Do any of the transhumanists in the room have a non-handwavey solution to overpopulation? I still haven’t seen one.
One solution would be to universally agree that the resources of the universe shall be split among each currently living person and everyone’s descendants, forks etc. shall only be allowed to access those allocated to their ancestor-at-the-time-of-splitting or voluntarily reallocated to them by their owners. Defectors will get destroyed.
It would be totally unfair to the innocent children of several generations of transhuman Quiverfulls, driven to subsistence level while those who don’t have any children enjoy unimaginable wealth and that’s the entire point. It would directly incentivize keeping one’s descendants as few as possible because maintaining a larger population requires more food/space/whatever just for survival, which is then not available for other productive uses, and minds that have greater per capita resources available can grow larger; one human is smarter than the equivalent carrying capacity consumption in rodents, and a single planet-sized computronium brain is smarter than the same planet tiled with individual ems.
This would mean that as long as the resource boundaries are initially enforced long enough to solidify such differences, the breeders can’t catch up and will most likely be the ones who get wiped out if the agreement is broken. Therefore posthumans would be incentivized to be growers instead of breeders, but also to maintain the balance as a long-term survival plan if they nonetheless are breeders.
If we growers initially outgun breeders, we can unilaterally enforce this if we can cooperate until the incentive landscape turns around; and thanks to transhuman decision-theoretic reasons our commitment to maintain that deal, even when it would be in our own interests to break it, can be trusted.
3 months ago · tagged #kind of quick speculation #extrapolated from my plan for countries immigration and population growth #but seems superficially sound at least · 37 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink