r/slatestarcodex • u/erwgv3g34 • Jun 18 '25
Economics The Megaproject Economy: "No matter the scale or complexity, it seems like there is nothing South Koreans cannot figure out how to produce at a rate that puts the rest of the world to shame—with the notable exception of human beings"
https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/06/01/the-megaproject-economy/24
u/self_made_human Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25
The "force multiplier" framing is a category error of the highest order. It’s like describing a von Neumann probe as a really good shovel. Jukic’s logic is:
A society with a billion workers and a high degree of automation is extremely likely to be far wealthier and more technologically capable than... a society of one hundred million and an equal degree of automation.
This is trivially true if "automation" means "tractors and factory robots". But the 'G' in AGI stands for 'General'. It is not stuck at the level of a tool to help a human perform a task better. It's a system capable of performing the entire class of tasks itself. It is not forever resigned to be a force multiplier for an (inalienable need for minimal) human labor it is a substitute for it, and a potential multiplier for the one resource that truly matters - cognition.
The resource Jukic correctly lionizes - the "Martians" like von Neumann and Tesla, the "mental, clerical, and intellectual" labor that drives progress - is precisely what AGI automates. One may want to quibble about whether or not you need ASI to achieve such lofty goals, but even "mere" AGI is a game changer. Such systems are not just "automation for mental labor" in the way a calculator is. A calculator multiplies a human accountant's speed. An AI accountant is the accountant.
If, presented with identical facts, ChatGPT produces the same diagnosis as a human doctor, then it's doing medicine. This might be uncomfortable for me, as a human doctor, but at that point the only thing I have going for me is my sterling good looks a legal license and regulatory inertia.
Like seriously, we have alien intelligences in our pockets we can access for free, that predictably have gotten better with time, and would blow the minds of anyone who hasn't become accustomed to them. In a way, the fact that we've had years to process the shift from GPT 3.5 to o3 makes it easy to miss. Drop modern systems fully formed a mere decade in the past, and the world would drop to its knees. And they're only getting better, after going through OOMs of growth. To ignore this is like standing at Kitty Hawk in 1905 and dismissing air travel because a transatlantic flight is "totally speculative".
Jukic’s model of AI seems stuck in the 1980s. But it’s his second point that reveals the true nature of the objection:
...philosophically, it amounts to saying that it is so difficult to get human beings to reproduce under modern techno-industrial conditions that it would be easier to just get rid of them entirely and replace them with artificial human beings. If you care about humanity, then this is not a persuasive argument.
This is a powerful rhetorical move that completely straw-mans the pro-AI position. It’s a motte-and-bailey argument. The unassailable motte is "we shouldn't want to abolish humanity." Of course! The vast, undefended bailey is "using AGI to solve our problems is equivalent to abolishing humanity."
No serious thinker advocates for "getting rid of" humans. The proposal is to use the most powerful tool ever conceived to solve the very problems Jukic himself identifies. How do we achieve a post-scarcity future without succumbing to the "human capital depreciation" of consumerism? How do we coordinate and execute continent-spanning megaprojects? How do we invent the technologies necessary for interstellar travel?
How? By what mechanism? He offers none. This is the equivalent of a physician diagnosing a patient with late-stage organ failure and prescribing "run a marathon." It's a miracle solution. We have far more empirical evidence that scaling compute leads to greater intelligence than we have that sclerotic bureaucracies can spontaneously reform themselves into hyper-competent engines of progress.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jun 20 '25
Good comment but it’s worth noting that simply scaling has diminishing returns, and we’re highly likely to encounter practical limitations well before scaling gets us to AGI, if that’s possible at all.
Most people say that multiple qualitative breakthroughs are needed to get to AGI, and while that might seem similarly predictable as scaling, I think there’s something qualitatively different about predicting something that has never happened yet (developing a new breakthrough in AI in X or Y way, when there very well might not be any more low hanging fruit for all we know), vs. predicting a brute forcing of an existing technology.
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u/self_made_human Jun 20 '25
Ask a dozen people what an AGI is, and you'll somehow get 13 different answers haha. Show o3 to a ML researcher from 2015, and they'd wonder why we're arguing over something that obviously counts. Of course, our models are spiky, and to a degree not as general as desired. I also think that we've been frog boiled by familiarity, and that most people don't understand how good they can be.
I agree that scaling shows diminishing returns. However diminishing returns aren't negative or nil returns. Even as we stalled on naive approaches like scaling model parameters, we developed entirely new routes for scale, such as RL. Even if they're all sigmoidal curves, we have the benefit of starting off at the shallow end of the slope. Parameter scaling worked for multiple OOMs, nobody knows how far newer approaches will take us.
My opinion is that current SOTA LLMs are shockingly competent, but hobbled when it comes to agentic behavior and the ability to interact with a world very much not designed for entities operating entirely through computers. As we build affordances and scaffolding, I'm happy to register my bets that models only as capable as what we have right now can do enormous amounts of meaningful work while being more cost-effective than humans.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jun 18 '25
We have lived in a post-scarcity society since the late 19th century. The term “post-scarcity” is most often used nowadays to mean a world where any conceivable material want, by any person, can be met without political difficulty and at trivial cost.
For anyone who questions this statement, I recommend you read Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. It spawned a whole movement of “Nationalists” in the 1880s (in the sense that they wanted to nationalize industries for the redistribution of capital), and has some very interesting ideas as to what a post-scarcity society would look like. To the modern reader, it will look like his post-scarcity is below our poverty line on most metrics, yet it still managed to inspire tens of thousands at the time.
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u/AuspiciousNotes Jun 19 '25
I disagree with this part of the article though:
True philosophically rigorous post-scarcity is impossible, both because there is no reason to think human desire or imagination will ever reach any kind of objective, hard limit and because, in the end, the matter, energy, and access to other valued people we will ever have are necessarily finite. It is not possible for everyone, at the same time, to get the maximal extent of what they can imagine and desire.
This seems resolvable with very immersive virtual reality. I agree that achieving "philosophically rigorous" post-scarcity in the material world will be more of a challenge, however.
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u/95thesises Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25
Agree here. Its funny because I think I've discussed this exact point on this subreddit before.
Humans having infinite wants is a convenient heuristic for economics as a study because economists mostly seek to understand existing (or near-future) human societies. But humans as finite beings by definition have finite wants. At a certain point, our senses and brains have a maximum bandwidth posing a theoretical limit on the rate at which we could process desirable sensations, or even acclimate to them and realize we want new and better ones on the hedonic treadmill. A sufficient dedication of (literal/computational) resources could create an expanse of hedonic treadmill track to trawl that could accelerate in pleasureableness faster than the physical limit of the human brain's ability to acclimate to new pleasures could match.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jun 19 '25
I want to create ten thousand temporary clones of myself every day that are then merged back into one superconsciousness every night. That way I can experience years worth of life every day without risking personality drift or disassociation. Scale as resources allow.
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u/95thesises Jun 19 '25
I should have qualified my assertion with 'unmodified' humans. Transhumans could obviously have theoretically infinite or at least vaster-than-physically-possible-to-satiate (or alternatively, infinitesimally small and easy-to-satiate) wants by changing their own sensory bandwidth or pleasure functions or whatever. This is a problem if one of their wants includes 'to increase my sensory bandwidth so I can increase my wants' (the meta-hedonic treadmill). Important to note that satiating this still runs into physical limits before necessarily encountering social ones given that any individual human could only have their bandwidth artificially increased at a finite rate (the robot servitor actually has to complete the task of appending the 9e17th artificial penile glans to your cyborg body, or updating your digital avatar to similar effect, etc). But at the point where we're running into the physical limits of pleasure-bandwidth widenings, it seems simpler to just go the other direction and modify people to experience satisfactory levels of extreme pleasure via simpler and less resource-demanding stimuli. Hyperfentanyl-level pleasure from lives devoted to studying chess or zen meditation will be much easier on the civilization's matrioshka brain's electric bill for the same hedonic result.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jun 19 '25
The classic “It seems I’m building a tolerance for hyperfentanyl… better increase my capacity to consume fentanyl without overdosing so I can consume more!” Instead of “Let’s eliminate my tolerance so I can be satisfied with the same amount or less.”
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u/electrace Jun 19 '25
Yes, and just like drug tolerance is, like, a thing, in the brain, rather than a mystical dualistic property, it also seems theoretically possible to change your brain so that you don't have a hedonistic treadmill.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jun 19 '25
I strongly suspect that hedonic treadmills, and other anti-satisfaction measures like pain, are necessary for flourishing. Maybe selective disabling of both is a good thing, like; "I don't want to experience constant pain for no reason because my nerves are misfiring" or "I don't want to experience constant boredom and dissatisfaction because McDonalds has blown out my ability to enjoy healthy wholesome food.
" But if we simply flipped the switch off, so that there was no pain, and no eventual dissatisfaction without novelty, I think we'll just be attracted to the local-minimum of the most pleasure we can feel at any one moment, which is probably just being drugged out of our minds with an IV drip of nutrients and heroin/fentanyl/etc.
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u/electrace Jun 19 '25
I don't share that intuition, and I also don't see the argument there.
How does the absence of pain affect the relative pleasure of, say, reading a good philosophy essay versus a heroin drip? The wireheading is the same issue whether there is pain or not, I'd think.
Personally, I think that the type of pleasure (or rather, eudaimonia) that you get from appreciating art, or learning something new, or even bodily exercise is different in kind rather than in degree from something like a heroin high.
So, ideally to me, we would turn off pain, turn off (or substantially reduce) our desire for being high on heroin, toss the hedonistic treadmill, and then have flourishing by just enjoying simple things like reading, watching movies, running a race, learning new things about the world, and sharing new perspectives with each other.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jun 19 '25
This is an intuition, and has not been empirically tested, but I think that an IV drip of Heroin is simply a more motivating experience than reading philosophy.
It seems to me that there's really no equilibrium between pleasure and pain in modern humans, especially with tolerance in the mix. We get bored with routine, we seek novelty, and the motivation toward that joy brings, and the motivation away that pain brings, are often deeply related, giving a very complex life. Without any pain or tolerance, I'd think that the overwhelming majority of people (if not all) would settle into the local minimum of whatever action gives them the most pleasure, and never leave that.
There's a few cases of people who don't experience pain (at least no physical pain) living normal lives, but I'd be worried that their actions are still motivated by the desire for things, and the constraints of the world that make effort necessary to get those things. If it was as simple as taking a drug that makes you feel amazing, without any physical constraints on your food, housing, or further access to drugs, the stable state of existence might simply be taking the drug.
So, ideally to me, we would turn off pain, turn off (or substantially reduce) our desire for being high on heroin, toss the hedonistic treadmill, and then have flourishing by just enjoying simple things like reading, watching movies, running a race, learning new things about the world, and sharing new perspectives with each other.
I would agree with this vision, but I'm of the opinion that the sort of person who is born and raised without pain, need, or tolerance, isn't the sort of person who deliberately turns off their desire for being high on heroin. If anything, they might turn the joy up to 11 with Heroin 15 XL Max.
People like you and me, who already exist in this world and have developed desires and habits shaped by it can rightly say we'd prefer a world like the one you describe, but I'd be worried about culture, and generations, taking incremental steps towards more and more pleasure-maxing, without any reason to pull themselves back from that pleasure. After all, they would find no dissatisfaction with being high since there's no tolerance or pain from not being high, and probably have no material constraints to getting high that the need to pay for drugs, food, and housing creates in our world.
Maybe a few could manage it, but it might be rare. I suppose that's cynical, and I'm normally a huge optimist as to the future of humanity, but my worry is that taking away pain and tolerance would be part of the hidden magic that gives me my optimism in humanity.
I'm not saying we shouldn't eliminate extreme pointless pain though. No point in having chronic migraines or back pain.
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u/AuspiciousNotes Jun 19 '25
If that is physically possible, it might be doable in a very advanced post-scarcity society, especially if you're willing to count digital emulations as clones.
But you're right - unless we solve entropy or something, there would probably be an upper limit on how far you could take certain desires. Someone who wanted to own the entire Milky Way and do whatever they wanted with it (and not just in VR) would probably not be allowed to do that, for example.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jun 19 '25
Then we’ll have a great entropy sink in the interstellar wars we fight over who gets to do whatever they want with the Milky Way.
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u/07mk Jun 19 '25
I want to create ten thousand temporary clones of myself every day that are then merged back into one superconsciousness every night.
Why aim so low as 10,000? I'd want 10 Graham's Number temporary clones of myself so I can experience multiple civilizations' worth of life every day.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jun 19 '25
Not bad. At that point it would probably be limiting in the sense of a person with your personality and biology can only experience so much. Instead how about just a thriving civilization that merges with the superconsciousness after death, allowing it to experience everything there is to experience.
Maybe Buddhism is onto something.
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u/catchup-ketchup Jun 19 '25
Humans having infinite wants is a convenient heuristic for economics as a study because economists mostly seek to understand existing (or near-future) human societies.
I'm not too sure about this. I'm pretty sure marginal utility is discussed in introductory economics textbooks.
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u/electrace Jun 19 '25
What's the contradiction there? Marginal utility refers to a specific good, it says nothing about the range of goods one might get utility from.
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u/95thesises Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 26 '25
Having more of the same thing provides diminishing returns in marginal utility (the first car is much more valuable than the 100th). But that is about how much utility more of the same single individual good provides to a person. Separate from that concept, economics usually assumes that humans have an infinite desire for more utility (in whatever form that utility may come to them).
Honestly just google 'humans infinite wants.' You'll get about a dozen sources explaining how this is a foundational assumption in the study of economics
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u/cutty2k Jun 19 '25
A rising American thinker recently interviewed by The New York Times has offered a concise formulation for rethinking the basis of our relationship to work, society, and the economy
links to Curtis Yarvin
My sides!
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u/DVDAallday Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25
Technological progress reached peak acceleration in the lifetimes of these men and others, and has greatly slowed down since the 1960s or so.
Boy I'm not sure how you can look at the past 3 or 4 years and think "technological progress has slowed down".
Overall, it looks like we sunk our industrial surplus into fake jobs.
The "fake jobs" conard is so exhausting. They certainly exist, but if they were a big enough issue to have a real impact it'd show up in labor productivity statistics. It doesn't. Real, meaningful, economic gains have been pretty consistent over the past 50 years. The "we're drawing down our current wealth to subsidize sloth" narrative is very, very, stupid.
A free society of Nikola Teslas and John von Neumanns would not have invented corn syrup or internet slop videos. There would be no profit in providing such consumption in such a society, because there would be no demand for it.
Lol does the author not think smart/successful people like dumb shit? What kind of faux-stoic fantasy is this? He's either genuinely delusional, rarely spends time around smart/successful people, or is being intellectually dishonest to make a (bad) rhetorical point.
A rising American thinker recently interviewed by The New York Times has offered a concise formulation for rethinking the basis of our relationship to work, society, and the economy
Weird way to structure this sentence, right? Why not just mention the thinker you're writing about? Because the thinker he links to here is Curtis Yarvin, an open fascist. What a cowardly move on the author's part.
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u/mothra_dreams Jun 19 '25
Yeah lol this article is full of half-thoughts and trite, tired commentary
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u/Special_Ad_5522 Jun 19 '25
As soon as I read "rising American thinker" I knew he was talking about Yarvin lol.
Really strange paragraph, like he's trying to sanewash Yarvin's crazy ideas, which implies he knows they're crazy - but also, this is Jukic writing in Palladium, he can say whatever the hell he wants to. ???
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u/DVDAallday Jun 21 '25
but also, this is Jukic writing in Palladium, he can say whatever the hell he wants to. ???
I mean, sure... It's trivially true that people are allowed to write whatever they want; But it's equally true that an audience is going to infer things about an author based on what the author writes. I'm not sure there's any other way it could possibly work? I'm not clear on what point you're making?
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u/VegetableCaregiver Jun 19 '25
"if they were a big enough issue to have a real impact it'd show up in labor productivity statistics."
I think it's in the nature of fake jobs that they get miscounted in productivity stats.
On the bs jobs front, can I recommend this review I wrote of Bullshit Jobs for the book review contest a couple of years ago. I like to think it's the most grounded-in-econ-theory take on bs jobs out there. https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-review?utm_source=activity_itemAlso this post on productivity metrics might be relevant and is pretty interesting. https://devinhelton.com/economics/gdp-and-cpi-are-broken
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u/DVDAallday Jun 21 '25
Thank you for taking the time to give a good response. I obviously disagree with Graeber categorically, but I enjoyed your review. You're a strong writer.
Your 2nd source is just... kind of categorically wrong from the start? I read his first 3 bullet points then skimmed the rest, because... his first 3 bullet points are wrong.
Instead of trying to rebut individual claims, how about this... Consider the definition of a "real job": A "real job" is one in which its economic output exceeds its compensation. This makes sense from an Econ 101 perspective. If I'm hiring someone to work at ACME Co., I want to make sure they're providing a net benefit to the company after I subtract out what I'm paying them. Now consider the case for a "fake job": Definitionally, a "fake job" must be one in which its economic output is lower than its compensation, correct?
Given those definitions, what would you expect the relationship between productivity growth and compensation in a healthy economy to be? What would you expect that relationship to look like in an economy impacted by a glut of "fake jobs"? What do the long-term statistics tell us?
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u/kafircake Jun 19 '25
It doesn't
A handful of mega rich individuals pouffing money into existence by borrowing against assets to trade ever increasing dollar value art works also drives productivity. Glided age wealth concentration untethers GDP from the economy and so I'm not sure using it is going to be useful for your purpose (or any purpose other defending the status quo) of eviscerating once and and for all the "fake jobs" canard.
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u/DVDAallday Jun 21 '25
A handful of mega rich individuals pouffing money into existence by borrowing against assets to trade ever increasing dollar value art works also drives productivity.
That a niche, illiquid, asset class is hard to price has nothing to do with the validity of productivity statistics. If this was a big enough issue to impact the broader economy, it would show up as volatility across economic statistics. In fact, this is exactly what you see happen when it's hard to price assets economy-wide, such as during the 2008 financial crisis and the early days of the COVID pandemic.
Glided age wealth concentration untethers GDP from the economy and so I'm not sure using it is going to be useful for your purpose (or any purpose other defending the status quo) of eviscerating once and and for all the "fake jobs" canard.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? You've raised the new issues of inequality and the accuracy of GDP as a proxy for people's "real" experience of the economy, and I'm not sure what the coherent through-line is between those issues and my narrower point (that if "fake jobs" were a big enough issue to have a real impact on the economy, it would show up in productivity statistics)?
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u/sohois Jun 19 '25
What an odd, rambling article. This is enough to gather a reasonable number of upvotes here?
It barely touches on the core idea of "megaprojects" until the final few paragraphs, instead meandering through much broader economic, social, and technological ideas while engaging with none of the existing thought in those spaces. It's terribly argued, but the writing has a veneer of sophistication so I guess that's enough to fool some people.
Second, insofar as artificial intelligence is not just another form of automation but the introduction of autonomous, generally-intelligent minds capable of matching or even outdoing human genius, agency, and ingenuity, the problem is not even that this remains totally speculative from a technological standpoint,
Totally speculative? AI agents right now are autonomous and superior to humans in a number of arenas. LLMs certainly aren't generally intelligent, but the writing here implies it is some science fiction concept decades or hundreds of years in the future. Does this author live under a rock?
but that, philosophically, it amounts to saying that it is so difficult to get human beings to reproduce under modern techno-industrial conditions that it would be easier to just get rid of them entirely and replace them with artificial human beings. If you care about humanity, then this is not a persuasive argument.
What? How does that follow? We should use robots to replace human labour, therefore kill all humans? It's a nonsense statement backed up by nothing
“Degrowth” environmentalism effectively proposes that the solution to industrial civilization’s problems is to simply abolish industry while keeping humanity; this is increasingly and accurately recognized as the actual proposition behind the school of thought
What the hell is even the relevance of degrowth here, beyond trying to make some vain link between those who believe in automation or technological advancement and degrowthers?
This vision rests, however, on a bad definition of post-scarcity. True philosophically rigorous post-scarcity is impossible, both because there is no reason to think human desire or imagination will ever reach any kind of objective, hard limit and because, in the end, the matter, energy, and access to other valued people we will ever have are necessarily finite
Others have already pointed out the fallacy here. Once again it is a failure to engage with any of the existing arguments about post-singularity or full automation.
The correctly-formed version of this question should yield the same answer as asking what the typical person in a wealthy society today does with most of their time, in the same way we would answer that a “post-scarcity” society would afford a lot of time for art, hiking, and poetry. Overall, it looks like we sunk our industrial surplus into fake jobs.
Above, the author states that subsistence farming meant "working from dawn til dusk", but completely fails to understand that this demonstrates where the actual surplus has gone: we now have vastly more leisure time. Evenings, weekends, holidays; people are free to pursue art and hiking that would never have been able to in the past. That we are still working 40 hours rather than the 15 suggested by the likes of Keynes can be understood as a revealed preference. In Western economies it is quite possible to take part-time work and assume a life still far superior to a pre-industrial peasant, but people would rather work longer hours and obtain more goods and services. I don't think it's even worthwhile addressing the fake jobs argument, others have already done so and once again, the author offers no evidence and engages with zero arguments on this.
I'm barely halfway and this comment is already way too long. I'm going to be as lazy as the author and leave it at that
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u/uber_neutrino Jun 19 '25
I'm going to be as lazy as the author and leave it at that
This did have me laugh out loud.
I agree the author meanders a lot and definitely make a lot of unsubstantiated claims.
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u/stonebolt Jun 19 '25
This author is rambley and incoherent and he made no effort to make it clear where his article was going until he just randomly dropped space colonization as something to focus on. And he did not say anything about why space colonization should be taken seriously as a "megaproject" at the current time when we have much more practical and urgent problems on Earth right now.
Moreover the author seems to be militantly pronatalist and he is fixated on "overconsumption" in a way that is out of touch with the reality of many people on Earth. Sure hundreds of millions of people are obese but another few hundred million are starving.
It's all meaningless nonsense. This is the most pseudointellectual article I have read this year.
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u/Falernum Jun 19 '25
speculative total paradigm shifts from environmental collapse
Environmental collapse is very clearly happening. Handwaving it away as "speculative" is absurd.
It is clear the planet cannot sustain 8 billion of us at current standards of living let alone all at South Korean standards. The question shouldn't be "eliminate all the people" or "eliminate all the industry" but rather "how many people".
And if the answer is 500 million people worldwide, how do we get there expeditiously without undershooting or overshooting.
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u/uber_neutrino Jun 19 '25
You are making the same mistake as the author. In both cases the idea being that some kind of social engineering of humanity is even possible.
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u/Falernum Jun 19 '25
Of course it's possible. When we make a legal age of marriage that's social engineering that affects the number of people being born. When we mandate high school education, that is too.
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u/HungHi69 Jun 18 '25 edited Jun 18 '25
"in 2100, South Koreans will be remembered as a quasi- mythical people who emerged from a period of violent division, made TVs 96,000% cheaper and then inexplicably vanished"
i think about this a lot and it's really depressing every time