TL;DR: Musk has 23 kids and NDAs with (most or all of) the mothers because he wants them to be his Mars scions well I finally fiinished the rest of the article and I got trolled where I got this from, it doesn't say that. I'm sorry
this was what :will-fancy: was speculating about in the last listenable Chapo episode
Not that insane, considering the trend lines. We were supposed to be careening towards 10B by the end of the century, but everything we know now suggests we've functionally peaked. What happens next is the big question. If reproduction rates stay below replacement levels for a decade... or a generation... yeah. You're talking about shedding a billion or more people and having a population indefinitely lopsided towards the elderly going into the foreseeable future.
Population decline isn't strictly the problem so much as how we handle a surplus of elderly people. Consider how much prior generations have invested in daycare and school (or, at least, consider how much we should have relative to demand) then flip that on its head.
Honestly, it sounds like straight up Monarchism. Divine Right of Kings. Hapsburg Dynasty shit. Elon was just some schlub with a B-list celebrity mom 40 years ago. But he hit the lottery with Paypal, so now he thinks he's an Ubermensch. Fucking bananas. But its the exact same kind of brainworms I'd expect to hear out of the British Royal Family.
There's a certain serious concern that collapses in food supply and manufacturing capacity will force large portions of the population back into the business of subsistence farming. And that's absolutely going to be terrible for technological development, infrastructure maintenance and expansion, and engineering output.
But... like... there's not really any sort of people shortage in this regard. We have enormous numbers of talented, educated, motivated people who spend most of their free time going on the computer to do the computer things. Sometimes they're doing bank computer things or law computer things or sales computer things. But they aren't contributing anything real to the overall economy. They're as much surplus labor as any out-of-work blue collar midwesterner. They just found a rich vein of busy work to exploit.
The westerners refuse to tackle isn't Volume Of People or Degrees of Intelligence. Its the phenomenal, monumental, soul-crushingly massive amount of waste that we all produce. We're not burning up the planet in order to build a Utopia. We're destroying this beautiful blue gem of a world so that we can argue on the internet about who manages the website hosting the spank bank.