There’s a strong evolutionary bias for rejecting things that are too good to be true. Many times throughout history, technology has appeared to promise abundance, but this hasn’t come to pass, and many of the people preaching imminent utopia have had ill intent. Automation was a core facet of USSR propaganda, for instance.
On a less emotional/heuristic level, finite matter in the universe is a more imminent constraint than most people realize. I did the math a while back, and if all of humanity had the birthrate of Eritrea[1], we’d end up with more bodies than the universe has atoms in fewer generations than humanity has already experienced. Barring the ability to create more matter, we cannot promise abundance and freedom to everyone indefinitely. Depending on one’s politics and philosophy, this means that utopia is either bad because of the tacit implication of some kind of eugenics policy, or bad because it amounts to strip-mining the universe to avoid one.
Genetic and cultural factors that increase birthrate are both heritable, and even low-birthrate societies have high-birthrate subgroups. If anything, this is a conservative estimate for what will happen in the long term when resource constraints on reproduction disappear.
There’s a strong evolutionary bias for rejecting things that are too good to be true. Many times throughout history, technology has appeared to promise abundance, but this hasn’t come to pass, and many of the people preaching imminent utopia have had ill intent. Automation was a core facet of USSR propaganda, for instance.
On a less emotional/heuristic level, finite matter in the universe is a more imminent constraint than most people realize. I did the math a while back, and if all of humanity had the birthrate of Eritrea[1], we’d end up with more bodies than the universe has atoms in fewer generations than humanity has already experienced. Barring the ability to create more matter, we cannot promise abundance and freedom to everyone indefinitely. Depending on one’s politics and philosophy, this means that utopia is either bad because of the tacit implication of some kind of eugenics policy, or bad because it amounts to strip-mining the universe to avoid one.
Genetic and cultural factors that increase birthrate are both heritable, and even low-birthrate societies have high-birthrate subgroups. If anything, this is a conservative estimate for what will happen in the long term when resource constraints on reproduction disappear.