A Less Populated Future Is Advantageous
When nearing an industrial revolution, people starts to have more children, because machines allow production of more food, which can rear us. However, it's also that the requirement for more and more food nowadays, that a more populated future isn't as advantageous as it used to be.
Before, and even after industrial revolution, you may need lots of hands and headcounts to fill in position that increase yields. Some farms don't have machines yet (it's expensive when it first come out), so it's advantageous to have more children, and hence more hands, in the farm to help out, to not only increase yield but ensure no decrease in yield because of insufficient helping hands. As these machines got cheaper and cheaper, and affordable, these hands are freed and allowed to take on other jobs, while the farm maintained with less hands.
Before, we need lots of brains. Inventions and stuffs don't just come from genius, but also from collective intelligence. Of course, to born a genius requires a lot of mixing of genes, and having more children increase the chance of a genius being born, without genetic discovery that could ensure 99.9% your children have the "genius gene" (or whatever it is that confirms it by-and-large). These brains are put to use that led to much more scientific discoveries, and other discoveries in other fields that are less extensive (non-scientific field invention, small invention that help a field but not significant and WOW to the world), or perhaps manipulative (how to gather wealth to increase the wealth gap even further); but as more and more brains are diverted to "how to increase the no. of clicks in users for our app", perhaps due to a saturation in the scientific field, or just not interested at all, it seems like more brain isn't necessarily needed anymore.
Especially with the advent of machine learning and robotics that, the former and latter could work together to replace hands in repetitive jobs nowadays, and perhaps more creative jobs in the future (albeit, even if it's not as creative as human beings, most jobs that people take part in needs only limited creativity). It so works out that jobs position are being filled, hence more hands being freed; and it seems like those more creative jobs are in demand now.
Of course, although we say we want to choose great people to do the job, which is good for the business, but it doesn't always work out that way. Not because of the flaw that will exist in hiring process, but what does the rest of us that's not that clever and can't fit the job description do? As this class grow in size, it seems a civil war/revolution is under way as they get more angry at the elites that took their job and let them stay hungry. In conclusion, there are not enough job positions to fill these people.
Hence, one suggests a reduction in world population. Of course, it's not perfect, a reduction in world population in a perfect situation means keeping those elites and eliminate those non-elites, but even with genetic nowadays, we can't be sure our children will be those elites, as it's not always due to genetics that one will be elites, at least not all causing. However, with less position available, we need less people to fill the job, albeit more lousy people, hence a reduction in world population would give a better situation, to not have that many people (sometimes thousands of them) fighting for a single position, and the rest left without food, starve to death probably without subsidies and deemed able-bodied (there's no penchant for unemployment, I guess, unless government move to a more populist view to redistribute wealth, like 98% tax on wealthy that have more than, say, a million dollars, and give these tax wealth back to the poorer ones).
In conclusion, the increase in human population that had helped long ago isn't helping anymore. The more people born into this world seems to only stay at home without a job position for them to fill. Even if they don't mind what job to take, including throwing rubbish job or manufacturing line rather than, say, tech jobs; there would be a limit; and the latter can now be replaced with robotics and AI (self-delivery car when you call for delivery, self-rubbish-throwing car, manufacturing-robotic-arms + advanced AI and camera tech). So, a decrease in world population is sought after.
Of course, there's another path that one dream (real dream, not daydream) about. With the (probably bad) incentive to give back in web3 world in social media (wtf???), so people post something they earn some money; ok, good for redistributing wealth, but bad as incentives to work. Therefore, it seems that in this world, that's when AI "take over" the working population; that is, everything, including creative work like writing a program and performing scientific discovery (via trial and error which the machine can do quite easily, without needing gedankenexperimente), therefore, all could just lie down in pods where things are delivered to them, and they look at the screen in front. It's not like the movie that consciousness to upload to some magical world; no, we didn't even discover consciousness yet. However, even with consciousness still in our world, we living in pods, dopamine and serotonin injected via a lazy incentives, you could imagine it as a utopia.
One would imagine, when there comes a bug where the AI couldn't fix and they have to turn to some 300-year-old (assume medicine can let us live that long) programmers (since these are the age that lived through hand-written programming) to fix a bug, because no one in the new world know how to even write a simple program more complicated than hello world, would be really funny to imagine. And that if these old multi-centenarians deceased and no more hand-written programmers, how do the bug get fixed?
Remember to Like and Subscribe.