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Comment by PicassoCTs | Hacker News Reader

The truth is that woman, given a informed choice without societal or religious pressure - would rather not have children. So artificial wombs and AI for raising it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb

Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.

Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.

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No criticism of you, nor do I want to put words in your mouth, but there seems to be a generalisation to 'all woman' in this argument, and from that an unstated assumption that the only way for humanity to preserve itself is something like artificial wombs/coercion etc. Surely another possible scenario is that the people that aren't interested in having children (or the conditions that make people not want to have children) will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level? Who can say which one of these is more likely?

That opens just the next can of worm- with self-selecting for non-rationality in a population. Just letting the thing run its course is basically a eugenics program against rational people. Its basically the enlightenment weeding itself out, which i would find sad, liking the civilization i reside in.

> [P]eople that aren't interested in having children will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level?

I think this is exactly what we're seeing. This is evolution as a punctuated equilibrium. Nature's last trick "sex feels good (but also leads to babies)" is breaking down in effectiveness on people. Instead, it will be some innate desire to have children that will carry some subpopulation forward. Given the extremely strong selection pressure on (it affects the one life event most determinative of "evolutionary success") this could happen really quickly.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true — people have fewer kids than they desire. Addressing that gap would get us to replacement rate. And obviously, the current rate is significantly non-zero.

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