We should be worried about a robot society taking over the many social and productive roles that humans now occupy. We think of them as jobs and a necessary evil for making a living, and we should be careful to create ways to guarantee that robots don’t somehow destroy our humanity. But our current society isn’t viable in the long run with the super weapons we now possess in superabundance, so it makes sense to search for ways that might extend human civilization. A human society of a million people surviving for a million years is preferable to ten billion and then total collapse perhaps to zero people. What if we postulate a middle goal of 200 million people, which is approximately the population about the year our modern Western legal and religious systems came into existence in 1 CE? That is a large enough number of people to sustain a vibrant society and yet it is small enough that the people could be physically sustained in what we now would consider a heavenly style. If we chose to drift back to that population at the same rate we are now increasing in population, it would only take a few hundred years and would not be much of an imposition on people’s feelings about family.
The recent world population trend has been to double in fifty years, so if we halved it in fifty-year increments, going from 8 billion to 4 would take fifty years, and back to 2 billion would take one hundred years, 1 billion 150 years, 1/2 billion 200 years, 1/4 billion 250 years, 1/8 billion 300 years. So using that method would take about 300 years. Unfortunately, that looks to be far too slow because at current rates the hydrocarbons will run out in less than a hundred years, and we must convert to a solar-energy-based society much sooner. This is worse than I thought. Hmm, what to do?
Is it possible to convert to solar-based human society in less than fifty years? Is it possible to reduce the population to a hundred million in fifty years, or even three hundred years without triggering a catastrophic World War Three? That was the main intention of exploring the idea of moving to create a robot all-electric society supporting humans.
In the current political mindset, it would be very difficult to create a robot society quickly and it is impossible to reduce population even a little. So … the future is obvious.