[rideg]

I think there is an interesting aspect of the depopulation that I haven't seen discussed yet: the scientific progress.

If we have less and less people, there will be less brain power to innovate while as far as I can tell the innovation is getting more and more difficult as we moving forward. Just imagine inventing the wheel was probably easier than inventing the combustion engine.

I have a feeling that the huge technological advancements of the 20th century happened because of the exponentially increasing population. Also having more advanced technology helped back the population growth too.

So I think if the shrinking population will cause technological stagnation on top of the constant hardship due to the proportionally increasing number of elderly who need support.

[peteradio]

Building a useful wheel isn't chipping it from stone. There is a lot of materials science and engineering evolved to make one, I wouldn't short change the effort in it. Anyway who cares if tech stagnates? I'd be more worried about a backslide where we lose hard won knowledge.

[LapsangGuzzler]

I think AI is just as, if not more of a threat, than population decline in this regard. With the ability to generate endless amounts of content on demand, an already overburdened and under-resourced education system is nowhere near sophisticated enough to deal with tools like ChatGPT. And scientific progress cannot happen unless we cultivate and nurture our education system.

We're already seeing younger people not understanding basic computing concepts like file systems because they grew up on locked-down mobile OSes that abstract this from users. AI is going to remove the affordances needed to learn on a scale we've never seen before.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...