Learnt about object permanence recently, but I didn’t know it was related to this.
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This reminded me when I was teaching my nephew about capturing stones. He was 4 years old at the time (exactly 4 years old I believe it was his birthday when I gift him the Go set and taught him). And he seemed to have a very literal sense of the “capturing stone”.
I remember I played a trick of disappearing stones on my hand, after I showed him how a stone can get captured and “disappear”. Then the stone "magically appeared on the side of the board (I just switch it to my other hand when I distract him and placed it on the side). But after a few examples of capturing on the corners/side/center, he insisted on getting the “magic stone”, then put each of the “capturing stones” on the sides back to the capturing locations in the right order with likely the exact stones captured, as he had been paying attention which stones were removed and placed. He didn’t count them as a group of captures, but individually in different made up stories that had been eaten by magic monsters (kids imaginations and attentions are really facinating)
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But who the heck is this Conner Arvidson?
Never heard of him. Have you, @anoek?
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Presumably an AI hallucination.
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Is what I also thought.
“One of the best places to play Go online is called Online-go.com, a.k.a. OGS,” says Conner Arvidson from Online-go. “It’s one of the largest Go servers out there and you can play with people all over the world - very similar to chess.com for chess enthusiasts.”
Interestingly, if you click the second link here, you go to …
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Yeah, the same channel did a video on South Korea last year. I remember that it was posted in the 2025 topic or somewhere similar. 
I was first exposed to the idea of “demographic decline” when I read Philip Jose Farmer’s brilliant, but little known, novella, “Seventy Years of Decpop” (Galaxy, July 1972). Consequently, I have a tendency to yawn when this subject comes up.
The video spends an inordinate amount of time on the purely economic consequences, but most of those are not really rooted in decpop; they are the consequence of socialism. That too has been noted for generations, by Milton Friedman (who observed that you can’t have massive welfare and unlimited immigration at the same time) and Margaret Thatcher (with her famous comment about the government ultimately running out of other people’s money to spend).
The real danger lies in the degradation of infrastructure, because too few people are left to maintain it. Of course, this involves caveats. We are obviously speaking of developed countries, since undeveloped countries have little susceptible infrastructure to begin with. Also, the time table is rather vague. The envisioned catastrophe may depend on its rapidity; if civilization can accommodate the decpop (through automation for example), then the danger may be reduced or eliminated.
This is actually the basis for a conspiracy theory that has been around for 20 or more years. It says that shadowy oligarchs have promoted decpop for decades so that they can monopolize and more fully enjoy the resources of Earth (as if they don’t already?). They expect to accommodate the decpop through automation, and they are therefore pushing hard for AI and robotics to supply the needed labor in a depopulated world.
When I did research on decpop ages ago, I found that the threshold was believed to be about 20 percent decline. That is not really much. The human race has seen several estimated declines of between 25 percent and 50 percent over the millennia. The largest recent one was the Black Death (bubonic plague) in the Middle Ages.
A related phenomenon, which can be caused by factors other than decpop, is systems collapse. I think this first became popular in anthropology in the 1970s or early 80s. My first exposure to it in an anthropological context was when I visited the giant mound in Cahokia, Illinois, in the 1980s. The museum there had a new display that included the idea that the mound-building culture in Middle America had ended due to systems collapse. This idea was originally developed, I think, to explain the collapse of the ancient Mayan civilization. Neither of those applications of the idea envisioned decpop, so far as I can remember. However, they show that the degradation of infrastructure can be catastrophic regardless of the cause.
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Very good point and I am honestly more worried about this, than the issues presented in the video itself, though those are important as well.
There are a lot of old systems that run today and a lot of infrastructure is based on them, but soon noone will be able to service (or understand) those systems and there might not be “profitable” to replace them either.
The advent of AI might indeed “accommodate the decpop through automation”, but it is not robust enough to create good long-term systems and solutions, which actually adds to the rate of attrition instead of inhibiting it.
Therefore, as the world keeps spining in the “last year went ok, why not next year as well?” complacency, the slow decay of entropy is working its magic.
edit and P.S.
That worry was introduced to me first in university when we were forced to use antiquated equipment and computers that noone even had the manuals for, anymore, so we were just “doing our best”. During school and while in the army I was fascinated by they whole “supply line/chain” issue of battles or campaigns. While a society is more static than a battlefield, supply lines are always a complex and delicate issue.
Finally, I got to read Asimov’s Foundation and I thought that Trantor is a great analogy for our current economies and how fragile they might be, once they move beyond the “self-reliance” basis and enter the “luxury/profit” basis. History is, after all, full of grand nations and empires that failed to achieve equilibrium after that, seemingly inevitable, transition and eventually collapsed.
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More or less conspiracy fact when you have the Rockefeller family setting up organizations such as this one:
Some text from this Wikipedia article
Established in 1952 by John D. Rockefeller III, with important funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Council is governed by an international board of trustees.
In the 1960s, the Council played a key role in documenting the large numbers of people in poor countries who lacked access to contraceptives and in conducting research to design and evaluate public family planning programs. This included bringing IUDs to India.[16] At this time, the Council’s biomedical researchers worked to develop contraceptive methods, such as the intrauterine device. The council has found that fertility is “most sensitive to changes in the proportions married and prevalence of contraception.” A country’s ideas around reproduction out of wedlock, its accessibility, and the public’s opinion of birth control are instrumental in the region’s fertility.[17]
An array of contraceptives available around the world today were developed by the Population Council, including: the Copper T Intrauterine device, Norplant, Jadelle (Norplant II), Mirena, and, in 2018, a one year contraceptive vaginal system called Annovera was approved by the US FDA.[18] More than 50 million Copper T IUDs have been distributed in over 70 countries. Norplant was replaced by Jadelle, a two rod implant that provides contraception for five years.[citation needed]
The British medical journal Lancet said of the Population Council, “Most non-governmental organizations claim to promote change; the Population Council actually has hard evidence of having changed the lives and expectations of hundreds of millions of people.”[19]
(I’m just using Wikipedia here because it’s quick and considered more or less neutral. But there’s boatloads of documentation out there for anyone who’s interested.)
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The total fertility rate in Germany is about 1.4, and people have children around age 33. So let’s ignore immigration and suppose each age class is (1.4/2)1/33 times the preceding one until age 80, and everyone dies at 80 (which is approximately the current life expectancy). The age pyramid would become
The median age would be 48, just 1 year older than today, and the age structure would become
So the change wouldn’t be so dramatic.
Of course we can’t do projections like that, I remember a few decades ago, demographers predicted that the world population would reach 12 billion and China’s population would peak at 1.6 billion, and now projections are 10 billion for the world population, and China has already peaked at 1.4 billion. So probably demographics will change unexpectedly a few decades from now.
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The predictions played a role in the draconian policy against childbirth, which undermined the family and completely altered the social structure. Again quoting Wikipedia for its perceived neutrality:
Although China’s fertility rate plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world during the 1970s under these restrictions, the Chinese government thought it was still too high, influenced by the global debate over a possible overpopulation crisis suggested by publications such as the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth and the Sierra Club’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. The fertility rate dropped from 5.9 in the 1950s to 4.0 in the 1970s.
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I have a tendency to yawn when this argument comes up
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The idea might be boring, but not without merit.
We might have grown very accustomed to the idea of a universal pension, since most of us were born and raised in a society where the concept already exists, but that also makes us tend to forget that it is a fairly new idea (barely 150+ years old) and in many countries it is made of systems that were thought off and planned many decades ago.
This means that the current systems, in many countries, are running under assumptions and expectations from the fifties and sixties and will soon be in dire need of revision, as the conditions deviate more and more from the initial concepts that gave rise to those systems.
I am not certain at all that there will still be a pension system in place, when it will be my turn to collect it.
In a sense, the difference of the societies then and now, is causing quite a lot of these issues. For example - I think we have had that discussion before - one of the main reasons of the drop in the fertility rate is that once (let’s say 1937, when our pension system was instituted here by a right-wing dictator of all things 
, Greece had a fertility rate of 4.1) having many children was a short term investment. Today (fertility rate of 1.2), having even one child is a very expensive long-term responsibility.
The situation has changed quite a lot, thus the system will eventually follow.
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Whether the pension system is public (“socialist”) or private (“capitalist”), it works if the ratio between active population and retirees is high enough. In a capitalist system, people invest in the stock market for their future retirement, but the stock value rises if the economy grows, and economy growth depends on how many people work. I have no reason to think that the pension system will disappear, however with aging population, it will become less advantageous than today. People may be required to retire later, or to work part time for a few years after the current retirement age, or accept to receive a smaller pension.
So although I think we will still have pensions, I’m not confident that we will have a comfortable life in the future, so it’s probably not wise to retire early.
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