Surprising to see this from the author of the Age of Em! I think a more straightforward extrapolation of current trends is a world of declining population but increasing software.
In response to worries about economic decline, current governments seem much more likely to double down on software (by making huge investments in software R&D, datacenters, robots, AI) than in subsidizing parents to have more children. We might disagree with their values, but with typical government goals of economic growth and national security I'm not sure they're mistaken!
Even without government intervention, software will increasingly require less human labor to develop and maintain. A single innovation (language models as coding assistants) has already led to a ~2x human labor cost reduction in software development, and a further 10x reduction this decade seems very plausible. There's no plausible fertility decline fast enough to counteract that rate of productivity growth.
As the world economy declines, govts are going to be having great trouble pay for retirement benefits of their old populations. Hard to see why software would be such a huge priority to them.
Why pay retirement benefits for older people if you can't afford them? Either figure our how to make them young and productive again, or cut them loose.
But cut them loose you mean let die of exposure and starvation? Adolph Hitler, is that you? Hint you will be old someday, pay that the people looking out for your welfare aren't cold hearted ASSHOLES like you.
I have no problem with grown kids taking care of their parents. Also, even old people can work. Society shouldn't be destroyed trying to take care of the ones that never bothered to have enough kids though. Or to take care of their own health so they don't become helpless in the first place.
The purpose of biological aging is have some portion of the population much more vulnerable to death, so that everyone doesn't die at once. It's not to so burden the productive portion of the population that they can't have their own kids.
You completely ignored the part about making people young again. Spend some money on health extension prizes before you blow it all on medicare, social security and interest payments on stupid debts.
By the way I'm not really replying to you, just expanding for whoever else might be reading this. I think you need to relax before you start insulting people on the internet for something you made up in your own mind.
I think government's have settled for deficit spending, anyone holding government bonds to maturity and not engaging in securities lending transactions with them is paying for it.
Extrapolating today's trends in the far future makes for fun scenarios, always and ad absurdum. Doing it for 3 trends at once - population/hardware/software - seems useless. Population is the most stable trend, yep it will peak at 11 billion and go slowly down. But during this century this is counteracted by: a) the raising amount of people taking more part in the global economy (+science) - even Pakistanis and Nigerians shall have a higher GDP per head in 2100 than now b) the higher birth-rate of the elite (US-households with an income of over 1 million a year are well over a TFR of 2.1. It is not just Elon Musk.) The global market in 2100 will NOT be smaller than today. And innovation? We just had GPT4; in my life, I have seen no innovation slowing (outside Japan, maybe), and we all are expecting a major UP with GPT 5. We may not even need many people to keep hardware and software up and running and ever improving.
As I said here before, I doubt a long deep fall of population over centuries to pre 1900 levels. Those who feel less like having kids will strongly be selected against, by definition. When Japanese have living space as large as in the US (instead of "rabbit houses"), growth may pick up. When energy will be abundant (PV or fusion), and homes robot-built: what to enjoy more than cuddling your next (not last) baby? - In 1800 there were 30 million Japanese and no one considered the island deserted. In 1900 there lived less than 40 million in France. When Einstein had his golden year, there were less than 60 million Germans (let alone Swiss), many just kids, most still poor, a tiny percentage with university-degrees. A time of stagnation, really?
You have had a very different experience with the growth of software than I have. I've mostly experienced it as increasing interoperability failures, increasing waste as systems that are unnecessary have caused the complete destruction of expensive equipment because they didn't handle exceptions properly, and increasing failure on the part of software engineers to appreciate the nature of complexity and how to handle it. It's a standard joke that the first 10 minutes of every meeting is trying to get the sound to work in Zoom or Teams. I've seen $50,000 cars scrapped because a door lock luxury feature malfunctioned, the software bus got flooded with useless messages, and the engine couldn't start, but it was too hard to diagnose the problem and replace the door handle. And the failure to understand software engineering concepts like the Normalized Distance to the Main Sequence, a metric for controlling complexity in systems, have caused vital underlying systems in the Internet to become unstable because, for instance, browser makers have insisted on a rapid, short release cycle for their product, making it impossible for other systems to upgrade their systems fast enough for their products to be tested against their browsers. You couldn't pay me enough, for instance, to approve the use of Firefox in a corporate environment because the browser's LTS period is shorter than the development and purchase cycle of corporate software packages with an HTTP front-end. So we centralize all of our data and secrets into cloud-based systems, and a single data breach at a major provider like Salesforce, or a fire at an AWS facility, risks bringing down the massive interconnected infrastructure of the modern world. The fact is we aren't very good at softwares development, the rush to low cost that has caused us to abandon more physical solutions has made everything more brittle and likely to fail, constantly and in millions of small ways. There was a recent revelation that commercial aircraft are struggling to navigate over the Middle East because the GPS system is vulnerable to interference because the signals aren't authenticated, even with public key authentication that would maintain the openness of the system, and the backup systems for the GPS are calibrated by ... GPS. We are failing to understand the need to design these systems wisely, and it's going to go critical soon.
This isn't central to your point, but still: Is it even possible to cryptographically authenticate GPS in a way that isn't easy to break? After all, the attacker can retransmit legitimate signal from another location, without messing with the cryptographic signatures.
Honestly, this occurred to me as I was typing the response, so maybe I haven't thought it through, but it is possible to use public-private keys to authenticate rather than encrypt, so it should be possible to assign each satellite a private key, sign each GPS packet with the private key, and GPS devices with the public keys could verify that the transmission were coming from the satellite. The vulnerability disclosed came from hackers impersonating satellites and either sending bad data, which corrupts additional systems that are supposed to be backups, or simply breaking the protocol resulting in denial of service, rather than simple jamming.
EDIT 2: I reread your comment and you could be right. This would protect against forged data, but maybe not against replay attacks, unless there was some kind of transmission ID feature, which could at least indicate the presence of a replay attacker, even if it couldn't distinguish between the transmissions.
In the world without hardware progress and with stagnant economy, most causes of software rot will be absent. Outside of some legal-dependent domains like accounting, nothing will prevent using software developed centuries ago.
It’s odd to see software rot framed this way. Software rots because it can’t keep up with change. The more static the world, the less of a problem that becomes. Even today, software decades old continues to run.
This is an interesting exploration of one of the impacts of a declining human population. However, I find it difficult to believe your conclusions because AI is lowering the cost of software development, and is doing so much faster than population growth deceleration. Your points are only relevant if we depart substantially from at least one of these trends.
"The world’s innovation rate will shrink a bit faster than does this exponentially shrinking economy, "
Why is that? Currently, the majority of the world population is on low paying jobs that did not require a high quality education. Dont you think we can grow the effective population by providing better education for more people?
Robin writes a lot about signalling, and his colleague Bryan Caplan wrote "The Case Against Education", arguing that signalling (and ability bias) is the cause of education being correlated with income rather than it mostly being a matter of increasing human capital. As the US has gotten a higher fraction of its population into higher education, these marginal students have not been as productive as previous generations of students.
it seems plausible that the marginal student in the us has a diminishing return on productivity, but why would that be true also in other regions such as africa where there is not the same level of education available?
Lots of third world countries have tried to invest in education, imitating wealthier countries... but they don't seem to get any boost to economic growth as a consequence of such increases in investment.
Thanks for the references. There are many variables in what makes development successful. For case studies, Joe Studwell in https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Success-Failure-ebook/dp/B00B3M47VC takes a look at the success of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China and compares it with less succesful countries in east asia. I agree, looking at education alone will not be enough. One needs to develop the country first to a stage where the need for a highly educated workforce arises.
> When software suppliers themselves choose what other software suppliers to rely on, they should in principle worry about how long each supplier’s software will be supported, and whether they will raise their prices. But in an expanding software world these are only mild concerns. If some suppliers die or raise their prices, other superior options will probably become available soon.
Great, except that the new supplier's stuff will have interfaces different from the old supplier, so you can't switch without paying a big cost to hook your software up to the new supplier's software and write custom exports for all your legacy data from the old formats to the new (which will never exactly correspond), and bug test everything. You get vendor lock-in.
> But if your product is near state of the art in features, then expanded revenue from your expanded base of customers will usually let you rewrite it all from scratch later.
Who is rewriting their giant software from scratch today? The MBAs practically never approve such a huge expense just to fix technical debt. Technical debt tends to stick around. A rewrite is not even necessarily a good idea from a technical perspective because a lot of "ugly cruft" in your current software is actually just bugfixes that took a lot of time and customer feedback to produce.
I'm a software developer and the team I'm on is currently working to replace an old system nearly impossible to maintain with a new one we wrote from scratch. I recently learned the old system was itself a version 2, after a previous system from before my time that was apparently even less maintainable.
Why? It seems counterintuitive maybe, but AI innovation ( re: software ) would not be constrained by anything but energy production, and even then, could find innovation and efficiencies in its own processes. And energy availability may be inversely proportional to declining population.
" When the economy isn’t large enough to support the huge fixed costs of the computer hardware industry, who will want to pay more for new hardware that isn’t better than plentiful durable old hardware?"
This arguably already true when workstation and business class notebook computers from 5 to 8 years ago have more than enough CPU power to even do strenuous tasks like edit 4K video, and compile code. Why would I pay a 1000 dollars for a consumer grade notebook, when I can get an older workstation class laptop for 200 that has a better keyboard and screen, and is way more durable, and will do everything I need to do?
Surprising to see this from the author of the Age of Em! I think a more straightforward extrapolation of current trends is a world of declining population but increasing software.
In response to worries about economic decline, current governments seem much more likely to double down on software (by making huge investments in software R&D, datacenters, robots, AI) than in subsidizing parents to have more children. We might disagree with their values, but with typical government goals of economic growth and national security I'm not sure they're mistaken!
Even without government intervention, software will increasingly require less human labor to develop and maintain. A single innovation (language models as coding assistants) has already led to a ~2x human labor cost reduction in software development, and a further 10x reduction this decade seems very plausible. There's no plausible fertility decline fast enough to counteract that rate of productivity growth.
As the world economy declines, govts are going to be having great trouble pay for retirement benefits of their old populations. Hard to see why software would be such a huge priority to them.
Why pay retirement benefits for older people if you can't afford them? Either figure our how to make them young and productive again, or cut them loose.
But cut them loose you mean let die of exposure and starvation? Adolph Hitler, is that you? Hint you will be old someday, pay that the people looking out for your welfare aren't cold hearted ASSHOLES like you.
I have no problem with grown kids taking care of their parents. Also, even old people can work. Society shouldn't be destroyed trying to take care of the ones that never bothered to have enough kids though. Or to take care of their own health so they don't become helpless in the first place.
The purpose of biological aging is have some portion of the population much more vulnerable to death, so that everyone doesn't die at once. It's not to so burden the productive portion of the population that they can't have their own kids.
You completely ignored the part about making people young again. Spend some money on health extension prizes before you blow it all on medicare, social security and interest payments on stupid debts.
By the way I'm not really replying to you, just expanding for whoever else might be reading this. I think you need to relax before you start insulting people on the internet for something you made up in your own mind.
I think government's have settled for deficit spending, anyone holding government bonds to maturity and not engaging in securities lending transactions with them is paying for it.
Extrapolating today's trends in the far future makes for fun scenarios, always and ad absurdum. Doing it for 3 trends at once - population/hardware/software - seems useless. Population is the most stable trend, yep it will peak at 11 billion and go slowly down. But during this century this is counteracted by: a) the raising amount of people taking more part in the global economy (+science) - even Pakistanis and Nigerians shall have a higher GDP per head in 2100 than now b) the higher birth-rate of the elite (US-households with an income of over 1 million a year are well over a TFR of 2.1. It is not just Elon Musk.) The global market in 2100 will NOT be smaller than today. And innovation? We just had GPT4; in my life, I have seen no innovation slowing (outside Japan, maybe), and we all are expecting a major UP with GPT 5. We may not even need many people to keep hardware and software up and running and ever improving.
As I said here before, I doubt a long deep fall of population over centuries to pre 1900 levels. Those who feel less like having kids will strongly be selected against, by definition. When Japanese have living space as large as in the US (instead of "rabbit houses"), growth may pick up. When energy will be abundant (PV or fusion), and homes robot-built: what to enjoy more than cuddling your next (not last) baby? - In 1800 there were 30 million Japanese and no one considered the island deserted. In 1900 there lived less than 40 million in France. When Einstein had his golden year, there were less than 60 million Germans (let alone Swiss), many just kids, most still poor, a tiny percentage with university-degrees. A time of stagnation, really?
Halfway through, this article goes rather absurd... was it written by AI?
You have had a very different experience with the growth of software than I have. I've mostly experienced it as increasing interoperability failures, increasing waste as systems that are unnecessary have caused the complete destruction of expensive equipment because they didn't handle exceptions properly, and increasing failure on the part of software engineers to appreciate the nature of complexity and how to handle it. It's a standard joke that the first 10 minutes of every meeting is trying to get the sound to work in Zoom or Teams. I've seen $50,000 cars scrapped because a door lock luxury feature malfunctioned, the software bus got flooded with useless messages, and the engine couldn't start, but it was too hard to diagnose the problem and replace the door handle. And the failure to understand software engineering concepts like the Normalized Distance to the Main Sequence, a metric for controlling complexity in systems, have caused vital underlying systems in the Internet to become unstable because, for instance, browser makers have insisted on a rapid, short release cycle for their product, making it impossible for other systems to upgrade their systems fast enough for their products to be tested against their browsers. You couldn't pay me enough, for instance, to approve the use of Firefox in a corporate environment because the browser's LTS period is shorter than the development and purchase cycle of corporate software packages with an HTTP front-end. So we centralize all of our data and secrets into cloud-based systems, and a single data breach at a major provider like Salesforce, or a fire at an AWS facility, risks bringing down the massive interconnected infrastructure of the modern world. The fact is we aren't very good at softwares development, the rush to low cost that has caused us to abandon more physical solutions has made everything more brittle and likely to fail, constantly and in millions of small ways. There was a recent revelation that commercial aircraft are struggling to navigate over the Middle East because the GPS system is vulnerable to interference because the signals aren't authenticated, even with public key authentication that would maintain the openness of the system, and the backup systems for the GPS are calibrated by ... GPS. We are failing to understand the need to design these systems wisely, and it's going to go critical soon.
Now think about how much worse all that will get in a shrinking economy.
This isn't central to your point, but still: Is it even possible to cryptographically authenticate GPS in a way that isn't easy to break? After all, the attacker can retransmit legitimate signal from another location, without messing with the cryptographic signatures.
Honestly, this occurred to me as I was typing the response, so maybe I haven't thought it through, but it is possible to use public-private keys to authenticate rather than encrypt, so it should be possible to assign each satellite a private key, sign each GPS packet with the private key, and GPS devices with the public keys could verify that the transmission were coming from the satellite. The vulnerability disclosed came from hackers impersonating satellites and either sending bad data, which corrupts additional systems that are supposed to be backups, or simply breaking the protocol resulting in denial of service, rather than simple jamming.
EDIT: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bk3v/commercial-flights-are-experiencing-unthinkable-gps-attacks-and-nobody-knows-what-to-do
EDIT 2: I reread your comment and you could be right. This would protect against forged data, but maybe not against replay attacks, unless there was some kind of transmission ID feature, which could at least indicate the presence of a replay attacker, even if it couldn't distinguish between the transmissions.
On re-reading, maybe I misunderstood what you were saying, but I think the reckoning is at least sooner than later.
In the world without hardware progress and with stagnant economy, most causes of software rot will be absent. Outside of some legal-dependent domains like accounting, nothing will prevent using software developed centuries ago.
It’s odd to see software rot framed this way. Software rots because it can’t keep up with change. The more static the world, the less of a problem that becomes. Even today, software decades old continues to run.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
This is an interesting exploration of one of the impacts of a declining human population. However, I find it difficult to believe your conclusions because AI is lowering the cost of software development, and is doing so much faster than population growth deceleration. Your points are only relevant if we depart substantially from at least one of these trends.
AI innovation will also grind to halt in a declining economy.
I think what Michael said is that he doesnt see why the economy should decline in the first place.
What's the production function for innovation?
"The world’s innovation rate will shrink a bit faster than does this exponentially shrinking economy, "
Why is that? Currently, the majority of the world population is on low paying jobs that did not require a high quality education. Dont you think we can grow the effective population by providing better education for more people?
Robin writes a lot about signalling, and his colleague Bryan Caplan wrote "The Case Against Education", arguing that signalling (and ability bias) is the cause of education being correlated with income rather than it mostly being a matter of increasing human capital. As the US has gotten a higher fraction of its population into higher education, these marginal students have not been as productive as previous generations of students.
it seems plausible that the marginal student in the us has a diminishing return on productivity, but why would that be true also in other regions such as africa where there is not the same level of education available?
Other countries provide evidence in the form of Macro-Mincer regressions:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/schooling_incom.html
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/10/international_e.html
Lots of third world countries have tried to invest in education, imitating wealthier countries... but they don't seem to get any boost to economic growth as a consequence of such increases in investment.
Thanks for the references. There are many variables in what makes development successful. For case studies, Joe Studwell in https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Success-Failure-ebook/dp/B00B3M47VC takes a look at the success of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China and compares it with less succesful countries in east asia. I agree, looking at education alone will not be enough. One needs to develop the country first to a stage where the need for a highly educated workforce arises.
Scott Alexander reviewed that book here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how
> When software suppliers themselves choose what other software suppliers to rely on, they should in principle worry about how long each supplier’s software will be supported, and whether they will raise their prices. But in an expanding software world these are only mild concerns. If some suppliers die or raise their prices, other superior options will probably become available soon.
Great, except that the new supplier's stuff will have interfaces different from the old supplier, so you can't switch without paying a big cost to hook your software up to the new supplier's software and write custom exports for all your legacy data from the old formats to the new (which will never exactly correspond), and bug test everything. You get vendor lock-in.
> But if your product is near state of the art in features, then expanded revenue from your expanded base of customers will usually let you rewrite it all from scratch later.
Who is rewriting their giant software from scratch today? The MBAs practically never approve such a huge expense just to fix technical debt. Technical debt tends to stick around. A rewrite is not even necessarily a good idea from a technical perspective because a lot of "ugly cruft" in your current software is actually just bugfixes that took a lot of time and customer feedback to produce.
I'm a software developer and the team I'm on is currently working to replace an old system nearly impossible to maintain with a new one we wrote from scratch. I recently learned the old system was itself a version 2, after a previous system from before my time that was apparently even less maintainable.
Urbit fixes this
https://urbit.org/
Last week I commented here that:
Software isn't cheese. It doesn't rot. And real innovation is much more than what transpires from this post.
As promised, here is the full explanation: https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/of-software-rot-fertility-cities
It will take a thousand years before fertility increases? Ho ho ho.
Flowers for Algernon
Why? It seems counterintuitive maybe, but AI innovation ( re: software ) would not be constrained by anything but energy production, and even then, could find innovation and efficiencies in its own processes. And energy availability may be inversely proportional to declining population.
" When the economy isn’t large enough to support the huge fixed costs of the computer hardware industry, who will want to pay more for new hardware that isn’t better than plentiful durable old hardware?"
This arguably already true when workstation and business class notebook computers from 5 to 8 years ago have more than enough CPU power to even do strenuous tasks like edit 4K video, and compile code. Why would I pay a 1000 dollars for a consumer grade notebook, when I can get an older workstation class laptop for 200 that has a better keyboard and screen, and is way more durable, and will do everything I need to do?
I dont remember, maybe I even picked it up from Scott Alexander ... thanks for linking the review