My essay on this (go to the original article to see the hyperclicks to some of the references, as I’m too lazy to copy them here)
One of the most common objections against the prospect of radical life extension (RLE) is that of overpopulation. Suppose everyone got to enjoy from an eternal physical youth, free from age-related decay. No doubt people would want to have children regardless. With far more births than deaths, wouldn’t the Earth quickly become overpopulated?
There are at least two possible ways of avoiding this fate. The first is simply having children later. Even if nobody died of aging, there would still be diseases, accidents and murders. People who’ve looked at the statistics estimate that with no age-related death, people would on average live to be a thousand before meeting their fate in some way. Theoretically, if everyone just waited to be a thousand before having any kids, then population growth would remain on the same level as it is today.
Of course, this is completely unrealistic. Most people aren’t going to wait until they are a thousand to have kids. But they might still have them considerably later than they do now. The average age for having your first child has already gone up as lifespans have grown. If you’re going to live for a thousand years, why rush with having kids as soon as possible?
Currently there is (at least for women) an effective maximum cap on how high the age for first childbirth can grow, since once a mother’s age grows beyond 35 or so, the probability for birth defects goes up radically. However, current reproductive technology has already made pregnancies over the age of 50 a real possibility. At the moment, this frequently requires egg donation, but a rudimentary ability to produce eggs from stem cells may not be that far away, certainly a lot closer than RLE. By the point that we have RLE, we’ll likely also have the ability to produce new sperm and eggs from a person’s own cells. Combined with an overall better condition of the body brought about by RLE, this seems like it could increase the maximum age for pregnancy indefinitely. With that, the average age for a first birth going up at least a couple of decades doesn’t seem all that unrealistic.
Besides the average age for having kids going up, there’s the possibility of larger family groups. Must we necessarily have a norm for children being the kids of exactly two adults? As a personal example, my best friend has a daughter who’s two years old right now. I’ve been over there helping take care of the girl a lot, enough to make me feel like she’s part of my family as well. Even if I never had children of my own, I already feel something resembling the feelings related to having a child of your own. In addition to growing attached to the children of your close friends, polyamory is also gradually becoming more common and accepted. With romantic relationships involving more than two people we also get children with more than two parent-like figures. Many have a strong desire to pass on their genes, something which can be helped with e.g. the recent creation of 3-parent human embryos.
So with both the prospect of having kids later and a child having more than two parents, I really don’t think that the population problem is as hard to solve as some people make it out to be. It should also be noted that it’s not like scientists are going to develop RLE one day, and then the next, blam, everyone lives forever. Rather, the technology will be developed in stages. In the early stages, there are going to be a lot of people who have grown far too frail to be helped, and it might take a long time before we hit acturial escape velocity, so there might simply be an e.g. 10-year bump on people’s lifespan and then 20 years could pass before the next major breakthrough.
The treatments may also not be affordable for everyone at first, though it needs to be noted that governments will have a huge incentive to subsidize the treatements for everyone to reduce the healthcare costs of the elderly and to push back the age for retirement. A 2006 article in The Scientist argues that simply slowing aging by seven years would produce large enough of an economic benefit to justify the US investing three billion dollars annually to this research. The commonly heard “but only the rich could live forever” argument against RLE does not, I feel, take into account the actual economic realities (amusingly enough, as its supporters no doubt think they’re the economically realistic ones).
So we’re going to get a slowly and gradually lengthening average lifespan, which at first probably won’t do much more than reverse the population decline that will hit a lot of Western countries soon. The replenishment rate required to keep a population stable is about 2.1 children per woman. The average fertility rate in a lot of industrialized countries is well below this—for instance, 1.58 in Canada, 1.42 in Germany, 1.32 in Italy, 1.20 in Japan and 1.04 in Hong Kong. The EU average is 1.51. Yes, in a lot of poor countries the figures are considerably higher—Niger tops the chart with 7.68 children per woman—but even then the overall world population growth is projected to start declining around 2050 or so.
To give a sense of proportion: suppose that tomorrow, we developed literal immortality and made it instantly available for everyone, so that the death rate would drop to zero in a day, with no adjustment to the birth rate. Even if this completely unrealistic scenario were to take place, the overall US population growth would still only be about half of what it was during the height of the 1950s baby boom! Even in such a completely, utterly unrealistic scenario, it would still take around 53 years for the US population to double—assuming no compensating drop in birth rates in that whole time.
We’ve adapted to increasing lifespans before. Between 1950 and 1990, the percentage of population over 65 almost doubled in Sweden, going from 10.3 to 18.1. (In the United Kingdom it went up from 10.7 to 15.2, in the US from 8.1 to 12.6, and in the more-developed countries overall it went from 7.6 to 12.1.) The beauty of economics is that like all resource consumption, having children is a self-regulating mechanism: if a growing population really does exert a heavy strain on resources, then it will become more expensive to have children, and people will have less of them. The exception is in the less industrialized countries where children are still a net economic benefit for their parents and not a cost, but most of the world is industrializing quickly. Over the last fifty years, the gaps between the rich and poor have gotten smaller and smaller, to the point where people are calling the whole concept of a first world/third world divide a myth. I see no reason to presume that radical life extension and indefinite youths would pose us any problems that we couldn’t handle, at least not on the overpopulation front.
Of course, this presumes that we’ll remain as basically biological entities. If we develop uploading and the ability to copy minds at will, well… that’s a different kettle of fish, with the various evolutionary dynamics involved in that being a much larger potential problem. And of course, if we get uploading, we’re probably close to AI and a full-scale intelligence explosion, with all the issues that that involves.
The long-lived slowly reproducing transhumans have to be willing to kill off “dissenters,” long-lived transhumans who reproduce at a faster rate, or else they will be a footnote in our evolution, the Neanderthals or also-rans on the path to whereever we get. Either you out reproduce or you kill your competitors, or you lose.
It seems to me a lot of future scenarios here depend on a kind of top-down imposed control and uniformity you just don’t see among intelligent competitors. It only takes a small number of escapees from the control who pick a strategy that eats the lunch of the top-down controlled group to bring that whole thing to an end in finite time.
Whatever you propose has to be intensively successful against conceivable variations. Long-lived slow-reproducers MAY be, if they are ruthless against other intelligences that are not so measured as they in their reproduction. Are you ready for that?
If some people wish to have lots of children and are willing to endure having an otherwise lower standard of living because of that, that’s fine by me. So far birth rates haven’t been going down because of top-down control, but because of people adapting to changed economic conditions.
This strikes me as very naive. Birthrates have been declining for a few decades (in some countries) and you’re trying to extrapolate this trend out into the distant future. Meanwhile there are already developed countries that buck this trend. Qatar is richer than any European country, and Qataris have 4 kids per woman. Imagine you had a petri dish of bacteria, and introduce a chemical that stops reproduction of 98% of the types of bacteria inside it, 2% of the bacteria have resistance to this chemical. What you would see is a period of slowing growth, as most of the bacteria stop reproducing. Then there would be a period of decline in the bacteria population, as the non-reproducing bacteria start dying off. Finally, there would be a return to exponential growth, as the 2% fill the petri dish left empty by the sterilized bacteria.
All that is necessary is for a small percentage to be immune and to be able to pass their immunity to their children with some consistency.
Well, Qatar’s birthrate is in a decline, too. But that’s beside the point, since I don’t actually disagree with you. Both your comment and mwengler’s reply strike me as arguing a different point from what I was making in the essay.
I was primarily trying to say that life extension won’t cause an immediate economic disaster—that yes, although it will impact global demographics, it will take many decades (maybe centuries) for the impact of those changes to propagate through society, which is plenty of time for our economy to adjust. Dealing with gradual change isn’t a problem, dealing with sudden and unanticipated shocks is. We’ve successfully dealt with many such gradual changes before.
In contrast, you two seem to be making the Malthusian argument that in the long term, any population will expand until it reaches the maximum capacity of the environment and each individual makes no more than a subsistence living. And I agree with that, but that has little to do with life extension, since the very same logic would apply regardless of whether life extension was ever invented. Yes, life extension may have the effect that we’ll hit population and resource limits faster, but we’d eventually run into them anyway. The main question is whether life extension would accelerate the expansion towards Malthusian limits enough to make the transition period much more painful than what it would otherwise be, and whether that added pain would outweigh the massive reductions in human suffering that age-related decline causes—and I don’t see a reason to presume that it would.
Well, Qatar’s birthrate is in a decline, too. But that’s beside the point, since I don’t actually disagree with you. Both your comment and mwengler’s reply strike me as arguing a different point from what I was making in the essay.
I know this is tangential, but I want to point out why the statistic you used is deceptive. Qatar has a huge foreign population (80% of the population) with much lower birthrates than the native Qataris. Four kids/ woman for Qataris, and 2 kids / woman for resident foreigners. So the decline in birth rates is mainly caused by 2 factors related to immigration. The first is that the resident foreigners have relatively fewer women (most migrant workers are males) and therefore lower the “births per 10,000”. Second, the women that do immigrate in have far lower birth rates than Qataris.
The more important element here that I disagree with is this:
If some people wish to have lots of children and are willing to endure having an otherwise lower standard of living because of that, that’s fine by me.
There are externalities here. When people make lots of kids, it doesn’t just crowd out resources for their parents. It crowds them out for everybody. At some point, more kids means higher prices (or, in a command economy, smaller rations) for everyone else. I am somewhat sympathetic to the Hansonian sentiment that having a huge number of poor people is better than having a tiny number of idle gods, and that poor people can be happy.
But I do flinch away from the idea that human-level minds should be like dandelion seeds for profligate, reproduction-obsessed future ems.
I know this is tangential, but I want to point out why the statistic you used is deceptive.
Ah. Thanks for the correction.
At some point, more kids means higher prices (or, in a command economy, smaller rations) for everyone else.
At some point in the far future, yes. But for now, more kids are AFAIK considered to have positive externalities, and barring uploading or the Singularity that looks to be the case for at least a couple of hundred years.
(Of course, discussing developments a couple of hundred years in the future while making the assumption that we’ll remain as basically biological seems kinda silly, but there you have it.)
My essay on this (go to the original article to see the hyperclicks to some of the references, as I’m too lazy to copy them here)
Of course, this presumes that we’ll remain as basically biological entities. If we develop uploading and the ability to copy minds at will, well… that’s a different kettle of fish, with the various evolutionary dynamics involved in that being a much larger potential problem. And of course, if we get uploading, we’re probably close to AI and a full-scale intelligence explosion, with all the issues that that involves.
The long-lived slowly reproducing transhumans have to be willing to kill off “dissenters,” long-lived transhumans who reproduce at a faster rate, or else they will be a footnote in our evolution, the Neanderthals or also-rans on the path to whereever we get. Either you out reproduce or you kill your competitors, or you lose.
It seems to me a lot of future scenarios here depend on a kind of top-down imposed control and uniformity you just don’t see among intelligent competitors. It only takes a small number of escapees from the control who pick a strategy that eats the lunch of the top-down controlled group to bring that whole thing to an end in finite time.
Whatever you propose has to be intensively successful against conceivable variations. Long-lived slow-reproducers MAY be, if they are ruthless against other intelligences that are not so measured as they in their reproduction. Are you ready for that?
If some people wish to have lots of children and are willing to endure having an otherwise lower standard of living because of that, that’s fine by me. So far birth rates haven’t been going down because of top-down control, but because of people adapting to changed economic conditions.
This strikes me as very naive. Birthrates have been declining for a few decades (in some countries) and you’re trying to extrapolate this trend out into the distant future. Meanwhile there are already developed countries that buck this trend. Qatar is richer than any European country, and Qataris have 4 kids per woman. Imagine you had a petri dish of bacteria, and introduce a chemical that stops reproduction of 98% of the types of bacteria inside it, 2% of the bacteria have resistance to this chemical. What you would see is a period of slowing growth, as most of the bacteria stop reproducing. Then there would be a period of decline in the bacteria population, as the non-reproducing bacteria start dying off. Finally, there would be a return to exponential growth, as the 2% fill the petri dish left empty by the sterilized bacteria.
All that is necessary is for a small percentage to be immune and to be able to pass their immunity to their children with some consistency.
Well, Qatar’s birthrate is in a decline, too. But that’s beside the point, since I don’t actually disagree with you. Both your comment and mwengler’s reply strike me as arguing a different point from what I was making in the essay.
I was primarily trying to say that life extension won’t cause an immediate economic disaster—that yes, although it will impact global demographics, it will take many decades (maybe centuries) for the impact of those changes to propagate through society, which is plenty of time for our economy to adjust. Dealing with gradual change isn’t a problem, dealing with sudden and unanticipated shocks is. We’ve successfully dealt with many such gradual changes before.
In contrast, you two seem to be making the Malthusian argument that in the long term, any population will expand until it reaches the maximum capacity of the environment and each individual makes no more than a subsistence living. And I agree with that, but that has little to do with life extension, since the very same logic would apply regardless of whether life extension was ever invented. Yes, life extension may have the effect that we’ll hit population and resource limits faster, but we’d eventually run into them anyway. The main question is whether life extension would accelerate the expansion towards Malthusian limits enough to make the transition period much more painful than what it would otherwise be, and whether that added pain would outweigh the massive reductions in human suffering that age-related decline causes—and I don’t see a reason to presume that it would.
I know this is tangential, but I want to point out why the statistic you used is deceptive. Qatar has a huge foreign population (80% of the population) with much lower birthrates than the native Qataris. Four kids/ woman for Qataris, and 2 kids / woman for resident foreigners. So the decline in birth rates is mainly caused by 2 factors related to immigration. The first is that the resident foreigners have relatively fewer women (most migrant workers are males) and therefore lower the “births per 10,000”. Second, the women that do immigrate in have far lower birth rates than Qataris.
The more important element here that I disagree with is this:
There are externalities here. When people make lots of kids, it doesn’t just crowd out resources for their parents. It crowds them out for everybody. At some point, more kids means higher prices (or, in a command economy, smaller rations) for everyone else. I am somewhat sympathetic to the Hansonian sentiment that having a huge number of poor people is better than having a tiny number of idle gods, and that poor people can be happy.
But I do flinch away from the idea that human-level minds should be like dandelion seeds for profligate, reproduction-obsessed future ems.
Ah. Thanks for the correction.
At some point in the far future, yes. But for now, more kids are AFAIK considered to have positive externalities, and barring uploading or the Singularity that looks to be the case for at least a couple of hundred years.
(Of course, discussing developments a couple of hundred years in the future while making the assumption that we’ll remain as basically biological seems kinda silly, but there you have it.)