I'm all for it. Both my parents were immigrants my wife's family is immigrants. I grew up in Michigan with a huge Muslim immigrant population. It's all good.

Unfortunately immigrants are an easy "other" and big target for the "they took our jobs" or "my neighborhood used to be for me". Crowd.

I don't pretend to have an answer for that problem because it's an emotional and healing problem not a political a or statistical problem.

We see Korea and Japan literally collapsing rather than let in more immigrants so that's a clue on how stuck in their ways people are.

Also I'm way more progressive than most. for most of human history borders were open and people just went where they wanted. it's only this last 80ish years we're the idea is a border should always be perpetually closed. Which i think is very anti human and terrible economically.

The closest model we have is what happened during the plague when death's caused a labor shortage. Which drives up the price of labor, which is a good thing. OR we are going to find it also races to create more automation as the ROI on a $400K robot is easier when a google employee makes $400K a year than when a McDonald's employee makes $20K a year.

I don't disagree, the OP was asking about preservering modern society.

The issue I was trying to highlight, it's not just people it's young productive people. China, Japan, Korea they are ALREADY in a population crisis. Of having aging demographics of non-productive seniors who require resources (and care etc). The US has a deficit too, it's just masked by immigration. The last number I read was that China needs 10 Million Imigrants a year under the age 40 just to keep it's current growth, but it has never had inflow immigration and they will run out of rural under developed areas to tap.

So I don't think seeing the world population decrease is itself a bad thing, but we really don't have an economic framework or model on what to do when we end up with upside-down demographics of more and more resources needed for elder care and fewer and fewer used to sustain let alone grow the economy. In a more egalitarian system maybe all this automation would help us hit a partial post-work society. In our current capital accumulation society, the billionaires will continue to own more even as the pie starts to shrink. The two easiest knobs to turn will be to raise the retirement age, lower the work start age or if you are grim-dark... let old people die or live in poverty.

And if 3rd world dictators have taught us anything, they won't care what size the pie is or how people feel as long as they (and the billionaires) continue to get to own 95% of it because they'll still be flying private jets, owning large yatchs and having parties at the French palace everyday.

We currently have the inverse problem in nearly every western country (unless propped up by immigration). So I we may be fighting the other problem in an ideal world of having to constantly encourage people to have at least 2.1 kids to match rate of replacement.

VC startup guy here. As alarmist as this article is written this is really more a case of Magic leap over promising and then getting taken over. They aren't doing well and their sales suck they have been at it for over a decade, it's a question on how long investor patience will last.

Fun fact AR has this unsolved vision blocking paradign.

Imagine a big tablet in your hands with a full screen video playing. Your wife calls you and you look up at her.

Ok now imagine you have a table sized screen floating in front of your face and your wife calls and you are already looking up. She doesn't know you can't see her and you can't see her without pressing buttons or whatever to hide the screen. Inconvenient.

Now imagine your a 737 pilot about to land in bad weather and you get a full screen pop-up that you forgot to check the tire pressure.

If it's small you can work around it but then it's a stamp at arms length. If it's big then no one has solved when you want to pay attention and when you want to not. Typical gauges let you look down at them. At best it solves really niche things like when you want limited headsup info like a speedometer floating while you drive but that's not life changing.