Won't extended life worsen overpopulation problems? (Response by Nick Bostrom)
Overpopulation is something we would have to come to terms with even if life-extension were not to happen. Some people blame technology for having given rise to the problem of overpopulation. Another way of looking at it is to consider that were it not for technology then most people alive today would not have existed -- including the ones that are complaining about overpopulation! Were we to stop using modern agricultural technologies, such as tractors, fertilizers and pesticides, most humans would soon die of starvation. It's worth thinking twice before calling something a "problem" when owe our very existence to it.

This is in no way to deny that too rapid population growth causes crowding, poverty and depletion of natural resources. In this sense there is a very real problem. Efforts to promote education about family-planning and contraception, especially in the poorest countries (where population growth is fastest), should be vigorously supported. The constant attempts by some religious pressure groups in the United States to block these humanitarian efforts are seriously misguided in the opinion of transhumanists.

We can also be hopeful that scientists will be able to keep up with the increasing demands of a growing world population. For example, we have just begun unlocking the potential of genetic engineering. (Cloning is just one very helpful method in genetic engineering.) It's impossible to foretell exactly how far that will take us, but it is already clear that it will enable us, among other things, to substantially increase crop yield and effectiveness in animal husbandry.

One thing that the environmentalists are right about is that the status quo is unsustainable. Things cannot, as a matter of physical necessity, remain the way they are today indefinitely or even for very long.  If we continue to use up resources like we currently do then we will run into serious shortages sometime in the first half of the next century that will force the world economy to contract and the world population to decrease drastically. The deep greens have an answer to this: they suggest we try to turn the clock back and return to an idyllic pre-industrial age in harmony with nature. The problem is that the pre-industrial age was anything but idyllic - poverty, misery, disease, heavy manual toil from dawn to dusk, superstitious fear and cultural parochialism. Also, it's hard to see how more than a few hundred million people could be maintained at a reasonable standard of living with pre-industrial production methods, so 90% of the world population would somehow have to get rid of.

Transhumanists propose a much more realistic alternative: not to go backward but to push ahead as hard as we can. The environmental problems that technology creates are problems of intermediary, inefficient technology. Technologically less advanced industries in the former Soviet-block pollute much more than their Western counterparts. High-tech industry is relatively benign. When we develop molecular nanotechnology we will not only have perfectly clean and efficient production of most any commodity but we will also be able to clean up the mess created by today's crude reduction methods. This sets a standard for a clean environment that transhumanists challenge any environmentalist to try to match.

Nanotechnolgy will also make it cheap to colonize space. From a cosmic point-of-view, Earth is a totally insignificant little speck. It has been suggested that we ought to leave space untouched and preserve it in its pristine glory. This view is hard to take seriously. Every hour, through entirely natural processes, huge amounts of resources - thousands of times more than the total of what the human species has used throughout its career - are transformed into radioactive substances or wasted as radiation escaping into intergalactic space.

Even with full-blown space colonization, however, population growth  can continue to be a problem. If the expansion speed is limited by  the speed of light then the amount of resources under human control  will only grow polynomially. Population on the other hand can easily  grow exponentially. If that happens then the average income will  eventually be drop to the Malthusian subsistence level, which will  force population growth to slow down. How soon this would happen depends primarily on reproduction rates.  Increases in average life  span does not have a big effect. Even vastly improved technology can  only postpone the inevitable for a relatively brief time. The only  long-term solution is population control restricting the number new  persons created per year. This does not mean that population could  not grow; only that the growth would have to be polynomial rather  than exponential.

Perhaps the most publically recogized of these economists was Julian L. Simon, whom Wired magazine dubbed “The Doomslayer”. Simon’s views received a strong boost when he won a ten-year bet against doomsayer Paul Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb, a book proven utterly wrong by history) when raw materials prices declined. While more vocal than most, Simon’s voice represents those of many other economists on this issue. Since this worry comes up every time I
speak on life extension, I will take the space to make six points.

1: Let us assume for a moment that population growth is or will become a serious problem. Would this give us a strong reason for turning against the extension of human lifespan? No. Opposing extended life because it might add to existing problems would be an unethical response. Suppose you are a doctor given a child to treat who is suffering from pneumonia. Would you refuse to cure the child because then she would be well enough to run around, fall down, and skin her knees? Our first responsibility is to live long and vitally and to help others do the same. Once we are at work on this primary goal, we can focus more energy on solving other challenges. The life extensionist may want to be part of the solution to any population issues, but dying is not a responsible or healthy way to solve anything. Besides, if we take seriously the idea of limiting lifespan to control population, why not be more active about it? Why not encourage suicide? Why not execute anyone reaching the age of 75? (Or 30? Does anyone remember the 1970s movie, Logan’s Run?)

2: Limiting population growth by opposing life extension not only fails the ethical test, it also fails the pragmatic test. Keeping the death rate up simply is not an effective way of slowing population growth. Population growth depends far more on how many children families have than on how long people live. In mathematical terms, longer life has no effect on the exponential growth rate. It only affects the constant of the equation. This means that it matters little how long we live after we have reproduced. Compare two societies: In country A, people live on average only to 40 years of age, each family producing 3 children. In country B, the lifespan is 90 years but couples have 2 children. Despite the much longer livespan in country B, their population growth rate will be much lower than that of country A. After 400 years, country A will have a population of over 57,000, while country B will never have more than 3,000. It makes little difference over the long term how many years people live after they have had children. The population growth rate is determined by how many children we have, not how long we live.

Even the apparent short term upward effect on population due to a lower death rate may be cancelled by a delay in child-bearing. Many women in developed countries (those who will be first to have extended life) choose to bear children by their early ‘30s because their chances go down as they age. Extending the fertile period of women’s lives would allow them to put off having children until later, while they concentrate on their careers and personal development. Couples having children later will better be able to care for them, financially and psychologically.

Even if there were a population problem, extending the human life span would worsen the problem no more than would improving automobile safety or worker safety, or reducing violent crime. Who would want to keep these deadly threats high in order to combat population growth? If we want to slow population growth, we should focus on reducing births, not on raising or maintaining deaths. If we want to reduce births, we might voluntarily fund programs to provide contraceptives and family planning to couples in poorer countries. This will aid the natural developmental process of choosing to have fewer children. Couples will be able to have children by choice, not by accident. Women would also be encouraged to join the modern world by gaining the ability to pursue
vocations other than child-raising.

3: We have seen that we have no reason to hesitate in prolonging life even if overpopulation really were a concern. But how much should we worry about the growing population? Is population growth accelerating out of control? Is expanding population causing major and unavoidable problems? The fad for popular books foretelling doom started in the 1960s, at the tail-end of the
most rapid increase in population in human history. Growth has been slowing down, and we have sound reasons to expect this trend to continue. In the Western world, population has stabilized. In some countries, such as Germany, the size of the population is actually falling, as more people die than are born. The population of the USA would be static were it not for an influx of new mind and muscle through immigration. The poorer countries, well below us in the development cycle, have also been experiencing a drastic reduction of population growth, despite extra decades of life bestowed by medical intervention and nutrition.

The peak average annual population growth rate was reached in 1970 at 2.07%. The rate for 1997 is expected to be 1.36%. Developmental trends suggest that this growth rate will drop below 1% in 2016, and fall to around 0.46% by 2049. Every year at present, the world population grows by around 80 million people. By 2050, we will be adding perhaps 40 million per year, a number that we can expect to continue dropping. This slowing of population growth results from a falling birth rate. The birth rate in Asia and the Pacific, between 1950 and 1980 fell 28.8%, and in the Americas by 24.7%. Africa, further behind on the development curve, reduced its birth rate by 2.2% in the same period, all of it being in the second half of the period. Overall, for the less developed countries, birth rates fell 24.9% from 1950 to 1980. Here are the figures in table form:

Why, though, should we expect people in less developed countries, even given contraceptives, to choose to have smaller families? This expectation is not merely speculation based on recent trends. Sound economic reasoning explains the continuing trend, and makes sense of why Africa is only just beginning to make the transition to fewer births.

Decelerating population growth appears to be an inevitable result of growing wealth. Early on in a country’s developmental curve economists, in their charming way, regard children as “producer goods. Parents put their children to work on the farm to generate food and revenue. Very little effort is put into caring for the child: no expensive health plans, special classes, trips to Disneyland, X-Men action figures, or mounting phone bills. As we become wealthier, children become “consumer goods”. That is, we look on them more and more as little people to be enjoyed and pampered and educated, not beasts of burden to help keep the family alive. We spend thousands of dollars on
children to keep them healthy, entertain them, and educate them. We come to prefer fewer children to a vast mob. Changing tastes resulting from improved education seem to reinforce this preference. The revenue vs. expense equation for extra children further shifts toward having fewer offspring as populations become urbanized. Children cost more to raise in cities and can produce less income
than in the country.
 
Fertility declines for another reason: As poorer countries become wealthier, child mortality falls as a result of improved nutrition, sanitation, and healthcare. (Reduced child mortality in modern times can come about even without a rise in income.) People in poorer countries are not stupid: they adjust their childbearing plans to reflect changing conditions. When child death rates are high, research has shown that families have more children to ensure achieving a given family size. They have more children to make up for deaths, and often have additional children in anticipation of later deaths. Families reduce fertility as they realize that fewer births are needed to reach a desired family size. Given the incentives to have fewer children as wealth grows and urbanization proceeds, reduced mortality leads to families choosing to reduce family size.

Economic policy helps shape childbearing incentives. Many of the same people who have decried population growth have supported policies guaranteed to boost childbirths. More than that, they boost childbearing among those least able to raise and educate children well. If we want to encourage people to have more children, we will make it cheaper for them to do so. If we want to discourage fertility, or at least refrain from pushing it up, we will stop subsidizing it. Subsidies include free education (free to the parents, not to the taxpayers), free child health care, and additional welfare payments to women for each child they bear. If parents must personally bear the costs of having children, rather than everyone else paying, people will tend to have just the number of
children for whom they can assume financial responsibility.

4: We can expect population growth to continue slowing until it reaches a stable size. That may be 12 billion, perhaps 15 billion people. Can the Earth support such a number? We can take little comfort in stable numbers if those numbers are unsustainable. A detailed answer to this question demands far more space than I have here. References to excellent writings on the subject can be
found in Bibliography. A few brief points will have to do here. A reading of economic and social history quickly makes one thing plain: Throughout history people have worried about overpopulation. Even the great nineteenth century social scientist W. Stanley Jevons in 1865 claimed that England’s industrial expansion would soon cease due to the exhaustion of the country’s coal supply. However, as shortages developed, prices rose. The profit motive stimulated entrepreneurs to find new sources, to develop better technology for finding and extracting coal, and to transport it to where it was needed. The crisis never happened. Today, the USA has proven reserves sufficient to last hundreds or thousands of years. If one resource does begin to run low, rising prices will encourage a switch to alternatives. Certainly, even a vastly bloated population cannot hope to exhaust energy supplies. (Solar energy and power from nuclear fission and soon fusion are practically endless.) So long as we have plentiful energy we can produce substitute resources and even generate more of existing resources, including food. Even if population continues to grow well beyond 15 billion, we can expect human intelligence and technology to comfortably handle the numbers.

5: Neither should we expect pollution to worsen as population grows. Contrary to popular belief, overall pollution in the more developed countries has been decreasing for decades. In the USA, levels of lead have dropped dramatically. Since the 1960s levels of sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and organic compounds have fallen despite a growing population. Air quality in   major urban areas continues to improve, and the Great Lakes are returning toward earlier levels of purity. This is no accident. As we become wealthier, we have more money to spare for a cleaner environment. When you are hungry for food and shelter and other basics, you will not spare much thought for the environment. So long as mechanisms exist for converting desires for cleaner air and water and space for recreation into the things themselves, we can expect it to happen.

Most effective at spurring the positive changes are marketsprice signals creating incentives for moves in the right direction. If polluters must pay for what they produce because their activity intrudes on the property rights of others, they will search for ways to make things with less pollution. Pollution
problems do exist. Most of them can be traced to a failure to enforce private property rights, so that resources are treated as free goods that need not be well-managed. Fishing in unowned bodies of water is an example of this. The desertification of collectively or government owned land in Africa is another. We can be reasonably confident that the trend towards less pollution with greater population will continue. Complacency is out of place however. We should press for responsible management of resources by privatising collectively owned resources to create incentives for sound management and renewal.

6: Human intelligence, new technology, and a market economy will allow this planet to support many times the current population of 5.7 billionit can support many more humans than we are likely to see, given trends toward lower birth rates. Many countries, including the USA, have a rather low population density. If the USA’s population were as dense as Japanhardly a crowded place
overallour population would be 3.5 billion rather than 270 million. If the USA had a population density equal to that of Singapore, we’d find almost 35 billion people here, or almost seven times the current world population. New technologies, from simple improvements in irrigation and management to current breakthroughs in genetic engineering should continue to improve world food
output. Fewer people are starving despite higher populations. This does not mean we should feel satisfied. Millions still go hungry or are vulnerable to disruptions in supply. We need to push to remove trade barriers, abolish price controls on agriculture (which discourage production and investment), and pressure governments engaging in warfare and collectivization to change their
ways.

So long as we continue to allow freedom to generate more wealth and better technology, we can expect pollution to continue abating. More efficient recycling, less polluting production processes, and better monitoring and detection of polluters, along with economic incentives making each producer responsible for their output, will allow us to continue improving our environment even as population grows. Far-sighted engineers foresee a day, not far off, when we will be able to completely control matter at the molecular level, a technology known as nanotechnology. If we achieve this level of mastery, we will have the keys to production without pollution. Another product of molecular manufacturing will be the disappearance of most arge-scale, clumsy machinery. Less and less land will need to be used for manufacturing equipment, making more room for people to enjoy. Some manufacturing will be moved into space. The result of these and other changes (some of which are already underway) will be the freeing of the Earth from unwanted, but previously necessary, means and by-products of manufacturing.

Current Virtual Reality tries to mimic our perception. I am by the way convinced that this will be the world where future uploaded brains will live. I'm also convinced that they will be extremely frustrated with it and that progress will be made toward artificial bodies as soon as possible. On an other way, I'm not sure that the complete suppression of most of our senses, such as sense of smell, touch, taste will not have a negative impact on a short run. Did you notice that any important modifications of the sensory input is frequently associated with sensation of dissolution of the self, which be experienced as "mystic" or as terrifying, depending of the patient ? It would be interesting to analyse the so-called revelation of LSD, or the dissolution of self in sensory deprivation experiment (such as Lilly's isolation tank, Yoga's samadhi...) by the fact that the continuity of consciousness is maintained by the continuity of the perception of the world .

But you forget why they upload in the first place - to expand their minds, to become posthuman. Once your brain has been thoroughly checked out the first augmentation might be the ability to control your own changes. From there virtually anything can happen.

I think most people will see uploading as an emergency medicine : a thing you do when when all the alternative solutions have failed. To speak frankly, I certainly prefer to be uploaded than to be dead, but well...I prefer to do it tomorrow than today.

As for the idea that uploading being by itself an evolution from our human state, I remain sceptical (at least in the beginnings). As far as I know, the better road to uploading is "brute uploading" which rely only on computer power. In other words, you copy the content of the brain, and you emulate it exactly as it is, without understanding anything of the inner workings. This is  fine, because it need only good scanners and great computer power. No understanding of the mind is required. But this also means that you cannot improve quality on the contents of your brain: it remains as mysterious as before: only the support has changed. The only modification would perhaps be to change the speed of working, but I am not sure it will be possible before a long time. Generally, an emulator works much more slowly than the original machine. And uploading is finally nothing else than building an emulator. If my hypothesis that the consciousness is dependant of the the perception contains some truth, the speed of thinking  would be dependant to the speed of the whole organism, mainly the perceptions.

Of course, I don't speak about the possible progress of technology which can occur in a few centuries. I just want to show that the complexity of the operations let some time for  "mere augmented humans" to enjoy their condition. I don't doubt that, in a far future, posthumans will be
radically different than us; but  in my humble opinion this will happen as a slow process, and not as a brutal event, as many of the Singularity supporters seem to think .