Doomerism is a kind of religion that goes back as far as they eye can see. What's interesting about it is that in spite of being perpetually incorrect in its myriad predictions, it continues to adapt and attract new adherents.
See also (recent only):
- Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Malthusian collapse)
- The Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth (resource exhaustion)
- Thomas Malthus' Population growth / famine cycle
- James Lovelock's Global warming catastrophe predictions
I am not a doomer, nor a Malthusian, merely a realist. There are a few points I could make briefly:
- Everything lasts forever, until it doesn't. Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted for thousands of years, until it didn't. Any Egyptian could point to thousands of years of their heritage and say it hasn't ended yet, therefore any prediction that it will end is clearly bad and dumb. Then it was conquered by Romans, and then by Islam, with its language, culture, and religion extinguished, extant only in monuments, artifacts and history books.
- We have nuclear weapons now. Any prediction of an imminent end of human civilization before then would be purely religious, but there is a real reason to believe things have changed. We are currently in a time of relative peace secured by burning resources for prosperity, but what happens when those resources run out and world conflict for increasingly scarce resources is renewed with greater vigor?
- Note that I did not outright predict the end of human civilization, merely noted it as a plausible worst-case scenario. If civilization continues on more-or-less as it is, in the next couple of hundred years, we will drive countless more species to extinction. We will destroy so much more of our environment with climate change, deforestation, strip mining, overfishing, pollution, etc. We will deplete water reservoirs and we will deplete oil, helium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, and various rare earth elements. Not a complete depletion, but they will become so scarce as to not be widely available or wasted for the general population's benefit. If billions of people are still alive then, which I explicitly suggested was a possibility, they will as a simple matter-of-fact live much less comfortably prosperous lives than us. It will not take a great catastrophe to result in a massive reduction in living standards, because our current living standards are inherently unsustainable.
Well, for starters, they definitively passed the Turing test a few years ago. The fact that many regard them as equivalent in skill to a junior dev is also, IMO, the stuff of science fiction.
how do you market that as a product that is needed by other people?
there are already companies that advertise Ai date partners, Ai therapists and Ai friends - and that gets a lot of flame about being manipulative and harmful
Starting this year, an academy member was required to watch all films in a category in order to vote on that category. I’m sure compliance was not perfect, but it seems a much better process than the honor system.
Remember that exec tech salaries are extreme outliers. I worked for an exec in manufacturing. He had full p&l responsibility for a business segment with ~150 employees, $27 million in revenue at 40% gross margins, and a production plant. His total comp was ~$300k.
Now just think of the comp levels in sectors like government, education, etc.
> Remember that exec tech salaries are extreme outliers.
It's the combination of tech and big or fast growing companies.
People who operate in FAANG or Silicon Valley bubbles (or who spend too much time on Blind) can lose track of what salaries look like in the rest of the world.
I often share Buffer's open salary page because their compensation is actually pretty normal from all of the data I've seen and hiring I've done: https://buffer.com/salaries
Every time it gets posted there are comments from people aghast that the software engineers "only" make $200K and in disbelief that the CEO's salary is "only" $300K.
According to OECD [1], population growth outran capital, housing, and infrastructure. So it's kind of like they didn't have enough "slots" to plug all of these additional people into.
They don't claim this is to only or even primary cause of Canada's weak per-capita GDP growth though. As you would expect, there are many, many causes.
Yeah, I think this is the real answer here, not the elaborate social signaling/insider conspiracy takes. These are people who are communicating non-stop and are mostly are boomers who did not grow up on keyboards.
See also (recent only):
- Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Malthusian collapse)
- The Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth (resource exhaustion)
- Thomas Malthus' Population growth / famine cycle
- James Lovelock's Global warming catastrophe predictions
- Hubbert's (et al) Peak oil economic disaster
- Molina & Rowland's Ozone catastrophe
- Metcalfe's internet collapse
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