Good point by Musk, but he’s also pointed out the problem of AI sucking up many jobs. I’ll get back to that in a moment.*
An interesting case can be made by examining Israel. Israel does not naturally have an environment conducive to a high density human population. Yet, it’s population density is over 10x that of the USA, and it does well (and very much encourages making babies), and it’s most definitely NOT any sort of dictatorship, even though it is under considerable threat(s). Technology and sensible decisions can get you a long way. (Perhaps Israel’s most sensible decisions have been those regarding their water supply.)
Israel HAS swung recently into a negative balance of trade, but for reasons that appear to be mostly external-political. Outside of those, there appears to be no reason Israel could not swing back to a positive trade balance.
The converse of Israel is Iran, which is also arid, is far more blessed with natural resources, and has a population density just over 1/8th of Israel’s. But... they have been idiots, and now face a staggering water crisis. Their fertility rate has also dramatically crashed, and had fallen to only 1.44 before this water crisis really began to bite.
On a planetary scale, because resources are not distributed evenly, you HAVE to have high volumes of international trade, to maintain a large population in at least halfway decent living conditions. So, those who go by the biblical adage “go forth and multiply” need to tack on “trade, but fairly” and perhaps even Rodney King’s “can’t we all just get along”.
*Several days ago, I observed as a road repair crew repaired some broken up asphalt pavement near my house. I also have some background, which ended a few years ago, with capabilities of AI robots in industrial production. (I’ve done some production engineering, but am not myself an AI developer.) Anyway, I couldn’t help but think the entire job could be done by advanced AI robots, perhaps with a human supervisor to address anything the programmers could not foresee.
Good points.