Population Collapse & the AI Explosion

Part I: The ingredients for collapse.

We are hearing two separate topics.

One is the threat of AI.

Hide your wife, daughter and husband too because AI is coming for everyone. At least their job.

This has already started.

The other is population collapse.

A long emerging trend driven by the inverse relationship between income and number of children. As the general global income increases there are fewer and fewer children being born.

What is not being discussed is the conjunction between AI and population collapse.

If the increase in income was the initial spark for population collapse, AI is the gasoline that is starting to pour onto the spark.

It is fair and perhaps even conservative to say that AI is in its infancy.

We are at the very beginning. When electricity was first discovered it was used for lighting. Only. And now lighting is just a mundane way in which electricity is used.

We are in the lighting stage of AI.

Rodolfo Clix

What is coming up is a fundamental sea change for every part of life including every industry.

Jobs requiring specialization including in the medical, legal, and policy fields are already being impacted and augmented by AI. The common example is Radiology where AI can now analyze for certain diseases better than x-rays better than humans. And it will only improve. You can now get reliable high quality diagnosis from an AI for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time. But every industry that analyses data is being disrupted. And the main trend is that what would previously take one people will now take only one.

When the USPS introduced computers to analyze dead letter mail, letters with poorly written addresses, the computers would successfully process less than half of the letters. Within 20 years it is now processing in excess of 99%. That last one percent is where humans are still needed. And every-time a human interprets a dead letter the machine learns and gets that little bit smarter. Which means that in another 20 years it will be likely that all letter addresses that are decipherable will be deciphered by AI.

uspsoig.gov

But the impact of AI so far, while incredible, is only operating at 1/2 capacity. Maybe even less. There are step changes coming that will significantly increase the economic viability of AI and that is in the area of general robotics.

A generalized labor force or artificial agents that operate in the real physical world will result in the single greatest change in employment for humans. From transportation, delivery services, manual labor, security, customer service, food services and more - we will see robots and smart agents fill out roles in the world at a skill level comparable to or greater than humans.

Instead of 10 human employees, there will be 9 robots and 1 human.

And none of this requires us to solve the holy grail of AI which is artificial general intelligence (AGI). If and when that is solved, all these predictions become moot. AGI will remove the need for most humans. AGI will drive change on scales and with speeds we can’t even begin to comprehend.

So let’s focus on the world before AGI.

What will happen when 9 in 10 humans are not needed?

There are lofty and foolhardy thoughts around guaranteed income.

These experiments are deeply flawed because they presume that the micro economics of a contained and limited experiment will play out in the macro scale. These experiments have an artificial input which is your tax dollars and no study to date has given a credible answer as to how the tax loop will be closed. They focus instead on the downstream effects hoping that the upstream factors will somehow fall into place.

They won’t.

When 1/10th of the human population are the ones actually contributing to society the remaining 9/10ths will be pushed to the brink. There will be violence, there will be war, and there will be a lot of deaths. All of which, on top of their direct effects on the population, will further decelerate population growth.

Look at what happens today when economies crash.

When there is fear in the economy the desire to procreate starts to shrivel up.

prb.org

It is an existing and reasonable response to a problem we don’t know how to solve.

In the past when economies have collapsed or when jobs have moved away we have found ways to repurpose and re-educate the workforce. Using the special ingredient of human intelligence we have been able to tap into education and retraining as a means of rejuvenating the work force. When manufacturing left many regions of the united states, like Detroit, we saw significant collapse of those regions but a nominal stabilization over time.

zillow.com

The difference this time will be that the special ingredient of human intelligence is exactly what humans are competing against. Up until now the ability to drive through a city requires a human. But in the very near future humans behind the wheel of a car will be a liability. A risk too great to allow. AI will be safer and generally more reliable than humans.

The re-tasking of human intelligence will be met repeatedly with ever increasing competition.

The fewer humans roles that will remain will be related to tasks that require increasingly higher intelligence and/or more specialized skills.

And here is our critical flaw. We cannot change our intelligence.

Not in the time we have. And because AI will consume jobs across the capability spectrum people of all types of intelligence will feel an impact. Generally the more intelligent you are the more choices you’ll have but overall you will have fewer choices than you do today or twenty years ago.

Detroit didn’t bounce back with tech savvy AI engineers. It stalled hard for a long time and it was only through many attempts that the economy started to stabilize. It has found the places where the population and the tasks available are compatible.

A task that will just get harder and harder in the future.

What would guaranteed income have done for detroit? Money would have been siphoned from elsewhere to the local population but would it have fundamentally transformed the outcomes? Detroit already had accessible education and childhood care programs. It may have accelerated the time it took for detroit to stabilize, but eventually the population would have found the same normal. And when the money siphon dried up, which in inevitably would, the city would have gone through another reset.

What is clear is that the ingredients of collapse are here. AI will reset the global population to a new and much lower number. And the journey to that number will be the stuff of nightmares.

Stay tuned for Part II: The Anatomy of Collapse. A step by step preview of what is to come.

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