Editorial
Homo Obsolescens?
by Howard V. Hendrix
I. Population Velocity
In biological Latin, obsolescens means “becoming obsolete, rudimentary, or extinct.” More broadly it suggests “wearing out, decaying, falling into disuse, losing value, disappearing.”
In most ways, our species seems to not be at all describable by such a generally pejorative term. Take, for instance, that meaning of “becoming extinct.” Although nationalists in the Global North fret about a “population collapse” when they look at national replacement fertility rates below 2.1 children per woman, this is a baseless fear in the context of global population. Most sub-Saharan nations, southeast Asian nations, and south Asian nations have total fertility rates significantly above 2.1. These latter nations are the flipside of the “underpopulation” numbers bemoaned by the natalist nationalists.
The error the prophets of plummeting population have made is that they have foregrounded national fertility rates (number of children per woman) while failing to account for population momentum (the total number of women in their childbearing years, whether in a nation or globally). Taking the momentum of the “population pyramid” into account, the United Nations now predicts human population will have reached ten billion by sometime in the late 2050s and that the curve for absolute global population numbers will continue to rise at least through most of the rest of this century.
These overpopulation numbers come more vividly into focus when we consider what might be called population velocity—the change in position (population size displaced from zero) over time, or speed plus direction (upward, in this case). Our species Homo sapiens took well over 300,000 years to reach a population of one billion, a number generally considered by demographers to have been attained around 1800. By the late 2050s we will have achieved an overall ten-fold increase in human population since 1800—that is, in a period of substantially less than three hundred years.
More vividly still, consider this: While it took over 300,000 years for the population of Homo sapiens to reach its first billion, it took only twelve years for human population to grow by one billion—from 7 billion to 8 billion, for instance—beginning in 2011 and ending in 2022. These numbers mean that the population of Homo sapiens has of late been growing at a velocity more than 25,000 times that of our long-term population growth rate.
Given that we have as a species done this “billion more people in twelve years” trick four successive times in the last fifty years, the idea that the global human population will suddenly collapse and we will go extinct as a result of people choosing to have fewer children is, at this point, absurd.
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II. Practically Inexhaustible
Something similar seems also to apply to the idea of human obsolescence. As John Danaher has argued in “Technological Change and Human Obsolescence: An Axiological Analysis” (Techne, 2022): “Humans do not serve a finite number of purposes. Humans are an adaptable and flexible species. Humans find entertainment and a sense of meaning in a diverse range of activities. Humans are constantly finding new activities and new purposes. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious limit to the purposes they can serve.”
Danaher proposes a two-by-two matrix description of human obsolescence with “general” vs. “narrow” along the rows axis and “actual” vs. “perceived” along the columns axis. Within that matrix, he finds that “actual-narrow” and “perceived-narrow” obsolescence is plausible and historically confirmed. He gives the example of human computers, who did not lose their internal capacity for arithmetic but whose skills fell into disuse because they objectively could not compete with digital computers on the same computing tasks.
Danaher goes on to note that “the history of workplace automation reads as a litany of narrow forms of technologically induced obsolescence.” This isn’t ultimately a problem, Danaher asserts, because general forms of obsolescence are “implausible.” For Danaher, the purposes humans can serve and the number of activities they can engage in are either infinite or “at the very least” larger in number “than humans can practically exhaust.”
It is precisely on this notion of “larger than humans can practically exhaust,” however, that optimistic discussions of both the planet’s carrying capacity for humans and the “actual-general” obsolescence of human beings run aground.
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III. On Not Forcing the Shift
As public health expert Hans Rosling has suggested (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI), human beings have never lived in ecological balance with nature—they have died in ecological balance with nature. Although Rosling generally focuses on the five-thousand-year period during which human numbers went from ten million to one billion (roughly from the advent of writing during the agricultural age to the advent of the steam engine during the industrial age), his argument is that, throughout most of human prehistory and history, the number of children born averaged six per woman. Over that five-thousand-year period he focuses on, however, only about two or so of those six children survived to adulthood, on average. Low replacement numbers, slow population growth—across eons. This high infant mortality rate Rosling refers to as the “death control” of human population.
Due to many factors (most prominently improved sanitation and medical care), by the nineteenth century and even more so into the twentieth, four out of six children per woman survived to adulthood, on average, according to Rosling. Death control had diminished. Because we had still not disentangled reproduction from sexuality, however, the rate of change in human population skyrocketed, due to a combination of traditionally high birth rates and newly lower infant mortality rates. (Increases to overall longevity also played a role, but not so strongly as the decreases in infant mortality rates did.)
Even with reliable and convenient contraception, there has still been a lag-time to widespread acceptance of family planning. Some of that lag is religious and cultural, but some of it is so deeply held as to be nearly “biological.” As Rosling has pointed out, family planning happens in response to seeing children survive. Paradoxically, the infant and child death rate must start to go down before couples will voluntarily take up family planning—with the result that the birth rate thereafter goes down. Rosling refers to this decreased birth rate due to family planning as the “love control” of population.
Although Rosling often gives short shrift to resource and environmental concerns, the transition from “death control” to “love control” nonetheless provides a good sketch of something a bit more complicated: Demographic transition, the historical shift from high birth rates/high infant death rates in low-tech, low-education, low-economic-development societies, to low birth rates/low infant death rates in high-tech, high-education, high-economic-development societies. If we want to encourage global demographic transition in order to slow human population velocity, it is particularly important to provide opportunities to women for education and employment beyond the domestic sphere.
Shift happens, but forcing that shift can be problematic. This is what occurred with China’s mandatory one-child policy. The government tried to encourage the shift from an agricultural society to an industrialized one, in record time, by curbing family size and thereby reducing the number of families dependent upon subsistence agriculture. That project of industrializing and modernizing China largely succeeded, but there was an unintended consequence: the government-mandated one-child policy and the voluntary demographic transition synergized with each other, to the point that the number of children born per woman in China fell significantly below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1. As a result, India, with a fertility rate of 2.159 children per woman has already or will soon surpass China to become the most populous nation on Earth.
We need a shift of a different sort, however. Naïvely believing that we don’t really have to do anything—that an invisible demographic hand will somehow inevitably resolve all our planetary issues of population and consumption—is magical thinking masquerading as population science.
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IV. Species 5150
For those who may not have pored over the California Welfare and Institutions Code lately, “5150” refers to the section of that Code that allows the involuntary detainment of an adult person who, in the throes of a disabling mental health crisis, presents a danger to self or others.
If we were to reframe the existence and actions of Homo sapiens throughout time as the existence and actions of one “human species person”—understanding humanity as a legal person made of natural persons—then the protections, privileges, rights, responsibilities, and legal liabilities of Homo sapiens should be very nearly indistinguishable from those of individual human beings.
Given this premise, one might then ask: Does the human species present a danger to itself and others? Our long self-mutilating history of violence against ourselves—uncounted millennia of murders, skirmishes, tribal conflicts, slave-takings, and genocides, not to mention global wars and the nuclear weapons we hold to our own head—all of these make self-evident the truth that human species person Homo sapiens is a danger to itself.
The dangers the human species person presents to other species is similarly self-evident. Our consumption of the natural world’s resources has been rising in tandem with our population, as has the collateral damage associated with that dual growth—climate emergency, ocean acidification, deforestation, much more. Particularly troubling is that, over the last fifty years alone, nonhuman vertebrate populations—wild fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals—have declined by seventy per cent.
Human activity has driven and continues to drive the accelerating rate at which biodiversity is being lost to extinction—not only the declines already mentioned, but also the additional one million plant and animal species facing extinction within the next few decades. Taken together, this is extinction at a rate not seen since a rock the size of Mount Everest fell from space and wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs (and much else), 66 million years ago.
As a result of human activity, the natural world is increasingly being downcycled and degraded. Earth’s biosphere is arguably more down-at-heel and tattered than at any time since that last major planetary extinction. We humans have come to exist in an inverse proportionality relationship to the rest of complex life on this planet: The more human population and its corresponding resource consumption accelerate in an upward direction, the more overall biodiversity accelerates in a downward direction, with more and more species being sped on their way ever faster toward the dead end of extinction.
In so many ways, the paradoxical result of the human species person’s productive and reproductive success is the no-longer-slow violence with which we are disabling our planetary life-support systems. Although the velocity of human population and consumption continues to skyrocket, what goes up like a rocket can come down like a shooting star—and all too often does. Even knowing that, our human species person (also known as all of us) nonetheless refuses to curtail the danger it presents to itself and other species. We persist in believing the manifest fantasy that inexhaustible growth can happen on an exhaustible planet, with the result that we Homo sapiens are hyper-populating and hyper-consuming far beyond what the planet can sustain.
If doing the same thing over and over again while endlessly expecting a different outcome is a definition of a disabling mental health crisis, then Homo sapiens might just be Species 5150 and in need of some restraint.
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V. Somewhere Over the Singularity
Cornucopian economists, crypto-moguls, effective altruists, and other technological utopians (quite a few of whom happen to work in Silicon Valley) are not big fans of restraint, and so have pumped a great deal of hype and money into longtermism, an approach to the future which occupies a position somewhere between philosophical movement and secular religion.
Longtermists don’t worry all that much about the disappearance of nonhuman life on this planet, but they are very concerned about the future of human life on other planets. The longtermists believe that trillions or quadrillions (or far more) of humanity’s deep descendants (flesh, uploaded, virtual) must, over millions of years, come to occupy many millions of planets throughout the Universe, if not the fabric of spacetime itself. For adherents of longtermism, we are marching toward a future of technologies so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic—a future in which (they promise) we can maximize both human population and the pleasures of consumption in a single bound.
From far enough forward, the past’s tragedies cease to be tragic. One must wonder, then, what enormities longtermists will countenance, on the long march to such a vastly and gloriously populous future. Many longtermists have already come to believe that only existential risks to the entirety of humanity are worth caring about. Climate change, global poverty, biodiversity loss—these just aren’t big enough threats to really be of concern to them. The possibility of nuclear war or runaway AI or big rocks from space may give them pause, but what do innumerable genocides, global totalitarian regimes, mass extinctions, or planetary ecosystem collapses matter, along the way to their wonderful future? If you want to ensure the cosmic potential of Earth-originating intelligent life, you’ve got to be willing to break a few planets.
Unfortunately, the first planet we’re likely to “break” is our own, and that before we can scurry off to another.
Those who favor untrammeled longtermist-style growth might well respond that, even if having more people does not necessarily mean having proportionally more geniuses and innovations to solve the problems that having more people creates, won’t we still need more people to do more of the mundane work of everyday human life?
Maybe not, given the suite of technologies (particularly robotics and AI) intended to reduce the need for human work in many types of employment—not just repetitive, tedious, or dangerous work. Mention the future of robots or AI and you’re likely to encounter the higher tech version of the “guns/knives/tools” neutrality argument: AI is not good or bad—what people decide to do with AI is good or bad. This argument cannot stand, however, once artificial intelligence decides what it wants to do with itself—and this possibility is particularly important to questions of human obsolescence.
This is the deep paradox of technotopian thought: It calls for simultaneously increasing the human population and for developing technologies that render increasingly obsolete not only human physical labor but also human intellectual labor. One must wonder if the technotopian idea that technology liberates us from labor is ultimately tending toward “liberating” us from thinking itself, or from being human at all. Why else create ever more new technologies to make ever more human beings ever more obsolete—thereby diminishing the marginal self-utility of individual human existence, at least for the foreseeable future?
Of course, some theorists think human obsolescence is fundamentally a good idea. If human beings fall into disuse—in terms of their productive activity that contributes to society—that might be a good thing. Maybe it has been our being so busy that has gotten us into so much trouble. Danaher, despite having argued earlier in his article that “at least some human activities are resistant to the dynamics of obsolescence because they are valued for their intrinsic performances and not their ultimate ends,” at last argues that “building a culture that celebrates human obsolescence may be the best way to benefit from technological progress.”
Somewhere over the Singularity, Twitterbirds fly. Someday we’ll all be magically transformed into a universal leisure class of genius-creative nontrepreneurs whose workplay can somehow never be offshored to the bots and AIs of Cyberia—and we wouldn’t care if it were.
I would love to be able to suspend my disbelief long enough to believe that. I would love to believe that idle hands will be less of a devil’s workshop than busy hands are. Unfortunately, it’s all about growth in human populations and technological innovations, for the two current world systems—one of which is about making a fortune out of other people’s misfortunes, and the other about making a misfortune out of other people’s fortunes. Or, if you prefer, one of which is about oppressing a very few people much less of the time and the vast majority of people much more of the time, while the other is about oppressing everyone more or less equally all of the time.
Both systems share an interest in making more and more people (in absolute terms) more and more obsolete (in absolute terms), failing, as they both do, to recognize the hidden dangers of living in a dream of fantastical inexhaustibility—whether of purposes, people, or planets. If we are to avoid both the 5150 boom-bust leading to the extinction of human being and the orgy of obsolescence leading to the decay of human meaning, waking up from that long strange dream of inexhaustibility is a good opening move. Especially if we hope to achieve a voluntary “soft landing” of our skyrocket situation, rather than face mandatory curbs on human freedom and meaning intended to ward off a hard planetary crash.
If we do not achieve the former, we are likely to have the latter imposed upon us. Yet that choice is still ours. Our velocity is not inescapable. For now.
Howard V. Hendrix’s first four published novels appeared from ACE Books, his fifth and sixth from Ballantine Del Rey. His most recent collection is The Girls with Kaleidoscope Eyes (Fairwood Press 2019). His first poetry collection is Living Fossils are the Happiest Kind (In Case of Emergency Press, 2023). He is at work on nonfiction about the science and fiction of population and extinction, for McFarland & Company.
Copyright © 2024 Howard V. Hendrix