A technical solution would certainly be better, but it's just a matter of passing the right law to give the DNT "suggestion" the force of law.
And that's pretty significant in itself. After all, there are no technical limitations preventing you from committing theft, murder, or most any other crime - just the threat of legal retribution. It's not a perfect system, but it's miles better than nothing.
If you're using Chrome, then you're implicitly trusting Google with 100% of the information about everything you do with your browser. They *probably* aren't sending all that information home, but the only thing stopping them is their own integrity.
Ditto if you use Android - you're trusting Google not to monitor everything you do, they have the power. And how do you feel about Microsoft? Apple? By using their OS you're trusting them with complete information about everything you do on your computer.
>how do you test for existence of a record in a database without bleeding out what you are checking? Easy. 1) You take the username+password pair to be tested and feed them through an irreversible hashing algorithm to generate a pseudo-random number 2) You query the database server for all compromised credentials matching that number 3) The server sends back any matches, encrypted for added security if you want 4) You compare all the potential matches found against your actual username and password.
If your credentials aren't in the database, then there's no way to figure out what they actually are from the information transferred between computers
If your credentials *are* in the database, then they're already public knowledge, and leaking them further has no effect. (other than possibly identifying you as the account user - which is really the only reason you'd want encryption in step 3)
Not quite - they're sending a partial hash of your credentials in order to look for matches in the already public databases of compromised accounts that they've assembled from hacker sites. If they find any possible matches, then they send those back to your browser for a full comparison.
That said, there's not much stopping them from doing what you suggest except some bad press
>What protection does the user have when the device itself is the threat, and not some nefarious third party?
None whatsoever. There's no possible defense against compromised hardware or operating system except not using it. Which is why the fact that there's reason to believe almost every microprocessor on the planet may be compromised is so worrying. And just how well do you trust Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. to police their programmers and codebase to prevent anyone who's also working for an intelligence or criminal organization from burying intentional backdoors or other malicious code?
Only if your compromised credentials are in the database, in which case they already have them and nothing is gained by monitoring your query.
Besides which, the database is itself already publicly available on cracker sites, that's the point. Google is simply checking to see if your credentials are already public knowledge.
Why go through all that effort? Just go download the same database(s) Google did and get all the compromised credentials in plain text - it's publicly available on various hacker sites after all.
That's the whole point - Google is warning you that your credentials are already public knowledge among criminals and intelligence agencies.
Firefox has a similar option. Very convenient, so long as you don't mind your passwords, bookmarks being stored in their database where they can be hacked or mined by bad actors.
Firefox used to have the option of locally encrypting everything so that it would be completely inaccessible on the server without the encryption key that only you knew. Of course that also means that if you forgot your key there was no way for them to help you recover the synced data, which as I recall was the excuse they gave when they removed the option.
>Otherwise this extension could be used to mine credentials out of whatever database google is using.
Except that the database is of credentials already known to be compromised - there's no need to "mine" them, just go download the same publicly available databases of compromised credentials that Google did.
It would likely be good to also let people know if their password alone is compromised - but given the difficulty of composing a short, memorable password, the answer for most people most of the time will probably usually be "yes". Because someone else used the same password in some other account that was compromised.
More valuable would be to let you know how popular your password really is - if it appears in the list of top 100 passwords (or even 1 million), then the security it offers is likely minimal if someone tries to brute-force the account.
> I don't want to give Chrome my username or credentials. Then don't use Chrome. Google is a surveillance-and-marketting company, and you have absolutely no idea what their browser might be doing behind the scenes.
As it is though, there's no particular reason to believe Chrome is sending your username and password anywhere but to the website you intended - that would be a liability nightmare, and I'm not seeing any profit to be made. The proper way to do this would be to generate an irreversible hash of your username and password pair, and send that to be looked up in their database. Then they send back any pairs found with a matching hash for comparison on your computer.
Then they don't have jurisdiction to enforce anything. But, we could at least make involuntary surveillance a domestic crime. Combined with making it a crime to purchase such surveillance information from foreigners, it would be a good start.
The next step would be forming international treaties to the same effect so that international surveillance could also be prosecuted. You'd never get everyone on board, but every little bit helps.
Google *can* see everything you do with Chrome - every click, every keystroke, every image you linger on a bit longer than is seemly. That capability is well within their ability, aka they *can* do it. The real question is how much of that they *choose* to collect and send back home, rather than simply having the ability to do so.
This seems like it should be benign enough though - not much advantage to be gained collecting this information (and a lot of potential liability and bad PR), and it's simple enough to hash a name/password combination and send it back to the server in order to retrieve any/all pairs with a matching hash for comparison on your computer.
Are you factoring in the fact that automation is already beginning to remove the need for manual labor, and is poised to advance rapidly in the next decades? Not to mention a great deal of intellectual labor - one of the reasons the pace of technological advances has increased so much.
That means much of the wealth currently being generated can continue to be generated going forward (though distributing it gets dicey), with minimal human involvement, vastly increasing the global productivity per man-hour.
My understanding is that methane is actually a much more potent greenhouse gas per kg, but there's vanishingly little of it in the atmosphere, so its total effect is minuscule compared to water and CO2. To make things worse, methane in the atmosphere eventually breaks down into CO2 and water, so it doesn't go away so much as just eventually transform into less potent greenhouse gasses.
Presumably it wasn't named in English. Like how we get SI units from "International System of Units" (from the French Le Système International d'Unités). That's
>Happiness is not about shelter, it's about change. That's what marketing claims, but not what the scientific evidence shows. In fact the the happiest countries in the world are actually mostly among the poorest.
>There is always a better car, a better house, a better kitchen, a better shower, a better bed, a better computer. Yes there is - but getting them won't actually make you any happier, aside from the brief transient burst associated with acquisition.
>That's why people work at work, not making impression of working. They hope to get better income. Yes they do. But that's because they've drunk the consumerism kool-aid that lurks like a cancer at the center of our economy. The reality is that a better income will not actually make them any happier(at least not after they get out of poverty and don't have to worry about rent, food, etc. expenses) as shown by many psychological studies. The problem is, as you said, there's always a better X available, and so long as you focus on that, instead of what you already have, you will very quickly become dissatisfied with your shiny new X. Even winning massive lottery jackpots has no effect on people's happiness a year later.
What actually makes you sustainably happy are things like spending time with friends and loved ones, making things, and helping others. As well as materialist hedonism - focus on savoring that cup of coffee and enjoying that car in the moment.
I strongly recommend you look into some of the scientific research that's been done on happiness. Advertising sells us a completely false bill of goods, and it sounds like you've bought it.
Perhaps you should clarify. Humans absolutely are biologically mammals, and demonstrate virtually all typical mammalian biological and psychological responses. We've got big fancy brains, but we use them in the service of fairly typical mammalian/primate emotional responses.
The availability of birth control throws a bit of a wrench in the works, but below-replacement reproduction rates in humans tend to correlate with wealthy, population-dense societies with low infant mortality, not with access to birth control. Suggesting that it is an intentional choice in line with typical mammalian environmental stress responses.
I've got to agree there. I could see 90% possibly happening, but with a billion people I don't think we'd be anywhere close to worrying about existential depopulation problems. And I strongly suspect that the wealth and space that would make it easy to provide would tend to promote larger families, an effect that would only intensify as the population dwindled.Where the stable point might be, I don't know.
You're wrong about how many children "real people" have as a general rule though - quite a few rich nations already have negative growth rates (less than 2 children per woman) when ignoring immigration. Japan is one of the most extreme, at ~1.4 children per woman.
Maybe not to support your business unit, but are there really fewer than 100 such business units on the entire planet? If not, then there will be enough market for at least one of them to survive. If so, then, yes it may disappear. Or perhaps not - perhaps it will just be smaller and the pace of advancement will slow down.
As for 3D printing - it may never take the place of mass-manufacturing (though there are already some commercial printers targeting the smallish-run ~100,000 unit end of the market), but it's *wonderful* for customized cosmetic shells for mass-produced functional items. For a car, mass-produce the frames, motors, batteries, etc. in a limited number of interchangeable options, and then 3D print the mostly-cosmetic body panels, etc. for personal customization. Per-capita production might not be as high as it currently is, but it's not necessary either - with intensely modular components and limited choices, it's rarely going to make sense to buy a whole new car, instead you're going to replace or upgrade modules as needed or desired. And it won't take long for everyone to realize that BrandX motors are much more cost-effective over time than BrandY. There's a lot less race to the bottom when you can transfer quality components from product to product.
I'm inclined to agree, but I think you're off base in this context - we're discussing population reduction not as a solution, but as a problem. Specifically, the sot of voluntary population reduction driven by women deciding to have, on average, less than two children each. The sort of thing that's already happened across many of the rich nations.
There's good reasons for it that have nothing to do with solving global problems - it helps dramatically with upward mobility and the quality of life that you can give to your children and yourselves. Not to mention the increase in leisure time, especially for those who choose not to have any children at all.
The one thing we can't do however, is continue to have an appreciably positive population growth with the lifestyle we've become accustomed to. Infinite growth is unsustainable on a planet, and as we move in to space, that's going to require a very dramatic lifestyle shift, while not helping people on Earth at all - there's no way to ship more than a tiny percentage of the 353,000 new lives created every day off the planet. Those who stay on Earth will have to deal with Earth's limitations.
I do not, but that wasn't what you proposed. You said corporations would collapse, I said no, we have plenty of evidence that they could do just fine at much smaller scales.
You are correct that technological advancement would probably slow (though it also seems to be self-accelerating as well, which might even outpace population declines), but I don't see that that is necessarily a wholly bad thing - we're currently proceeding at a breakneck pace that most people find quite stressful to adapt to.
And when you get right down to it, we've already had the technological solutions we need to create a paradise on Earth for a long time. We just haven't yet had the collective will to do so. Heck, we're already at the point of seriously considering colonizing another planet. By the time the population declines enough to severely impact the pace of technological development we will likely have begun.
We might not be able to develop new technologies nearly as fast - but we wouldn't *need* to, we've already done that, and we're not going to lose the technologies we already have, unless irreplaceable key components benefit so much from economies of scale that they cease to be economically viable. But very little is irreplaceable.
Yes, we would almost certainly have fewer choices - but most of the choices we have today are artificial. There's no meaningful difference between the vast majority of cars or laptops - there's a few different classes of product, and a whole lot of cosmetic variation that could be served at least as well by personalized artisans. Only being able to buy a handful of different models of something would likely also increase the market appeal of standardized modular components for aftermarket customization. There's no reason your car should be any less customizable than a desktop PC, especially as things go electric. And as the number of "viable end product" options the market can support decreases, the desirability of easy customization options increases. And with it the incentive for manufacturers to standardize.
It doesn't matter so much if you can only get four different kinds of widgets, if you can instead mix-and-match widget parts to get what you really want - in fact you'll potentially end up with something much closer to your ideal. Sure, maybe you don't want to do it yourself, but if you figure your local auto dealer actually did final assembly of a "LEGO car" to meet your desires? Even if there's only 4 each different frames, motors, seats, consoles, etc. that rapidly becomes far more options than currently exist in the market. Add in modern production-quality 3D-printing, as improved by another century or two of advancement at current levels, an internet full of enthusiasts sharing their designs, and immersive VR to be able to fully road-test your car before placing your order?
We're not going back to the 1800s. Even if the pace of new technology somehow grinds to a complete stop, existing technology will be quite sufficient to provide us with more options than ever before, while letting us spread throughout the solar system as we see fit. Not so bad a place to lie fallow for a while and adjust to the fact that we have raised ourselves from clever beasts to almost the edge of godhood, capable of reshaping life itself and remaking worlds to suit our will, with nothing to severely threaten us but ourselves.
Every major corporation on Earth was once 1/100th of it's current size and thriving. Even if the current corporations imploded under the stress of downsizing, there's absolutely no reason to believe upstarts without their institutional inertia wouldn't take their place.
We're also not talking about doing this overnight - even if every person on Earth immediately started averaging only one child per couple, it would take almost 7 generations to reduce the breeding population a hundredfold.
Would it? Right now the vast majority of the global population is stuck in economic conditions that pretty much preclude them making any contribution to the advancement of science or technology. If we eliminated all of that poverty as the population shrank, we could reduce the population to a small fraction of its current size without affecting the number of contributors significantly. After that point, yes, advancement would likely slow - but so would the need for the many advancements needed just to try to solve the problems created by the last round of advancements.
And of course there's the fact that technological progress is arguably advancing exponentially, and much faster than the population is growing. In which case you could potentially reduce the number of scientists and engineers quite rapidly while the pace of advancement continued to increase, though obviously more slowly than it otherwise might.
It's also not entirely clear that technology actually has much to offer in terms of improving standard of living. At least not once you've established a reliably adequate food supply and reasonably effective medicine. Does the existence of TVs, cars, cell-phones, etc actually improve our quality of life, rather than just changing it in a value-neutral manner that's marketed as an improvement? How would you even begin to objectively answer that question? Technology certainly gives us more options, but as numerous psychology studies have shown, having more than a relatively small range of options actually tends to reduce happiness and satisfaction.
Finally, the things that definitely *do* improve happiness - comfortable shelter, good health, art, and spending time with loved ones - we've had the technology to provide that to everyone with minimal effort for at least a century, and have chosen not to do so, instead creating a rat race where billions of people sacrifice those things to work long hours at jobs that they hate, to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't care about. Perhaps a few centuries or millenia of slowed technological progress would give us an opportunity for our cultural and social technologies to catch up with our mechanical ones.
Slashdot Mirror
A technical solution would certainly be better, but it's just a matter of passing the right law to give the DNT "suggestion" the force of law.
And that's pretty significant in itself. After all, there are no technical limitations preventing you from committing theft, murder, or most any other crime - just the threat of legal retribution. It's not a perfect system, but it's miles better than nothing.
If you're using Chrome, then you're implicitly trusting Google with 100% of the information about everything you do with your browser. They *probably* aren't sending all that information home, but the only thing stopping them is their own integrity.
Ditto if you use Android - you're trusting Google not to monitor everything you do, they have the power.
And how do you feel about Microsoft? Apple? By using their OS you're trusting them with complete information about everything you do on your computer.
>how do you test for existence of a record in a database without bleeding out what you are checking?
Easy.
1) You take the username+password pair to be tested and feed them through an irreversible hashing algorithm to generate a pseudo-random number
2) You query the database server for all compromised credentials matching that number
3) The server sends back any matches, encrypted for added security if you want
4) You compare all the potential matches found against your actual username and password.
If your credentials aren't in the database, then there's no way to figure out what they actually are from the information transferred between computers
If your credentials *are* in the database, then they're already public knowledge, and leaking them further has no effect. (other than possibly identifying you as the account user - which is really the only reason you'd want encryption in step 3)
Not quite - they're sending a partial hash of your credentials in order to look for matches in the already public databases of compromised accounts that they've assembled from hacker sites. If they find any possible matches, then they send those back to your browser for a full comparison.
That said, there's not much stopping them from doing what you suggest except some bad press
>What protection does the user have when the device itself is the threat, and not some nefarious third party?
None whatsoever. There's no possible defense against compromised hardware or operating system except not using it. Which is why the fact that there's reason to believe almost every microprocessor on the planet may be compromised is so worrying. And just how well do you trust Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. to police their programmers and codebase to prevent anyone who's also working for an intelligence or criminal organization from burying intentional backdoors or other malicious code?
Only if your compromised credentials are in the database, in which case they already have them and nothing is gained by monitoring your query.
Besides which, the database is itself already publicly available on cracker sites, that's the point. Google is simply checking to see if your credentials are already public knowledge.
Why go through all that effort? Just go download the same database(s) Google did and get all the compromised credentials in plain text - it's publicly available on various hacker sites after all.
That's the whole point - Google is warning you that your credentials are already public knowledge among criminals and intelligence agencies.
Indeed.
Firefox has a similar option. Very convenient, so long as you don't mind your passwords, bookmarks being stored in their database where they can be hacked or mined by bad actors.
Firefox used to have the option of locally encrypting everything so that it would be completely inaccessible on the server without the encryption key that only you knew. Of course that also means that if you forgot your key there was no way for them to help you recover the synced data, which as I recall was the excuse they gave when they removed the option.
More likely it uploads a hash of your combined username+password. After all, there's nothing to be gained by sending the username in plain text.
>Otherwise this extension could be used to mine credentials out of whatever database google is using.
Except that the database is of credentials already known to be compromised - there's no need to "mine" them, just go download the same publicly available databases of compromised credentials that Google did.
It would likely be good to also let people know if their password alone is compromised - but given the difficulty of composing a short, memorable password, the answer for most people most of the time will probably usually be "yes". Because someone else used the same password in some other account that was compromised.
More valuable would be to let you know how popular your password really is - if it appears in the list of top 100 passwords (or even 1 million), then the security it offers is likely minimal if someone tries to brute-force the account.
> I don't want to give Chrome my username or credentials.
Then don't use Chrome. Google is a surveillance-and-marketting company, and you have absolutely no idea what their browser might be doing behind the scenes.
As it is though, there's no particular reason to believe Chrome is sending your username and password anywhere but to the website you intended - that would be a liability nightmare, and I'm not seeing any profit to be made. The proper way to do this would be to generate an irreversible hash of your username and password pair, and send that to be looked up in their database. Then they send back any pairs found with a matching hash for comparison on your computer.
Had, not has. They eliminated it around the time that people started realizing it included silent punctuation: "Don't. Be evil."
That's currently true, but it could be changed.
Then they don't have jurisdiction to enforce anything. But, we could at least make involuntary surveillance a domestic crime. Combined with making it a crime to purchase such surveillance information from foreigners, it would be a good start.
The next step would be forming international treaties to the same effect so that international surveillance could also be prosecuted. You'd never get everyone on board, but every little bit helps.
Google *can* see everything you do with Chrome - every click, every keystroke, every image you linger on a bit longer than is seemly. That capability is well within their ability, aka they *can* do it. The real question is how much of that they *choose* to collect and send back home, rather than simply having the ability to do so.
This seems like it should be benign enough though - not much advantage to be gained collecting this information (and a lot of potential liability and bad PR), and it's simple enough to hash a name/password combination and send it back to the server in order to retrieve any/all pairs with a matching hash for comparison on your computer.
Are you factoring in the fact that automation is already beginning to remove the need for manual labor, and is poised to advance rapidly in the next decades? Not to mention a great deal of intellectual labor - one of the reasons the pace of technological advances has increased so much.
That means much of the wealth currently being generated can continue to be generated going forward (though distributing it gets dicey), with minimal human involvement, vastly increasing the global productivity per man-hour.
My understanding is that methane is actually a much more potent greenhouse gas per kg, but there's vanishingly little of it in the atmosphere, so its total effect is minuscule compared to water and CO2. To make things worse, methane in the atmosphere eventually breaks down into CO2 and water, so it doesn't go away so much as just eventually transform into less potent greenhouse gasses.
Presumably it wasn't named in English. Like how we get SI units from "International System of Units" (from the French Le Système International d'Unités). That's
>Happiness is not about shelter, it's about change.
That's what marketing claims, but not what the scientific evidence shows. In fact the the happiest countries in the world are actually mostly among the poorest.
>There is always a better car, a better house, a better kitchen, a better shower, a better bed, a better computer.
Yes there is - but getting them won't actually make you any happier, aside from the brief transient burst associated with acquisition.
>That's why people work at work, not making impression of working. They hope to get better income.
Yes they do. But that's because they've drunk the consumerism kool-aid that lurks like a cancer at the center of our economy. The reality is that a better income will not actually make them any happier(at least not after they get out of poverty and don't have to worry about rent, food, etc. expenses) as shown by many psychological studies. The problem is, as you said, there's always a better X available, and so long as you focus on that, instead of what you already have, you will very quickly become dissatisfied with your shiny new X. Even winning massive lottery jackpots has no effect on people's happiness a year later.
What actually makes you sustainably happy are things like spending time with friends and loved ones, making things, and helping others. As well as materialist hedonism - focus on savoring that cup of coffee and enjoying that car in the moment.
I strongly recommend you look into some of the scientific research that's been done on happiness. Advertising sells us a completely false bill of goods, and it sounds like you've bought it.
Perhaps you should clarify. Humans absolutely are biologically mammals, and demonstrate virtually all typical mammalian biological and psychological responses. We've got big fancy brains, but we use them in the service of fairly typical mammalian/primate emotional responses.
The availability of birth control throws a bit of a wrench in the works, but below-replacement reproduction rates in humans tend to correlate with wealthy, population-dense societies with low infant mortality, not with access to birth control. Suggesting that it is an intentional choice in line with typical mammalian environmental stress responses.
I've got to agree there. I could see 90% possibly happening, but with a billion people I don't think we'd be anywhere close to worrying about existential depopulation problems. And I strongly suspect that the wealth and space that would make it easy to provide would tend to promote larger families, an effect that would only intensify as the population dwindled.Where the stable point might be, I don't know.
You're wrong about how many children "real people" have as a general rule though - quite a few rich nations already have negative growth rates (less than 2 children per woman) when ignoring immigration. Japan is one of the most extreme, at ~1.4 children per woman.
Maybe not to support your business unit, but are there really fewer than 100 such business units on the entire planet? If not, then there will be enough market for at least one of them to survive. If so, then, yes it may disappear. Or perhaps not - perhaps it will just be smaller and the pace of advancement will slow down.
As for 3D printing - it may never take the place of mass-manufacturing (though there are already some commercial printers targeting the smallish-run ~100,000 unit end of the market), but it's *wonderful* for customized cosmetic shells for mass-produced functional items. For a car, mass-produce the frames, motors, batteries, etc. in a limited number of interchangeable options, and then 3D print the mostly-cosmetic body panels, etc. for personal customization. Per-capita production might not be as high as it currently is, but it's not necessary either - with intensely modular components and limited choices, it's rarely going to make sense to buy a whole new car, instead you're going to replace or upgrade modules as needed or desired. And it won't take long for everyone to realize that BrandX motors are much more cost-effective over time than BrandY. There's a lot less race to the bottom when you can transfer quality components from product to product.
I'm inclined to agree, but I think you're off base in this context - we're discussing population reduction not as a solution, but as a problem. Specifically, the sot of voluntary population reduction driven by women deciding to have, on average, less than two children each. The sort of thing that's already happened across many of the rich nations.
There's good reasons for it that have nothing to do with solving global problems - it helps dramatically with upward mobility and the quality of life that you can give to your children and yourselves. Not to mention the increase in leisure time, especially for those who choose not to have any children at all.
The one thing we can't do however, is continue to have an appreciably positive population growth with the lifestyle we've become accustomed to. Infinite growth is unsustainable on a planet, and as we move in to space, that's going to require a very dramatic lifestyle shift, while not helping people on Earth at all - there's no way to ship more than a tiny percentage of the 353,000 new lives created every day off the planet. Those who stay on Earth will have to deal with Earth's limitations.
I do not, but that wasn't what you proposed. You said corporations would collapse, I said no, we have plenty of evidence that they could do just fine at much smaller scales.
You are correct that technological advancement would probably slow (though it also seems to be self-accelerating as well, which might even outpace population declines), but I don't see that that is necessarily a wholly bad thing - we're currently proceeding at a breakneck pace that most people find quite stressful to adapt to.
And when you get right down to it, we've already had the technological solutions we need to create a paradise on Earth for a long time. We just haven't yet had the collective will to do so. Heck, we're already at the point of seriously considering colonizing another planet. By the time the population declines enough to severely impact the pace of technological development we will likely have begun.
We might not be able to develop new technologies nearly as fast - but we wouldn't *need* to, we've already done that, and we're not going to lose the technologies we already have, unless irreplaceable key components benefit so much from economies of scale that they cease to be economically viable. But very little is irreplaceable.
Yes, we would almost certainly have fewer choices - but most of the choices we have today are artificial. There's no meaningful difference between the vast majority of cars or laptops - there's a few different classes of product, and a whole lot of cosmetic variation that could be served at least as well by personalized artisans. Only being able to buy a handful of different models of something would likely also increase the market appeal of standardized modular components for aftermarket customization. There's no reason your car should be any less customizable than a desktop PC, especially as things go electric. And as the number of "viable end product" options the market can support decreases, the desirability of easy customization options increases. And with it the incentive for manufacturers to standardize.
It doesn't matter so much if you can only get four different kinds of widgets, if you can instead mix-and-match widget parts to get what you really want - in fact you'll potentially end up with something much closer to your ideal. Sure, maybe you don't want to do it yourself, but if you figure your local auto dealer actually did final assembly of a "LEGO car" to meet your desires? Even if there's only 4 each different frames, motors, seats, consoles, etc. that rapidly becomes far more options than currently exist in the market. Add in modern production-quality 3D-printing, as improved by another century or two of advancement at current levels, an internet full of enthusiasts sharing their designs, and immersive VR to be able to fully road-test your car before placing your order?
We're not going back to the 1800s. Even if the pace of new technology somehow grinds to a complete stop, existing technology will be quite sufficient to provide us with more options than ever before, while letting us spread throughout the solar system as we see fit. Not so bad a place to lie fallow for a while and adjust to the fact that we have raised ourselves from clever beasts to almost the edge of godhood, capable of reshaping life itself and remaking worlds to suit our will, with nothing to severely threaten us but ourselves.
Every major corporation on Earth was once 1/100th of it's current size and thriving. Even if the current corporations imploded under the stress of downsizing, there's absolutely no reason to believe upstarts without their institutional inertia wouldn't take their place.
We're also not talking about doing this overnight - even if every person on Earth immediately started averaging only one child per couple, it would take almost 7 generations to reduce the breeding population a hundredfold.
Would it? Right now the vast majority of the global population is stuck in economic conditions that pretty much preclude them making any contribution to the advancement of science or technology. If we eliminated all of that poverty as the population shrank, we could reduce the population to a small fraction of its current size without affecting the number of contributors significantly. After that point, yes, advancement would likely slow - but so would the need for the many advancements needed just to try to solve the problems created by the last round of advancements.
And of course there's the fact that technological progress is arguably advancing exponentially, and much faster than the population is growing. In which case you could potentially reduce the number of scientists and engineers quite rapidly while the pace of advancement continued to increase, though obviously more slowly than it otherwise might.
It's also not entirely clear that technology actually has much to offer in terms of improving standard of living. At least not once you've established a reliably adequate food supply and reasonably effective medicine. Does the existence of TVs, cars, cell-phones, etc actually improve our quality of life, rather than just changing it in a value-neutral manner that's marketed as an improvement? How would you even begin to objectively answer that question? Technology certainly gives us more options, but as numerous psychology studies have shown, having more than a relatively small range of options actually tends to reduce happiness and satisfaction.
Finally, the things that definitely *do* improve happiness - comfortable shelter, good health, art, and spending time with loved ones - we've had the technology to provide that to everyone with minimal effort for at least a century, and have chosen not to do so, instead creating a rat race where billions of people sacrifice those things to work long hours at jobs that they hate, to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't care about. Perhaps a few centuries or millenia of slowed technological progress would give us an opportunity for our cultural and social technologies to catch up with our mechanical ones.