So wood would stack up, not rot, get covered by dirt and turned into coal due to physical processes, not biological ones.
So coal deposits of the existing magnitudes couldn't be created now.
Many people want to restore nature, but the natural state is usually one of flux which is deeply unsatisfying to many advocates of it's restoration.
It is an interesting question.
Your tangent does not negate the point, as it has practical applications for public policy and managing interest groups.
One of my favorite examples to illustrate the challenge is restoration efforts around the Salton Sea. The lake is drying, causing dust, and there is a major environmental movement to restore it. The challenge comes in that the entire lake was created by accident in 1905, so the benchmark for restoration is critical. Restoring it to the dry lakebed of 1904 would not help with fish life and dust reduction. Dial the clock back to 1700, and it was a enormous lake again, but we would have to reroute the entire Colorado River from the current path along the Arizona boarder, because the Colorado river has shifted 200 miles east 300 years ago.
>> Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists.
...
>> To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough
Tldr, things get stable until they aren’t and then they may remain unstable for a while, and you never know how, why and how long in general, unless it’s something really obvious and measurable.
This always confuses me. If I were abandoning my home of my own volition, I'd take my possessions with me.
And of course I wonder why stuff piles up. The reasons include laziness and probably a mild hoarding instinct.
Then eventually, without realizing, you have gone there for the last time, and there's nothing left to move to your new home.
Alternatively, the last old person who lived in the house dies or goes into a care home, and their kids (if they have any) never find the time to clear out the old place. There's no one to sell it to, anyway, so they have all the time in the world.
Most rural towns were built to serve surrounding farms and ranches. As farming became less labor-intensive, the need for those towns went away, and the towns slowly died. See "Depopulation of the Great Plains"[2] It's interesting to note that the depopulated area is the best part of the US for wind power. That could work out OK.
Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go fast.
Japan, where the population is rapidly declining, has a large number of empty rural towns. There's an incentive program to get young people to move there, but not many are interested. Because Japan's infrastructure is centrally funded, much of the infrastructure is still maintained in areas with very few people.
Russia has a declining population and entire abandoned cities. Putin is pushing young people to have kids. There's a "Pregnant at 16" TV show in Russia, which has been re-branded to encourage pregnancy.[3]
The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman) are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.
There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Un...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_the_Great_Plai...
[3] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/11/05/as-russia-targets-ab...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
It’s just a huge opportunity loss if you talk to any young woman, and they’re obviously right. There is no tangible benefit to have more than two children other than “for the humanity!”.
Which has happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban has cracked down.[1] "Our analysis shows that by 2026, the impact of leaving 1.1 million girls out of school and 100,000 women out of university correlates to an increase in early childbearing by 45 per cent."
A family of rabbits without enough quiet, food, shelter, etc will have hardly any babies. The mother will also eat any babies.
Its not easy, but its worth it. Far more so that putting long hours into your job.
> I can absolutely imagine why many women would not want to have to raise children no matter how good the circumstances
That sentiment is part of the problem. Why is it still women's work to raise children? Why are there so few stay at home days? Why do couples not sharing parenting equally if both work? Why do not not have more famimly friendly working hours?
We have currently culturally accepted that its OK for women to do traditionally male work, but not for men to take on women's work. That will not work. I think this is unstable and we will have either a reversal (of which I see some signs) or a transition to men taking on more of a role in raising children (which is the better outcome, but I think is less likely because it is so ingrained that they do not).
> Even in countries with extreme demographic problems (SK and Japan), men still expect the women to take over the main duties of parenthood.
Maybe that is why they have extreme demographic problems? People choose to have kids for personal reasons, not demographic ones.
Why can we not have that cultural change? We managed the one that allowed women to do men's work? Everyones wins. men get the joy of full participation in their kids lives, women are not landed with all the work, and children get better parenting.
I was married to a stay at home mum and did half the parenting, but that meant I was overworked and she was not doing very much. It is one reason I am not married to her any more!
My ideal would be something like both working part time and sharing parenting. I blame governments focused on maximising the workforce and GDP. A lot of parents here in the UK drop kids off at school for breakfast and pick them up after "after school" activities. Not much joy in your kids if you hardly see them/
I know a pregnant woman has been nauseous for 6 months, is on prescription medication for it, and now can barely walk due to symphysis pubic dysfunction. Completely healthy prior to becoming pregnant in terms of BMI/blood sugar/pressure/physical activity/etc
I know many who have had to get a C section, or bed rest, or the kid has issues like allergies, club foot, autism, etc.
Is very real, but significantly lower for later pregnancies, and was generally not something that put people off in more prosperous times, even when medical care was less advanced.
There is a 100% correlation with total fertility rates dropping and women’s independence.
No one does need to make that sacrifice, but don't be alarmed when other groups that made that sacrifice start changing world how they see fit.
Subreplacement level fertility is bound to bound to bite you. We don't know of any way to turn subreplacement country (fertility rate < 2.1) into a above replacement country (fertility rate >= 2.1). Just how to mitigate it (immigration). Eventually pools of high fertility will run dry.
Some think that it depends on replacing individualism with some form of collectivism. Some think it's related to hope for future. It's very hard to do any comparison.
Kind of depressing when you realize you’re designing CPUs with billions of transistors and yet you’re going to end behind some retired boomer who sold cars just because he got here first and the magic of compound interest
In Nevada/Eastern California there was a railroad that went from the Carson City area down toward Owen’s Lake.
The interesting part is if you look at the railroad map, pretty much none of the stops exist anymore. It’s a long string of communities that are all long gone from the eastern Owen’s Valley.
Even the eventual highways that were to follow ended up coming down the western side of the valley, yet more reason for those late communities to no longer exist.
And it’s pretty much all gone. No ghost towns, maybe a few overgrown foundations remnants.
But if you had never seen this railroad map, you’d probably never have any idea this land was occupied at all.
It's also ironic that Route 66 [3] was originally in-and-of itself a bypass.
As someone that predominantly lived in a capital urban city of a nation still expanding rather than contracting, understanding its equivalent occurence in Bulgaria is even more difficult.
[1] https://betweenenglandandiowa.com/2018/02/11/cars-route-66-m...
Or, more likely, people are extrapolating from current trends, and those trends won’t hold. Not that long ago, people were doing that extrapolation and deciding that overpopulation and worldwide famine were in our future. “The Population Bomb” was a bestselling book along those lines.
The population is likely to shrink, easing strain on resources, and people will look back fondly on “the good old days” when folks had big families. Trends will shift and the population will grow again.
If you're talking about environmental pollution and declining fertility because of it then that's something else but even then, those who manage to survive and persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who pass on copies of their genes.
That's.... not how humans work. If people choose to have less children, which has very little to do with their genetics, there are fewer children to replicate, not "replacement" with children who are genetically determined to be fecund.
They are taking issue with the ludicrous assertion that falling birth rates are "self correcting" because the offspring of people who do replicate are somehow genetically predisposed to have more children to "replace" them.
If someone has a different perspective on this then they are welcome to make their version of the problem explicit and concrete and explain what exactly they propose as a valid intervention for fixing it. I suspect and am almost certain they have not thought about the issue as rigorously as they think and are simply parroting popular talking points they've seen and heard on social media platforms about the impending collapse of civilization caused by declining birth rates.
The implications of this may have been exaggerated of course. But it's quite clear that it is not being "self corrected" by the offspring of people who do choose to have more children than the replacement rate being genetically [or culturally] predisposed to breed like rabbits...
Biology and evolution by definition is determined by those who reproduce offspring, those who do not will be replaced by those who do. Put another way: Generation B and onwards are the offspring of Generation A who reproduced.
Or more specifically, that humans in many parts of the world are reproducing at below replacement rate.
Reproduction below replacement rate means that those who do not reproduce offspring are not replaced by the offspring of those who do.
Nobody is arguing that Generation B aren't the offspring of those who reproduced, they're arguing that this detail is essentially irrelevant to how many children Generation B will have and therefore birth rate decline need not be "self correcting" and empirically isn't in much of the world.
Given a long enough time span, everyone alive will be the children of those who reproduced. Generation B will be composed of Generation A reproducers. The world of tomorrow will be owned by those who reproduce today.
Not true. If my brother reproduces, then about half of my genes are still getting passed on. If my cousin reproduces, 12.5% of my genes are still getting passed on. If the argument is that pure gene selection will determine the outcome, then you can’t treat genetics as some simplistic binary.
Religious people belonging to certain religions/sects do have a lot more children even in the contemporary world. Maybe the world of 2100 is going to be a lot more religious than today.
The development is certainly visible in, say, Israel, or even migrant communities in Europe. Europeans must now be a bit careful not to insult Islam; that wouldn't be the case fifty years ago.
> The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman) are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.
>There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."
It sounds wild, but we already professionalized a lot of other activities that were "naturally" done by households, such as fuel gathering, cooking, home construction and small agriculture.
We are now very, very far from our hunter-gatherer roots.
The idea of mechanizing/automating/centralizing that stuff is irking me in general. One could argue that the biologisms which evolved us, and we with and through them, are just another, rather imperfect way of doing this, by slow, biologic means.
IMO this only leads to transhumanism, which I consider BS, because it will produce shadows/weak simulations of the real thing and philosophical zombies.
For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#/media/File%3A1910-... shows it going from 8 around 1940 to 12 around 1957 and back down to 7 around 1972 in the USA.
Do the people who don't have children send resources to relatives who do? Making the family more succesful?
Not to mention it isn't a binary really. There is a middle ground of simply having less children. A family that has a single child is still below replacement and quite different from a family with 5. Regardless, genes are still being passed on.
However i disagree with the mechanism you propose. Having less children can be evolutionarily advantous in some circumtances. People will have less children when it makes sense, and have more children when conditions change and that make sense.
Having kids early precludes education and career focus -> Education and career focus gets you money and prestige -> Folks want money -> Folks want to avoid having kids early -> Fewer kids.
It's all based on a couple misconceptions that a) you can't have what you want now if you have kids and b) you'll want what you want now when you have kids.
Try this thought experiment on for size:
Initially, you don't have kids b/c you don't want to avoid this vacation ($5k?) and that opportunity (A few years at a good job?)
But consider the reverse: If you had kids, and they were going to die if you didn't turn over $X, what value of X is "too high"? There is no value of X that is too high, you'd happily give everything you have to bring your kids home safe. Why don't we give a meager few years of our lives to have kids and get them through the infant stage until our lives return somewhat to normal?
Why do we all pretend that $5k before kids is somehow not the same as $5k after kids? It's not a trap - parents do want their children, do love them, and are willing to drop money to have them, but we only recognize this after they have them. Substitute money for a job change, a spouse choice, etc.
It's a weird cognitive dissonance that we don't recognize this for ourselves when we're young, and I'd argue it's mostly this cognitive dissonance that stands in our way. So, some tangible improvements and a slight increase in number of successful people having kids would probably dispel that misconception.
I have, and it’s miserable for the parents and often traumatic for the kids. At least if the jobs are at all challenging.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
(Used to be a biologist)
Genetics can only have a minor influence on number of offspring, because the genetic makeup of basically every industrialized nation did not change completely within 20 years.
If there was no other factor apart from genetics, it is decidedly unclear if that could stabilize population numbers on its own.
But it won't have to, almost for certain, because non-genetic mechanisms will balance this in all likelyhood ("organized" incentives from states and also emerging ressource over-supply), and those mechanisms will work MUCH faster than genetics ever could.
Also collapsing populations will lead to resource scarcity. One of the many negatives of low fertility is that you end up with far more elderly than working age people. Any given market will also naturally decrease in size, all other things being equal. These factors, amongst others, will completely wreck economies which may well end up creating a vicious cycle against fertility.
Another reason I think 'organized incentives' will be unlikely to achieve much is that Scandinavia had been at the forefront of fertility collapse in Europe and they have both an exremely strong social safety net as well as great minimum maternity benefits. Clearly there are other factors than economic inability driving people to go childless or to only have 1.
[1] https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/06/3918e2481936-japa...
[2] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F13213?...
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...
Personally I just think it's just a lot of hassle and I don't think it adds much value to my life. Others will of course differ in opinion hugely.
One thing is sure to me though, humanity isn't going to die out. Our planet is overpopulated as it is.
Right now, we pay more for our nanny than we do for our house, and combined both are pretty huge chunks of our income - and we're both fairly successful professionals.
Eventually, there will be better resources for working couples to have kids. It's a fairly easy problem to solve: More childcare options, more housing supply (so its cheaper to live), and more childcare workers by e.g., reducing regulations and improving immigration policy. USA has no reason to do this - we have good demographics b/c of immigration and (frankly) Calthocism and its ilk.
When I married into a catholic family I inherited 100s of cousins, and there's 1000s of relatives in our state now.
How do you square this with huge childcare costs in the US? The costs come from childcare ratios and liability, and those regulations are there for a reason.
Where are all the workers going to come from? Won’t the growing and politically powerful old population want workers for their needs/wants?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-009-9179-9
Places like Japan and Korea aren’t having the sort of birth rate turnaround you are discussing.
So for instance Japan is still living the good times relative to what's yet to come since they collapsed in the 80s. South Korea hasn't even begun to really feel the consequences of their actions since they only collapsed in the 90s. And places like Finland or the Western world in general only collapsed even more recently.
But collapsed they have. And because our fertile window in life, for women at least, closes long before we die - most, if not all, of these places will, unavoidably, see dramatic population declines, screwed age ratios (with consequent impacts on the labor/retiree pool/costs), shrinking economies, and so on. And we're left to rely on some ever smaller generation(s) down the line to start having large families in this context.
Our political culture is not a high integrity, high honesty culture but one that relies on a lot of indirect communication and symbolism. In this the west has become a lot more like east Asian stereotype. So in my view this crisis will be solved, just not in a way that people want to acknowledge. A lot of the nonserious "attempts" to address the issues are just performances to make it look like the facially palatable policies have been tried before they inevitably fail.
If you start with a population of 1 then the generation before was 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. So when you remove the biggest group, the oldest, it will always be about 50% of the total population regardless of how many other generations happen to be alive. And a 'generation' is proportional not to our life expectancy, but to our practical fertility window - so about 20 years.
You would substantially mitigate many of the economic problems but your Logan's Run would also need to be a dictatorship (and a rather less than benevolent one) because the skewed age ratios mean with a collapsing fertility rate the elderly will exclusively control any democracy, even if 100% of people vote. And all of this just to make it more comfortable to sleep walk into extinction.
I'm fully on board with you about saying the unspoken parts out loud, but I don't see this idea as a solution.
Hmm, which is what the current plan for the next US president seems to be….
There has been a lot of debate in the press and online (and no doubt also in private across the whole country). The arguments range from the risks of potential cooercion to the morality of a 'coup de grâce'. Yet your point is also pertinent, as 'quality of life' often has as much to do with the quality of care as it does with the affliction itself, and quality of care is largely down to how much society pays for it.
I do think that euthanasia would make sense in these cases. The real person, their mind, has died a long time ago, it's just their body that lives on.
Of course the decision should be up to these people (while they're still capacitated) and their family. It shouldn't be imposed on them. But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.
In such a situation I'd be inclined to agree. I think my question is rather how many of the candidates for humane euthanasia would be in that condition if preventative healthcare was better.
Clearly there will be some people whose conditions could not be prevented by any medical intervention, but cuts to healthcare funding would probably result in more people getting terminal illnesses in total. Witnessing the suffering of patients is a big part of reminding people why healthcare is important (which of course is why medical charities advertise in this way). Thus, personally, my chief concern is that compassionate euthanasia could end up hiding fixable problems in our healthcare system.
It makes it increasingly difficult for people to care for themselves, and highly vulnerable to exploitation, even when in 'perfect' health.
If it won’t decrease life span by more than six months, how will it affect population?
However it's totally unsustainable. Sure, countries like Japan will have a tough time as the bulk of the ageing population matures but after that they will be in a better position for a stable occupancy. Less pressure on resources and housing, more ecological sustainability.
Our planet really doesn't benefit from having many billions of us around. And many of the problems we see, like climate change and pollution, are a direct result of that.
So imagine a fertility rate of 1. The scalar would be 1/2 so the population would declining by about 50% every 20 years.
And this doesn't stop until you go extinct or start having more children. And you'd have to start having more children in the midst of economic collapse.
So think about a period of just 80 years, a single human lifetime - that would be a decline of 1-(1/2)^4 = 15/16ths of your previous population. The US would go from 345 million to 22million, about the size of Sri Lanka or Chile.
And you're right religious groups do retain healthy fertility rates, so we're bee-lining to a world where secular educated individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool, while highly religious, less educated individuals are thriving. Guess what the world would thus look like in the future and how concerned it might be with your issues of choice, like climate change.
Children are essentially your voice in the future - have no children, have no voice.
Even if they are promoting population growth, they must be doing a bad job of it. An article from 2015[1] shows that religious groups are shrinking quickly in Europe, and that their fertility rate is only slightly higher than that of the group of 'unaffiliated' individuals. The population growth in total is also slowing, if not actually on a downward trend[2].
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/europe/
[2]: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-e...
The more likely scenario is a natural oscillation between these two outcomes, similar to how animals maintain oscillating population equilibrium that's controlled by space, resources and predation.
This is probably oversimplified and naive, but go back to the 80's economically where families could afford a family-raising sized home and a comfortable life on a single income. Bring jobs back to the smaller towns, which are safer and healthier places to raise families.
Combine this with the fact that is has never been easier to work remotely.
From my perspective it is a matter of preference - people decide that their life style in urban centers is more important than having a resource surplus and starting a family.
Which still means it's almost impossible for almost everyone almost everywhere
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA
I am guessing the bump from late 1980s to 2000s was almost entirely due to immigrants, especially Latin American. Similar to a bump seen in other countries where immigrants coming from places with higher TFRs bumped it up, and within a couple decades, even those immigrant populations now have lower TFRs.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab...
The point is. There’s no much you can do if people don’t want to have kids. And this is probably generational, so you won’t change the mind of the current generations.
We will need to learn to live without it. Retirement while healthy and capable of work, will probably become a thing of the past.
Also, we will probably have to rethink compound interest and inheritance rights. Compound interest on investments require by necessity monotonically increasing economy outputs in the long run.
Stop this school and health care nonsense! This is communism!
I have a suspicion that there is almost no amount of realistic benefits that can incentivize having sufficient kids to the level of replacement rate. The problem is that once sufficient women do not have 2 children, it is unrealistic to expect a sufficient amount of the remaining women to have 3+ children to offset those that have 0 or 1 child.
The big change from 100 years ago is that being a couple is now completely optional with no social stigma for being single, so if 30% or even 20% opt out of the compromises required in a relationship (due to their financial independence and safety in society), then you're fighting a losing battle (to keep TFR at replacement rate).
Reversing fertility drops will require social solutions in addition to economic solutions. I.e we need economic incentives but we also need to find ways to “make it cool” to have babies and have women in child bearing age be in close social circles with women having kids. And we have to all that while respecting all the gender equality gains we have made in the modern world. Not an easy solution
That or make the economic incentives super huge
If addressed sooner, then it won’t be a crisis. Do you think that will happen?
Not wrong, especially in relative peacetime and when things are going well.
But there is a reason the first thing Ukraine did when they got invaded was a draft.
"Don't want" to have kids. Just like people "don't want" to own their own house and "don't want" to have a retirement when they get old and "don't want" to have a living salary.
> In 2020, the total fertility rate among ultra-Orthodox women in Israel was 6.6, while the rate among Arab women was 3.0, and among secular women, it was 2.0 — still well above the OECD average — according to a report from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-birth-rate-remains-hig...
The women that do the above most certainly have a TFR closer to 2 rather than 3.
See table 1 at top of page 7 and figure 2 on page 8.
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Dem...
One data point against this dichotomy is that most women in the West generally report wanting more children than they have.
A different view is that, in the first world, men and women have become more neurotic and risk averse. E.g. "we can't afford kids with this market"
This seems like a gross simplification. In western world, the pressure is to raise kids well rather than just so-so, since one can easily see how much this helps them with rest of modern complex life. For example emotional stability, maturity and resilience is not something that comes automatically regardless of quality (and quantity) of parenting. This aspect alone is enough to make or break literally any conceivable talent or wealth under our sun.
And raising kids well these days is... hard, very hard. If it would be just question of money, rich folks would be all having 10-15 kids yet even those who are pretty horrible parents via ignoring their kids most of the time (with corresponding results later in life) very rarely do so, and if they do its normally the result of their instabilities and mental issues rather than part of a bigger plan.
Well, Musk certainly does... the thing is, for the really rich, more kids means more complex inheritance schemes and the risk of their wealth going down the drain in inheritance fights. Here in Germany for example, there was a ridiculous multi year fight in the empire of the Albrecht clan (the ones behind Aldi, I think in the US it's Trader Joe's?).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Jacob_Meijer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habsburg_family_tree
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsbu...
You can have 100 men and 1 woman, and predicting future population will have nothing to do with how many men there are (as long as there is at least 1 fertile man).
But if you have even just 1 man, having 10 women versus 100 women makes an enormous difference in potential future population.
family relationships - parenting report Jul 25, 2024 The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children
The U.S. fertility rate reached a historic low in 2023, with a growing share of women ages 25 to 44 having never given birth.
Overly pessimistic. Our culture and economy have been structured to yield low fertility. That will eventually pass. There's no need for oppression to get replacement rate fertility.
But I don't see succesful attempts culture/economy changed to be family friendly?
Realistically our culture/economy right now "will pass" by being replaced with the virile Amish.
The fertility crisis is fairly new, and the public's consciousness of it is still barely there. That means we've not had enough serious attempts at fixing this. But it will happen. First we're seeing tax policy being altered to incentivize family formation in some places (very few). Second we'll see at some point that newer generations will place more value on early family formation and that will then lead to a change in the culture. That's my prediction, but who knows.
> Realistically our culture/economy right now "will pass" by being replaced with the virile Amish.
This is just the The Handmaid's Tale fantasy some people have. That's quite clearly not in the cards. And it's not like that's what our culture was like in the past (it wasn't), nor like that's the only way back to replacement level fertility (why would it be?).
The biggest problem is that countries want to incentivize good family formation, not just family formation. And that's a seemingly impossible nut to crack with government incentives. You can't just throw cash at people, you would end up with people you don't want having kids raising them to become adults you don't want.
But with the advent of AI, it is quite likely that some of the effort will be gone. Imagine a robot that does the dishes, folds clothes, or changes diapers. Or a robot that teaches patiently a child to speak a foreign language, or teaches them algebra. Maybe with a human (read parent) in the loop. I know this can easily slide into becoming stuff of nightmares (e.g. M3GAN), but with a bit of trial and error I'm sure we'll be able to strike a balance where the AI will be useful but not dangerous. After all, fire can kill yet we use it in our kitchens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l11zPNb-MFg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath:_Population_Zero
Aftermath: Population Zero - The World without Humans What would happen if, tomorrow, every single person on Earth simply disappeared? Not dead, simply gone, just like that. A world without people, where city streets are still populated by cars, but no drivers. A world where there is no one to fix bridges or repair broken windows…
Edit: It's just that particular link. Searching for the title itself brought up a working one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHoOG4eKzbM
Interestingly, humans (without canids) apparently don’t come across as much of a threat by default. I would be approached by curious animals that in any other environment would never allow themselves to be remotely that close to a human. For lack of a better description, these animals also had much more “personality” than the wild animals you see near civilization.
Until you’ve seen the actual wilds, it is easy to forget how much of the “wilds” are actually quite zoo-like.
I had the same thoughts as you - these animals don't behave as expected - it's like they haven't yet learned that humans can be dangerous.
I've also found that the animals behave differently out here, or appear to anyhow. Maybe it's just there's more sensory room to notice the differences. There's a family of small furry rodents that greet me a few feet away from the porch every morning. Birdsong also has a load of hidden complexity to it I've never noticed. Go outside every day and listen to the songs. There's persistence, modification proposals and consensus reaching among birds over days and weeks. I don't know a thing about birds, but it's clear there's a lot of fascinating stuff happening among them.
We have an "armadillo buddy" that lives under the cabin. Clouds of bats swarm between the trees at night and coyotes howl at the moon. There's got to be dozens of rabbits. They'll let you walk right up to them before they run off. Once had to wait for a family of 10 cross the gravel driveway on our way home. Another time there was a large cougar just chilling in the yard.
Having never lived in a rural area until my 30's, it's wild how much activity there is and how close it is to us.
How much of this is because nature doesn't have to work as hard to survive around our cabin, and how much is just being able to notice it? It's a mix for sure.
Not many discos out so rural, and not a lot of dining out either, but 45 minutes from a Walmart implies close to something.
