The Data Is Clear: People Are Having Less Sex
graphsaboutreligion.com
graphsaboutreligion.com
Anti-porn? It's because of the porn
Anti-LGBTQ? It's because it's hard to have sex "when you're not even sure of the gender" of your partner (an actual comment on the Substack)
Parent? It's because less available childcare and more helicopter parenting expectations lead to less alone time
Young adult? It's nihilism about the future and crushing workloads with no way to afford your own home/apartment
Old? It's because people had more sex when "men were men and women were women"
An incel? It's because of women
Feminist? It's because of men
Anti-tech? It's social media
Environmentalist? It's environmental factors
I could go on. But almost anyone could argue for almost any reason, and it seems to be more enlightening about the person making the argument than about the problem.
> Feminist? It's because of men
I find it funny that you indirectly equated feminists and incels
But I don't think that should alarm anyone, this is not the source of the fertility drop, our species does not not a very high sexual activity to trigger reproduction.
And by the way, I don't think that any kind of population collapse is on the horizon, we'll certainly experience a population stagnation, maybe a slight to moderate reduction at some point, but what we're about to see is the flatter part of the sigmoid, and this should be considered good news.
With fertility rates rapidly falling towards 0 all over the world, I see only three viable long-term options, if we want to self-preserve (and not just fade away):
1. Growing humans on industrial scale in bio-reactors. Government+AI would take care of raising them. Basically a cyber-communism. Probably could happen in China.
2. Replacing/surpassing humans with AI+robots completely. Then reproducing is as easy as scaling up a K8S cluster. Seems that we're heading towards it.
3. Reverting progress. Could happen anyway via some apocalypse scenario. But also could be deliberate, like Neo-Amish or something.
Some things just take decades to change, and are always changing in one way or another.
It is just a likely thing to happen IMO. WW3 or extreme climate change... or a depopulation so severe that the infrastructure will slowly collapse, and nobody could ever fix it, because all the smart people who built and maintained it are retired or dead? Or maybe even all of those combined.
> 1. Growing humans on industrial scale in bio-reactors. Government+AI would take care of raising them. Basically a cyber-communism. Probably could happen in China.
"Probably could happen in China." It's about 1000 times more likely China will just crank up the carrots and sticks until their reproduction rate recovers. Right now they're going with carrots and propaganda, but unlike the West, they don't have any qualms about sticks.
They could probably solve the problem (in the medium term) by kicking women out of the workforce (or implementing a low glass ceiling) along with heavy fines for childlessness.
Quit reading sci-fi.
> 2. Replacing/surpassing humans with AI+robots completely. Then reproducing is as easy as scaling up a K8S cluster. Seems that we're heading towards it.
That's just the fantasy of weirdo tech fetishists (who are in disproportionately great supply in SV and on HN). Not going to happen unless some psycho billionaire manages to build a robot army.
Quit reading sci-fi.
> 3. Reverting progress. Could happen anyway via some apocalypse scenario. But also could be deliberate, like Neo-Amish or something.
"Progress" is a myth. There's no direction to history. Even if current social trends continue, at least with sub-replacement reproduction, there will be selection against them and an inflection point after which things start to go in a different direction, though perhaps it will take a couple hundred years to get there.
Quit reading sci-fi.
It isn't about a robot revolt. It is about slowly pushing humans out of economy, until we're not economic actors anymore, because we're uncompetitive. Combined with rapid depopulation, many generations after, there will be no carbon based economy anymore. Everything will be owned and driven by silicon-based profit-seeking self-improving autonomous entities, rapidly expanding all over in space at a significant fraction of speed of light (the "grabby alien" thing). It might happen very gradually, over many decades (or even centuries). But why wouldn't it?
Yeah, I might need to quit reading sci-fi. But many of our sci-fi predictions became reality recently.
Landlords and fundamentally broken housing markets are the problem, everywhere. But people rather blame "the smartphones!!!", JFC.