In other news today "The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends" with comments mentioning "this is actually a huge issue with girls too"
What I find interesting about your response here (and perhaps you could elaborate more) is that it does seem plausible that AI boyfriends would be a huge issue with girls. If anything, it might actually be worse for women, if not now then in the long term. Women love reading about things that invoke certain emotions (the market for literature targeting women dwarfs that for men) and playing games like The Sims which lets them vicariously experience social situations between imagined archetypes in a way that gives them ultimate control. LLMs could fit both of those niches beautifully. It's not that there aren't plenty of men and boys that are compelled by reading and talking to someone/something feminine, but many of a man's needs are already pacified by porn, which we don't even need AI to produce if we're being honest.
I agree with you on this! However, it's deeply concerning[1] if this young population is accelerating this trend of what I'd call psychological degeneration.
If we take the cohort who's under 25 now, consider that within about 15 years of today, almost no women older than this cohort is even capable of reproducing[2]. So if a significant number of today's kids and teens and college-aged kids decide they'd rather opt out of human companionship, birth rates will plunge even more catastrophically than the current projections have them, with even more devastating effects due to the very bad ratio of retirees to workers. So this kind of thing actually does strike me as very concerning.
[1] I know there are many nihilists out there who think humans are a cancer, and that the best thing that could happen (morally? To nature? Opinions vary.) is for human population to be reduced by 90%+, if not exterminated. I am just not one of those people though, so I want to see humanity live and thrive.
[2] sure, it's not unheard of at 40+ but it's risky and often expensive, so we really shouldn't count on a sudden surge of very old first-time-moms to materially change the math here. Also culturally, looking at 25-year-old people on social media none of them say they're waiting for 40 to have kids, they say they don't want them.
If they feel they're never going to succeed in that competition, then why put themselves through that heartache and financial burden?
Maybe WOPR was right, the only way to win is not to play.
But with great effects on reducing carbon emissions and other waste products in the environment.
> But population is project to continue rising until 2084 anyway, which means I don't need to think about this problem at all for the remainder of my life.
Your first point sounds like you are probably the kind of responsible person who is pretty concerned about climate, emissions, wealth inequality, etc. Which implies that you consider it a duty to not just do whatever is convenient in the now, but to act in a sustainable way that doesn't screw future generations.
Then you drop that second bomb, which implies maybe you don't give a crap if today's teenagers will inhabit a horrific world with twice as many old people as society can afford to support. You'll be gone after all, so you "don't need to think about it." If you are that callous to the plight of generations that come after you, I guess you have more in common than you think with those people who are supposedly doing such a bad job with the "resources we have now."
I dare say I think I have plenty in common with those other people, as I do care a little, but maybe not as much as I could or should. I think this is how we got to this point in the first place.
I wouldn't say that a lower population needs to result in a horrific world.
I assume standards of living would change. What other choice is there, given the change in the ratio of workers to retirees? Not everyone could afford a big house of their own, a car, and tech toys and other possessions, but we are productive enough as a society to feed, cloth and shelter everyone, including a bunch of retired people. We could still afford the really important benifits of modernity. And we keep getting more productive, finding easier ways to do more, so who knows?
The Ahmish wouldn't describe a simplier way of life as as horrific. Nor people born a hundred years ago. Nor people living like that in many countries today. Change society like that and, who knows, young people might be more open to having kids again.
Why do you think things would end up being horrific?
Having a very inverted population pyramid, where the old vastly outnumber the working age, and the working age outnumber the children, isn't something that would be a minor inconvenience. Our economic system will collapse because it takes a lot of people creating value to pay for the needs of the elderly (remember, there isn't some big trust fund set aside for them -- it's only through the wages of the currently-working that we can pay the benefits for them, and if I'm not mistaken, public pensions in other Western countries are exactly the same in that way). And setting aside the money abstraction, which is just how we organize things, the elderly need a lot of medical care and they consume food, water, need housing to live in, and they can't contribute much to the work of making those things. So they need there to be enough younger, working people that there's a big surplus of stuff not needed to keep the young fed, clothed, and housed, and a surplus of young people to work to take care of them.
I'm not one who insists on some unsustainable growth or even any growth at all. A 0 growth rate would be fine. But the nihilism in the West (coupled with too many economic incentives to not have kids) that has killed off our birthrate is going to make the decline in living standards that's been seen between the boomers and our generation (you know, all those think pieces about the "Death of the American Dream") look like a joke. And economic collapse doesn't mean we just shift to living like the Amish. It looks more like Haiti.
Lots of the world gets by on a fraction of US per-capita GDP, and isn't as screwed up as Haiti. Countries like Japan, Korea, Italy and others in Europe are blazing trails with this problem, a generation of aging (no millenials) ahead of the US (assuming no more immigration). We'll see how that works out.
Scary to back-slide on standards of living, but it's happened before in history. Best not to get too comfortable with the idea of the American Dream. Stay flexible. Stay healthy. Good luck!
American culture is absolutely a failure, yes
Post-2005 or so culture? I'd say probably... yes? Though it's far from an American thing, most of the issues I'm concerned with are worse in Europe.
The failures are:
1. Nihilism and hedonism as a substitute for moral values
- This is what signals to young people (even including many millennials) that life has no particular meaning so do whatever feels good, rather than seeing yourself as having a responsibility to raise the next generation of people, to do good things and to live good lives. Note that we're equally a failure here in a Star Trek Humanist lens or a religious moral lens.
2. Militarized gender war
- Driven by visual social media and as an immune overreaction to the real sins of past generations, men and women have normalized hating the opposite sex. For women the "Man or the bear" meme really sums it up. For men, it's exemplified by many men having zero interest in even being with women. This is mainly driven by this graph [1] - the "bottom 80%" of men in 'attractiveness,' when they realize that women judge them as a "4" or under, feel the game is unwinnable so they simply drop out. Women compete for the tiny population of "high value men," who don't value them (and won't even settle down) because they have too many options, and grow more and more frustrated.
3. Economic disorder
- In the pursuit of a virtuous cause -- allowing women to have career ambitions -- we've accidentally built a world where both parents have to work to compete with other families for scarce necessities like housing, but even having two working adults doesn't magically give most families enough resources to pay for proper childcare. Women are put in an impossible situation: Staying home to care for kids is seen as basically degrading among other women and it puts the family in a financial disadvantage, but working means both parents are stretched to find enough time to care for children, and that the children will probably suffer from the lack of your time and attention. You can't win.
4. Militarized culture war
- In every Western country we have elites who identify as "left" with a set of values that sees their political "enemies" as despicable scum, and an opposite group of mostly less educated and less wealthy people that identifies as "right" that feels the same way about the left. (Amusingly the "Left" usually claims to be For The Common Man, but that's fair-ish since all the less famous billionaires are indeed card-carrying conservatives.) They've both polarized so much that it's impossible to see how we can have a government run by either faction that isn't considered evil and fascist, or even outright illegitimate, by the other side.
5. Everything to do with social media, of course, and the worst uses of AI. (Needs no explanation I assume)
So yes, Western culture has dramatically failed. I'm trying to advocate that we improve it rather than commit cultural suicide, which is the current plan we're on.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1alibge/oc...
How much of what you said holds true in other cultures with plumetting birth rates? Japan, Mexico and India for example? Russia? Seems to be quite a few exceptions.
Quick comments on your post: 1) I'm impressed by the young, they're trying, maybe more so than gen-x and boomers, who went from lazy-as-anybody to mucho reactionary, 2) That graph doesn't say that 80% of men drop out of the dating pool, 3) I agree that affordibility is a problem, but I'd question both sides of the supply/demand curve, and (in the U.S.) Reaganomics, 4) how does partisanship relate to birth rates? For example, Congo is divided, but birth rate is high, 5) I agree that algorithmic profit seeking social media is a huge problem, but those who rule us like to push their propaganda, and they are doing a good job.
I've always heard that lower birth rates were correlated with urbanization and educating women. Always and everywhere. That having kids in the city costs too much, compared to on farms, and that women want to avoid a bad situation if they can.
How to make things better?
I think that there is a lot we can do to make life more social and affordable, for example imagine a world with more cheaper housing options, no need for a car, no need to wage-slave full time, less mercenarial, less scams, less manipulating people to buy things they don't need, etc. Better living for less money. Easier to have kids. In aggregate we are plenty productive enough. It'll take time to unwind so many decades going in the other direction. And we haven't even started. Because the people capturing all that wealth don't want to make those changes.
I assume that kids will figure it out eventually. This is self correcting. The world will go on :-)
Me too. It would be nice if we, as a society, did more to prioritize that.
Letting big tech psycholocally pollute everyone for profit is not helping.
Whether or not the usage is problematic is a separate question. I don't think anything rises to the level of "sharing fake nudes of a real person" and I suspect the effort of having a conversation is a natural limiter, but now I'm the one speculating.
sigh. I really hope someday people can achieve sufficient emotional strength to realize that it can't take anything away from you that someone can take a photograph of your face and create arbitrary fictional imagery from it.
It's been possible since realistic painting was mastered, and yes now it's far easier. But it still isn't real. People shouldn't let it affect them any more than fictional text. I can write "<insert moviestar> does <insert shocking sex act> on <insert shocking other person>" and it doesn't mean they did the act or that anyone should even care about that stupid sentence. It's make-believe.
Now in the case they keep it private, you'll never know and never be bothered by it, but the issue is people tend to share this stuff and build on it. Other people read it and start assuming it's real or based on some kind of truth.
When you add things like Americas fear of nudity you can start creating problems for the victims in these cases.
This 'bully' is nearly always going to be an untraceable online ghost. Raging against them and declaring yourself violated doesn't teach them a lesson, it only increases the blast radius of their mischief and makes people see themselves as helpless victims.
Also, I wish all bullies were so weak and impotent that all they can do is generate fictional, obviously-fake images. Imagine if Putin was trying to conquer a country by making mean pictures of Zelenskyy. Would be a pretty good world.