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Comment by pphysch

9 hours ago

China is probably the among the best countries in the world to handle so-called "demographic collapse". Elders are relatively healthy and multigenerational households more common. Leader in robotics. News flash: you don't need a billion hard-working peasants in 2026 to be productive.

People in general don't seem to look at how much "productive" population you need in the real economy to support a given population. Things look pretty fine by those metrics and if the AI claims are to believed about to rapidly get even better. How to motivate and compensate that small number of people in the real economy that supports human welfare is a different question.

Also people appear to be blind to the real material limits that really start to be pushed by large populations. You could end up making life materially worse by trying to "fix" the demographics by adding more humans.