They’re selling nudes of imaginary women on Reddit
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
The rise of AI companions is going to absolutely drop the bottom out of even the most pessimistic birth rate outlooks. It's easy to imagine a future where the majority of all young people give up on trying to establish real relationships and just resort to AI companions for the cheap and easy dopamine.
And I think we're going to see the rate of mental illness, suicide, mass shootings, etc continue to climb to numbers that not long ago would have been unfathomable.
I don't want to be an AI luddite but I am terrified.
Yes, because of housing, healthcare, childcare and education costs spiraling out of control and the difficulty of getting well paying jobs to cover those costs are pushing youngsters to spend their youth and most fertile years hunched behind a desk studying and working to climb the corporate ladder to afford a home bigger than a shoebox in the sticks with a 30 year mortgage, not because of AI generated porn.
Graphic porn has been around for over 100 years and blaming it now for falling birthrates has got to be the silliest things ever, up there with blaming avocado toast for millennials being poor.
Present society is economically fucking the young generations for monetary gains, and they're aware everything is stacked against them, so instead of taking part in this impossible to win ratrace/squidgame, they choose to check out of the most expensive things in life (traditional marriage and having kids) and instead spend their adulthood on various hobbies and individualistic hedonistic endeavors (smoking pot, VR porn and anime waifus, videogames, being a perpetual nomad in cheap countries, avocado toast, lattes, etc.). All these things are the effect, but not the root cause.
People can't afford kids and aren't having them
> shockedpikachu.gif
I don't think teenagers are thinking about housing and childcare when not pursuing sex.
To your point, there are multiple reasons causing people to have less sex and less children.
What matters is planned pregnancies, and to that, housing and childcare absolutely factor into that decision.
This is a funny way to frame it. A lot of people are trying to stop teenagers from having sex. When I was a teenager the parents sponsored a "post prom" Carnival, I believe with the intent of having kids doing something with their dates after the prom that didn't involve having sex.
Some religious people work every day towards the goal of making sure a female teenager's life will be imperiled if she has a medical problem as a result of sex. And will tell her if she doesn't like it, she shouldn't have had sex.
Who is working in the other direction and trying to get teenagers to have sex?
After all, quality of life is way better than 100 years ago, and 100 years ago people would have 8 children at like 25.
I don’t have any studies to disprove that, so I can’t argue against it.
But then wouldn’t making jobs higher paying and life better make the issue worse? Now kids mean you give up an even better life.
Yes, which is what we see in the data. People with higher incomes have fewer children than those with lower incomes.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
“Jobs getting harder or bot paying well is a odd explanation of low birth rates.”
Harder/more demanding job => can’t dedicate proper time to job and child at the same time.
Better paying job => giving up job means giving up significantly more wealth.
It still tracks.
worst paying job == less kids
Does not track. People had tons of kids 100 years ago when quality of life is worse.
If you are saying that’s because life has gotten better and so we have less kids then fine, but then you need to acknowledge that the difference is because of better quality of life, so less would not have a negative effect on birth rates.
I know a lot of 20 and 30-something urbanites who don't plan to have children and I doubt cheaper rent or free childcare would make them change their entire life trajectory. There's a lot of other factors at play.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340562787_Students%...
With that said, dating can be tough too. I worked hard to get my dating skills to the level of being with someone that I want to be with (I’ve met others that tried and failed. It took 3 years of constant rejection, I learned to deal with rejection by necessity).
Also, having a relationship is tough. I had two that lasted both around 4 years. Currently learning non-violent communication to become better at having a healthy fight since that’s where things always went wrong.
The thing is: 50 years ago, you sort of married the first person you had a kid with and did your best to suck it up (that’s what I see around me in The Netherlands anyway). However, nowadays we want our relationships to be much nicer than “make it work, somehow”. I feel we’re more picky. I know I want a relationship that feels fulfilling, I’d rather be alone otherwise. And I think 50 years ago, people were less picky about that.
Taking morals out of this, and instead focusing on human nature along with current trends, it’s not hard to imagine this having a real impact.
I don’t think any of these possible downsides are a foregone conclusion, but neither should we dismiss the unpredictable impact of developments that fundamentally alter the sources of satisfaction for basic human biological drives. We already know that we’ll happily trade the future for short term satisfaction, so when something new comes onto the scene that encourages the proliferation of this behavior, we should bring curiosity, not dismissal.
We’ve already observed similar phenomena in nature [0] (the bottles were eventually redesigned to protect the species), and while this doesn’t prove that humans are as susceptible as beetles, it’s worth considering the nature of unintended consequences.
The term moral panic has started to lose its meaning, and caution about AI should not be conflated with unjustifiable beliefs about culturally controversial pastimes. They are orthogonal and unlike each other, and the nature of the concerns are quite different.
- [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-6055.1983...
So what you’ve stated is true but tautological with respect to all of the potential causes of the bottleneck.
The real concern is getting through the bottleneck at all, and without societal upheaval.
The comic book Marvelman has Marvelwoman invent the ultimate A.I. algorithm to help people find romantic partners.
The latest William Gibson novel has a benevolent A.I. tell people things like
"Your Mom just woke up, I can tell because she's scrolling Twitter. You should give her a call."
First off, if we want to bring the birth rate back up, we would probably do well to implement social policies that makes having kids less of a nightmare for everyone but the very rich or very poor: generous paternal leave, some kind of childcare (a creche-like system), better tax credits, good public schools, etc. I understand that well-paid developers might be less attuned to this kind of thing, but as a non-dev professional in a HCOL city with a young baby, I promise you that economic factors are the major reason we will not have another child.
Second, while I understand that the economy is organized around ever-growing populations, it seems like at some point, we'll have to figure out how to deal with declining or flat birthrates. We can't just grow forever, can we? Could the planet really sustain triple or quadruple the current population?
> First off, if we want to bring the birth rate back up, we would probably do well to implement social policies that makes having kids less of a nightmare for everyone but the very rich or very poor: generous paternal leave, some kind of childcare (a creche-like system), better tax credits, good public schools, etc. I understand that well-paid developers might be less attuned to this kind of thing, but as a non-dev professional in a HCOL city with a young baby, I promise you that economic factors are the major reason we will not have another child.
Oh boy, tell that to all the developed asian economies. What you're describing is known as pro-natalist policies, and many east asian countries have tried (and failed) to raise fertility by implementing them. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, all have varying degrees of pro-natalist policies, none of which have been met with much success. I think there's a case to be made that their demographic problems would be worse if they didn't implement these policies though.
> Second, while I understand that the economy is organized around ever-growing populations, it seems like at some point, we'll have to figure out how to deal with declining or flat birthrates. We can't just grow forever, can we? Could the planet really sustain triple or quadruple the current population?
Quite trivially. America alone throws a huge portion of its perfectly good food into making biofuels and feeding livestock; the primary constraint on food is not that we can't grow more, it's that it gets more expensive on the margin. When farmland runs out, you move to hydroponics, then to aeroponics, and those can grow 10x the food in the same amount of space. Water from the oceans is effectively limitless, desalination is just more expensive. Not everybody can have cars, but that's why you build public transit. And on and on it goes. Resources are not finite, it's not a video game where earth has 1000 units of iron and that's it. They just get more expensive on the margin, which then shifts consumption patterns to establish a new equilibrium. Recycling starts becoming profitable, some metals get too expensive and are only used in high-end applications, etc.
The bigger problem is socioeconomic though, there is simply not enough useful work for that many people — and with advancements fewer and fewer actual jobs will meed to exist. So we are left with a change, for example something like UBI, which would majorly shift our entire economic system.
A major component in the affordability to raise a family is the cost housing in desirable locations, which is mostly driven by a population increase there, and would fall during a population decrease; and a decrease in work-aged people combined with an aging population obviously pushes salaries up, if other things in the job market stay equal.
And if we're speaking about the world as a whole, we're so far from a population crisis - the current trends of global birth rates still imply a population growth until something like 10 billion; while even a halving of population from the current number to 4 billion wouldn't be something to be terrified, I mean, the world had 4 billion people during 1970s.
On one hand, this is definitely not ideal. But on the other hand, I can't blame them for seeking the easy way. A good relationship requires almost unacceptable sacrifices for a young adult considering the rising costs and stagnant wages and the expectations from their partners and family and workplace. Not to mention potential complications such as cheating, abuse, emotional issues, and maybe even legal problems. Way too much risk for just too little gain.
A simulation has maybe 50% of the benefits and none of the downside. In a way, this is the result that we as a society has pushed for. And we might be about to pay a price for it.
The onlyfans phenomenon might turn out to just be a flash in the pan.
I rewatched it a couple of weeks ago and it felt like a documentary. The movie is 10 years old.
Many of you have probably watched/rewatched it recently, but if you haven’t, I highly recommend it.
The wooden frame on computers, valuing things “written by humans” hit close to home.
The whole situation reminds me of this Futurama scene:
While I don't agree wholly with your take on the situation, the fact remains that there is a situation about which dialogue must be had. In my cohort (M26, 90's kids) the number of young men who have completely eschewed long-term relationships in favor of short-term hookups or other forms of gratification is somewhat alarming.
As (albeit weak) evidence that this is due to the changing roles, expectations, and power (im)balance between men & women, simply look at the sheer volume of 'toxic masculinity' podcasts, social media accounts, and other platforms spouting these jaded worldviews. Men are raising other men up who are saying what they believe to be true but lack the voice to say. The inherent truth of the message is not what is concerning, but rather the rate at which the beliefs are spreading.
As a man who has been happily married for the past 6 years with two kids I love more than life itself, I have very little personal stake in this issue; however the fact remains that this issue is very real and is affecting a large proportion of young men.