this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
771 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
76415 readers
4143 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The people can stay, it is the AI that has to go.
From a long term environmental standpoint that's not at all clear cut.
We objectively have too many humans in our biosphere for our current rate of resource consumption and we should significantly drop the overall number.
However, our current standard of living is mostly the result of a shared economy where we pool and share our resources and have a shit ton of people working.
Right now neural network algorithms consume a lot of processing power and resources, but they also solve whole new classes of automations problems that computers haven't been able to solve before.
If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can't.
Stop this ecofascist shit.
We can support the current population, it's just not profitable or popular to do so.
Birthrates naturally level off as societies develop. Many are already seeing negative growth.
Our current standard of living is mostly predicated on offshoring the suffering and waste to the global South, but even that could be comfortably leveled off if we weren't living under Capitalism.
We don't need large AI farms, we need empathy. The techbros will not save us.
They're the ecofascist yet you're the one saying "you'll shit in the mud and you'll like it".
Birthrates lower partially thanks to higher standard of living, which are not sustainable for 7+ billions people.
Not that I think LLMs are going to help in any way, but every time someone mentions overpopulation, all the counter arguments I see are loads of anti system rhetoric with nothing to show for it.
You think soviet Russia was/current China is sustainable?
The earth can easily sustain our current population at a 1st world standard of living, but only if we are orders of magnitude more efficient. That means things like no mass car usage, eco-urbanisn, no more single family homes with quarter acre empty lawns, widespread plant-based foods as the norm, and repairable technology that actually lasts decades instead of planned obsolescence and cheap plastic junk that fills up landfills.
You don't need to be some anarcho-primitivist/Ted Kaczynski wannabe living in a wooden shack with one set of clothes.
Now is that viable in the current societal climate? No, people, especially Americans generally hate much of those eco-urbanist ideas. As long as Capitalism is the default economic system and neo-liberal politics is the default political approach to democracy, we will continue marching towards a consumerist doom.