[ExI] How new AI economics might change our systems

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 5:43 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 2026-09-21 15:41, Keith Henson wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 2:13 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat
> > <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> https://theconversation.com/there-was-a-decline-of-male-diversity-when-humans-took-to-agriculture-38725
> >>
> >> This runs counter to your claim because the advent of agriculture
> >> brought about an huge increase in resources instead of scarcity
> >> enabling
> >> the development of cities fed by farms, but nonetheless resulted in
> >> the
> >> killing of 95% of all male humans.
> >
> > Agriculture, settled life instead of nomadic, hugely increased the
> > birth rate and the number of surviving children resulting in a fast
> > growth of population and resource crisis for farmable land in a few
> > generations.
>
> Ok, let's assume a fast growth of population that sponged up all the
> abundant new food and caused a shortage of farmland. Why would only 5%
> of men participate in that temporary bounty and population explosion?


I have no idea. That is not the only mystery from the early days of
agriculture.  The farmers out of Anatolia spread into Europe over a couple
of hundred years starting in 5000 BEC and then died out over a generation,
some places where they vanished they left rows of headless corpses in
others barisal pits of people who died violently.. Nobody yet has an idea
of why this happened. I am not entirely sure if it is a good idea to figure
out what happened. Whatever it was, we might be susceptible.

On the other hand, wars usually wipe out the males. Human cultural
practice, or maybe genetics, is that the young women are absorbed into the
winners group while the males, even the young males, are killed. See
Numbers or Crow Creek for examples.

> Or
> why would only 5% of men survive the overshoot of carrying capacity?
> Keep in mind that almost 100% of women survived it. It is such a
> striking disparity that I had to wonder if aliens were selectively
> breeding us and simply culled the males with undesirable traits. Rafal
> Smigrodski talked me out of that notion, but how or why would xenophobic
> memes and warfare over scarce resources favor 5% of men above all others
> while being completely unbiased toward women?
>
> Only thing I can imagine is that wars and the aftermath of wars
preferentially killed males.For unknown reasons the rise of states put an
end to the culling of male lines. Again, I don't know why. Agriculture
arose much later in the Americas. Did male culling happen here later?
Anyone know?


> > They were not exactly nomadic, but the bushmen had a
> > lifestyle similar. They were a decade or so back force into
> > settlements. I have not looked it up, but would not be surprised if
> > the number of children per woman has gone up. It was just at
> > population replacement level.
>
> I would not be surprised if fertility amongst these bushmen had gone up
> in the settlements. I would be very surprised if a mere 5% of the men
> were fathering that population boom.
>
> Me too.

> >
> >> So maybe it is back to territorial
> >> tribalism even in the presence of abundant resources? Also consider
> >> John
> >> Calhoun's Universe 25 experiment where there was abundant food and
> >> water, but nonetheless the mice were very violent toward one
> >> another.
> >
> > It is possible that mice sense a high population density as a sign
> > that a resource crisis is about to happen and react violently, driving
> > some of them to leave. The Calhoun situation is nothing you would
> > expect in nature. Humans seem to be very different from mice or you
> > would see dense cities being much more violent places.
>
> But, if the mice use population density as an indicator of resource
> scarcity in contradiction to the facts of the situation, then it is
> population density that is the driver of war rather than scarcity.


Humans are not mice.

> Or
> perhaps, in a more nuanced fashion, competition drives a small subset of
> a population to hoard abundance and *create* scarcity for the rest of
> the population.
>

I can't refute this possibility, but it does not seem very likely

Keith

>
> Stuart LaForge
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