

Good luck to us! May you live in interesting times, and all that.

Yet in what’s an amazing coincidence—or perhaps not a coincidence if you believe in the “simulation hypothesis”—the Rise of the Smart Machines will be happening simultaneously with the Decline of Homo sapiens. Right now, humanity is likely having fewer kids than we need merely to keep a constant long-run population. In the world of demographics, this is another unknown land.

“As far as we can tell,” write economists Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (University of Pennsylvania) and Patrick Norrick (Northwestern University) in the new paper “Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World,” such an occurrence “has never happened before in our history as a species, not even during wars or pandemics.”