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AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
This month total human population crossed 8 billion!
Do you think the world needs more people? (Context)
21y“Needs” might be too strong, but I think more people would be a good thing. More
people means more ideas, more art, more science, more inventions, more
innovations, more pushing the boundaries of knowledge and practice. If you
define “genius” as 99.9999th percentile intelligence, then for every million
people born, we get one new genius.
Indeed, there is an argument that we need continued population growth in order
to keep up economic growth. The intuition for this, in brief, is that the more
we advance, the broader and more challenging the technological frontier gets,
and the more specialists we need working in R&D to push it forward. (See here
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/]
for a take on this)
Ultimately, as David Deutsch writes, "only progress is sustainable".