I suppose this is the real answer to why we won't need UBI. The oligarchs will just wait in their bunkers while the world's population is eradicated by death bots.
That seems the more likely outcome to me than a post-scarcity utopia.
I know people point out that Malthusian predictions have always failed so far - but the reason we got to >7G humans is that an enormous amount of science and engineering went into making things better, a large part of which was spearheaded by the US because world peace and prosperity was in the interests of millionaires and billionaires. Now they've decided this isn't in their interest anymore, so I worry that the trend in scientific progress that got us here will be more like the tide - we're now flapping our fins on the beach and the water is receding.
This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility. So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
It's also why the concept of us reaching a 'max population' is rather silly. We will reach a point where the population begins to decline due to certain groups removing themselves from the gene pool, but as the other groups continue to reproduce and produce children who, in turn, reproduce, that population will stabilize and then eventually go up, up, and away again. In other words it's just a local max.
And has been for the many generations over which humanity has gotten more secular.
> So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
But for generations that hasn’t been what has happened, despite the correlation between religiosity and fertility not being a novel thing that developed this century? Why could that be? Because religion isn't a genetic trait. Fertility of populations and popularity of ideas and practices have some interaction, sure, but not in the simplistic “spread of a genetic lineage determines spread of culture and ideology” way you are trying to push here.
The second thing is that you're likely dramatically overestimating the secular population. Gallup has been polling people on religion since 1948. Here [1] are those data. As recently as 2004, the percent of people with no religion was in the single digits, so the overall relevance was low. And the inverse correlation between secularity and fertility is also quite new driven by a rather large number of new factors - antagonistic attitude towards gender roles, the embrace of non-marital sex largely enabled by the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, and so on. So in general, we're entering into relatively uncharted waters, but it's not hard to see what lies ahead as consequences of fertility decisions lag behind those decisions themselves by ~60 years.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
(That's if we accept that it makes people disinclined to spawn offspring, and that this was always the case and never changes.)
The sad thing is that culture will probably have less concern over individual rights and freedoms, and much more likely to be collectivist and religious.
Not sure I like where this is headed, honestly, but I hope I'm not around to see the fall of liberal democracy.
You make the same mistake as GP in confusing memetics with genetics. Cultures survive by ideas and behaviors spreading, not by genes. People can spread ideas without having children, and people can have lots of children and have their ideas die out.
Or just say "some people are still nasty and self-centered, although others have at least have decency to care for others after their own needs are satisfied".
"a person is smart... people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- Tommy Lee Jones as "K" in MIB
In any case, by "biology" you're referring to the biosphere? If so, the (potential) risk is that "biology work[ing] itself out" may involve working humans out of the picture as well.
As witnessed by worldwide developments over the last 15 years.
Or all of human history if I’m taking a broader scope.