daggertx said:
Bill Gates is a more the type of person to want to depopulate the earth. He has said as much.
Has he? What exactly has he said about that?
Has he said: "I want to forcibly depopulate the planet. People will need to be liquidated but that's okay with me"?
Or has he, just like any nerd from the Golden Age of SciFi, read hundreds of books with all manner of predictions about the future of humankind under different technological scenarios, and has come to the same conclusion which is obvious to anyone who looks at technology -- specifically, that we only needed 7 billion people when human labor was superior to automation, but now the amount of system input required to create and maintain another human body on the
off chance that 20 years later they'll turn out to be intelligent Producers worth the investment.... has been circling marginal utility for decades and is now zeroing out as we enter the infancy of software-automation. In much the same way families in the pre-1940s USA needed to have 6-10 children in order to be able to divide up all the labor necessary to run the farm/ranch/smithy/lumberyard, and now only already-comfortable parents could afford to spend 23 years feeding and clothing 8 children whom our modern society actively prohibits from working/earning or otherwise sharing a family burden?
And did Gates merely point out - as a nerd looking at the overall trends of economic systems - the indisputable fact that a society with a tighter ratio of active workers to dependent non-participants, will have an economic and creative advantage over societies where parents must spend most of their time and labor choices merely feeding/sheltering a large set of kids?