It's always possible to make the number go up by divorcing the number from any real-world meaning. I think the "Singularity", as AI proponents call it, will actually happen, and will likely happen pretty close to its predicted date of 2029. It's just that the form it'll take will be "I'll have your AI talk to my AI", AI botnets clickfrauding AI ad networks, AI newspapers serving up content to AI social media users, AI job boards reading AI generated resumes of people that don't actually exist, AI agents at work generating walls of text that are summarized by AI email readers and then are never read by humans anyway. Meanwhile, actual humans go fuck off to raise their kids while being paid by AI finance and HR departments that have no idea if you're actually working, because AI mouse-jigglers will provide a convincing simulacrum. Of course, the AI-inflated currency won't buy anything that you actually want, and so all actual commerce will function on personal relationships, barter, and local currency, kinda like it did in pre-industrial times.

But in terms of real products that affect people's lives in positive ways, capitalism has a problem. There are going to be fewer real people in the future, which means a shrinking market for everything, which makes it harder to justify technological improvements and amortize their R&D costs over a large market. Many of the incentives in capitalism assume growth; when that assumption is violated, the game theory collapses to everybody fighting over a share of the shrinking pie before it disappears.

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senordevnyc 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I thought the US population was predicted to peak in like 2080.

Also, hasn’t per-capita consumption in real dollars gone up way more than 10x over the last century? So even if the population in 2126 is slightly lower than in 2026, people’s actual consumption could be much higher.

What am I missing?

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nostrademons 13 hours ago | parent [-]

The peak has been moved up by decades in the last year. The 2080 figure is from Nov 2023 [1], before Trump administration cuts in immigration. The Jan 2026 CBO report predicted a peak of 2056 [2]; a similar Institute for Family Studies report from July 2026 [3] predicts a peak in 2054.

The delta is entirely because of immigration. If you count only natural fertility (births - deaths), population growth nearly went negative during COVID (distorted somewhat by the high death rate), briefly recovered, and is predicted to cross again for good in 2030. The Trump administration's signature campaign promise is to clamp down on immigration, and even get an estimated 12-15M illegal immigrants to self-deport. If this happens, the population will immediately shrink. Immigration and immigrant families are what is propping up the population; if you assume net-zero migration (which IIRC was one of the scenarios modeled in the Census projection), the population already peaked in 2023.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/HTML/IN123...

[2] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61879

[3] https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-demographic-dead-end-...

	▲	senordevnyc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fair point, although I think it’s pretty hard to predict what immigration will look like over the next few decades. But yes, the peak could come in a couple decades, not a half century, so stipulated. Does that meaningfully change whether capitalism today is facing a shrinking market? Any thoughts on the second part of my comment?

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overfeed a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Meanwhile, actual humans go fuck off to raise their kids while being paid by AI finance and HR departments

I was able to suspend my disbelief until this line. Unless Capitalism has been upended by 2029, AI companies will continue to have capitalist goals like maximizing value for their shareholders. AI HR won't pay humans that don't positively move the needle on the P&L

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nostrademons 21 hours ago | parent [-]

It would be interesting if AI actually did optimize the P&L at most companies.

Right now, the vast majority of office jobs are bullshit jobs, because the director who holds the budget is incentivized to maximize headcount rather than P&L. The job is not strictly necessary, but if the money is not spent, it disappears, and so the director has an incentive to ensure everything is spent.

The reason these jobs can continue to exist is because of poor information flow within the organization. Directors distort both the importance and required resources for the projects they're working on, making them seem harder and more lucrative than they actually are. It's notoriously difficult to credit an actual transaction back to a particular product feature that made someone buy, so there is no actual verification of these. Then these project proposals are looked at by an FP&A analyst who has maybe 5 minutes to evaluate each, so of course 100 headcount to maintain a 3-screen CRUD mobile app seems reasonable.

A rational, omniscient AI would look at this and say "This is ridiculous. I can code this app in 50ms." And so if we actually did put AI in charge of the P&L, they would likely fire 100% of the employees, as well as doing other shady stuff like charging all stored credit cards multiple times, gaslighting consumers as to the existence of the product, and DDoSing the court system.

But again, this strengthens my thesis. So the AI has now fired 100% of the humans in the workforce and is running amuck with the financial system. What do the remaining 100% of unemployed people do? Start trading their skills for old-fashioned analog currency, like gold coins or even paper dollars. They just disconnect the AI, turn off the computers, and go about their daily business.

	▲	overfeed 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Right now, the vast majority of office jobs are bullshit jobs, because the director who holds the budget is incentivized to maximize headcount This may have been briefly true during the Zero-Interest regime. The economy isn't doing so hot right now, outside of AI. If squeezed companies doing multiple rounds of layoffs keep those "bullshit jobs", maybe they are not bullshit. Perhaps coordinating people, and keeping up with bureaucratic demands like paying taxes, not breaking the law and growing the business requires warm bodies. > What do the remaining 100% of unemployed people do? Start trading their skills for old-fashioned analog currency. History books suggest a different outcome. Firing 100% of employees in a growth-based, consumer economy only works when you're the only one using that strategy. If a critical mass of companies do the same, then you're staring at a managed decline at best.