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The Peripheral The biggest problem for me, is after the catastrophe, and collapse of everything, the survivors have "won the lottery". But the book never rea

The Peripheral The biggest problem for me, is after the catastrophe, and collapse of everything, the survivors have "won the lottery". But the book never really explains how this future turned out 'good' for the survivors and not a 'mad max' like dystopia like every other post apocalypse story. If there was massive population decline, then how are they making all that technology? Is it all robots? Who built the robots?. It was just a big leap from "huge global collapse and there are no people left" to "those that are left are really living it up in the abundance that is leftover".

s1artibartfast 2y ago
I think that you can make a pretty good case that global scale isnt necessary for modern quality of life, and the world would be more efficient with 10 or 1% of the current population. Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy. Natural resources are still the primary constraint on human prosperity: food, energy, land, metals, ect. In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, but they are working with only the best inputs. You might have the same number of fishermen per capita, but they are fishing the best 1% of fishing grounds without competition. If you drill for oil, it is now in the top 1% in terms of ease of extraction. If you build a dam for power, you have more site capacity per capita. If China had 1% the population, the three gorges dam would supply enough power for entire country two times over. People learn about economies of scale and high school econ, but there are also ineconomies of scale. At some point there is no more efficiency and gain from increasing the size of your widget factory. However, it might be more expensive to import power and metal from further and further away
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  >Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy. This is laughably naive. Not only would "innovation suffer", but it's pretty doubtful that current technology could be maintained with a population as small as that. Humans are a (weak) hivemind intelligence, and everything we have now is only capable with a population as high as we have it currently. Sure, there might be some inefficiency going on, but it's tens of percent, not hundreds of percent. >In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, In a depopulated world, we don't have double digits of one-in-a-billion geniuses. We don't have 1% of the population doing agriculture work, because they can't spare 500,000 people to build and maintain agricultural mechanization. Because they can't do that, they'll actually need to employ even more people doing it with less automation and more manual labor. These things don't scale linearly. (Even if they somehow caught on that the ag mechanization paid dividends, their version of John Deere can't do the same thing because all of the other industries that make John Deere possible don't exist). Regressing back to lesser forms doesn't work, because back when John Deere was making 50,000 small tractors a year, there was demand for small tractors. And that's before we even get to the part where if those 80 million have the same demographics that we have now, with an excess of old geezers... I suspect strongly that if we could somehow go do the Star Trek thing and visit countless alien worlds that show a variety of (human-like) aliens, their technology level strongly correlates with their global population, and that in instances where global population somehow declined, so too did their ability to retain that technology.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I never said hundreds of percent, that's all your imagination. If I were to guess, I would ballpark 25% more efficiency if population were 1% and no growth. I think we are well into the linear and decreasing scale for most industries. How many parallel factories do you think there are around the world building tractors. How many independent factories making cars and trucks? Also, consider how much labor is spent on R&D, investment, and growth. I think you are drifting back into innovation when you are talking about geniuses.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      There are a lot more single threaded supply chain factories that you'd think. When they start falling apart, it all starts falling apart. We got a dry run of this in covid with chips. One small part of chip making, think some substrate, was in short supply, and shut down the automakers And even the Hurricane that hit NC, took out one of the single factories making high end quartz for chips.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Chip making is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, and in no way representative the whole. Even then, a huge amount of the chipmaking industry aside from the bleeding edge is parallelized. Let me ask you a question. How much efficiency do you think would be saved with zero population growth and zero innovation? What percent of the world do you think works in Chip making? It is tiny.
        FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        I think I'm biased from being in manufacturing. During Covid the lack of even a few types of parts, derailed huge projects. So you could have a project going in worth millions, with thousands of parts. But the whole thing gets delayed because of a single 100$ part that could not be sourced. It really seemed stark how the global supply chain could just start crumbling. And I was extrapolating to people, if we aren't staffing, and those parts aren't being made, then the whole thing starts to collapse.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

I think that you can make a pretty good case that global scale isnt necessary for modern quality of life, and the world would be more efficient with 10 or 1% of the current population. Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy. Natural resources are still the primary constraint on human prosperity: food, energy, land, metals, ect. In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, but they are working with only the best inputs. You might have the same number of fishermen per capita, but they are fishing the best 1% of fishing grounds without competition. If you drill for oil, it is now in the top 1% in terms of ease of extraction. If you build a dam for power, you have more site capacity per capita. If China had 1% the population, the three gorges dam would supply enough power for entire country two times over. People learn about economies of scale and high school econ, but there are also ineconomies of scale. At some point there is no more efficiency and gain from increasing the size of your widget factory. However, it might be more expensive to import power and metal from further and further away

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
>Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy. This is laughably naive. Not only would "innovation suffer", but it's pretty doubtful that current technology could be maintained with a population as small as that. Humans are a (weak) hivemind intelligence, and everything we have now is only capable with a population as high as we have it currently. Sure, there might be some inefficiency going on, but it's tens of percent, not hundreds of percent. >In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, In a depopulated world, we don't have double digits of one-in-a-billion geniuses. We don't have 1% of the population doing agriculture work, because they can't spare 500,000 people to build and maintain agricultural mechanization. Because they can't do that, they'll actually need to employ even more people doing it with less automation and more manual labor. These things don't scale linearly. (Even if they somehow caught on that the ag mechanization paid dividends, their version of John Deere can't do the same thing because all of the other industries that make John Deere possible don't exist). Regressing back to lesser forms doesn't work, because back when John Deere was making 50,000 small tractors a year, there was demand for small tractors. And that's before we even get to the part where if those 80 million have the same demographics that we have now, with an excess of old geezers... I suspect strongly that if we could somehow go do the Star Trek thing and visit countless alien worlds that show a variety of (human-like) aliens, their technology level strongly correlates with their global population, and that in instances where global population somehow declined, so too did their ability to retain that technology.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I never said hundreds of percent, that's all your imagination. If I were to guess, I would ballpark 25% more efficiency if population were 1% and no growth. I think we are well into the linear and decreasing scale for most industries. How many parallel factories do you think there are around the world building tractors. How many independent factories making cars and trucks? Also, consider how much labor is spent on R&D, investment, and growth. I think you are drifting back into innovation when you are talking about geniuses.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    There are a lot more single threaded supply chain factories that you'd think. When they start falling apart, it all starts falling apart. We got a dry run of this in covid with chips. One small part of chip making, think some substrate, was in short supply, and shut down the automakers And even the Hurricane that hit NC, took out one of the single factories making high end quartz for chips.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Chip making is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, and in no way representative the whole. Even then, a huge amount of the chipmaking industry aside from the bleeding edge is parallelized. Let me ask you a question. How much efficiency do you think would be saved with zero population growth and zero innovation? What percent of the world do you think works in Chip making? It is tiny.
      - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        I think I'm biased from being in manufacturing. During Covid the lack of even a few types of parts, derailed huge projects. So you could have a project going in worth millions, with thousands of parts. But the whole thing gets delayed because of a single 100$ part that could not be sourced. It really seemed stark how the global supply chain could just start crumbling. And I was extrapolating to people, if we aren't staffing, and those parts aren't being made, then the whole thing starts to collapse.