[okr]

Is AI not a solution for our problems? I can imagine a declining population, a younger generation, that does not want to reproduce, neither working off the available work. We need a solution for that.

So we need systems, that learns human knowledge, refines it, makes it better and takes over all of the work.

And for programmers: is sitting not the new cig smoking and drinking alcohol for early death?

[bru3s]

How does AI help in solving the issues you brought over in your post?

> a declining population, a younger generation, that does not want to reproduce, neither working off the available work. We need a solution for that.

And what do you reckon is the reason for that? "Kids these days are lazy and only want to have fun", or something to that extent? Or is that because the cost of living has skyrocketed, the future is uncertain and people are afraid of the planet becoming more and more inhospitable for humans in the following decades or even years?

Maybe people do not want to work despite the job availability because those jobs offer piss poor conditions and no security? If not for all these reasons, why would people act so differently than in the past?

Once you put your precious A"I" in the equation, what do you get out of it? Even less job security, more leverage for bad employers to threaten workers with the magic wand of "you'll get substituted", and arguably way shittier quality of products all around (cases in point: A"I" customer service that fails to be satisfactory in resolving customer issues or become a huge nuisance to deal with, or A"I" "art" in articles and blogs that' so easy to spot that you could arguably be better off with no illustrations at all).

> So we need systems, that learns human knowledge, refines it, makes it better and takes over all of the work. First off, who is "we"? And secondly, once it "takes over all of the work" (whatever that means), what are people going to do? Do you really think we'll get some utopian fantasy like UBI?

> And for programmers: is sitting not the new cig smoking and drinking alcohol for early death? How tf does that have anything to do with A"I" helping? If I use Copilot to "help" me out in programming I'll still have to sit, will I not?

[derefr]

> And what do you reckon is the reason for that?

Declining birth-rates seem to happen to every society that passes a certain level of industrialization, with the most well-off and secure in these societies having the fewest kids, and birth rates as a whole declining as more people enter this "totally well-off and secure" demographic. In fact, people in these same late-industrialization cultures who aren't well-off, whose futures remain uncertain, do not experience any decline in aggregate birth-rate at all. Nor do people in societies where nobody is well-off — these in fact tending to be the societies with the highest birth-rates!

The trend in my own observations, from personal experience with both family-wanting "trad" people, and "child-free" people, is that as the self-perceived value and security of your own life goes up, two things seem to shift in your perspective:

1. your subjective resource-commitment bar for bringing a new life into the world grows ever higher proportionally to your available resources (i.e. a millionaire has the intuition that they'll have to allocate a good portion of their millions to any kids they have; a billionaire thinks the same, but now it's a good portion of their billions.) Having kids is always intuitively expensive — but as your own life becomes better and more secure, having kids begins to feel exceedingly, inhibitingly expensive. (Even though it's likely eminently practical for people with 1/1000th your resources, let alone for you!)

2. specifically for women, the act of gestating and raising of a baby grows ever-larger in its subjective potential for negative impact on their (increasingly-highly-valued and de-risked) lives — in terms of both time-cost and risk to their health, career, etc.

Given these trends, here's my hypothesis for what's happening:

We have seemingly evolved to feel driven to reproduce when under a sort of optimum level of scarcity and uncertainty. We feel this drive the most when:

• things are bad enough that you feel your own opportunities for a good life are done and spent — so having kids is your genes' Hail Mary to trying again in 15 years when opportunities could be better; with this lack of further opportunity making the risk to your health and resources of having a kid feel "worth it";

• but things still aren't so bad at the moment, that any kids you conceive would literally starve and not make it to reproductive age themselves.

This heuristic worked just fine for the entirety of human evolution (and perhaps long before that); but it seems to "go wrong" in post-industrial society, for people experiencing no present scarcity or uncertainty. The heuristic wasn't designed to cope with this! It outputs nonsense — things like:

• "you never need to have kids, you'll be immortal, always healthy, and will always have infinite opportunities"

• "the right time to have kids is after you retire, when you'll have time, and also money accumulated to raise them. But of course, only if you can get someone else to carry the baby for you, since you won't have working gonads by then. And only if you can afford a team of nannies and private tutors, since you won't be able to handle the rambunctiousness of a toddler by then."

...both of which, as intuitions, tend to result in people just never having kids — despite often eventually regretting not having had kids. Because, by the time these intuitions shift or resolve positively, it's too late.

This broken intuition about when (or if) you should ever have kids, seems to lead to people also developing very different perspectives on sexual relationships. These "child-free" people — especially women — often seem to experience much lower sexual drive, or even fear of sex for its potential to force an (unwanted) child upon them. And this negative attitude toward sex, secondary to fear of reproduction, often then leads to either strained romantic relationships, or just not bothering with romantic relationships at all.

If you wanted to medicalize all this, you might call it a specific kind of neurosis that humans develop, when they no longer need to do anything much to ensure all their needs are satisfied. It's a compulsion toward catastrophizing all the negative aspects of reproduction, child-rearing, sex, and romantic relationships; and a disconnection from the emotional valence-weight that the positives of these same subjects would normally have.

(And I suspect that this is exactly the framing various societies will eventually take toward this developing "problem" — as I can totally imagine drug companies developing and marketing treatments for "reproductive neurosis", that trick just the part of your brain that cares about that sort of stuff, into thinking you're not well-off and not secure, so that it'll spit out the signals to tell you to feel more positively toward these subjects.)

> Do you really think we'll get some utopian fantasy like UBI?

Yes. Why wouldn't we? As soon as nobody has to labor, UBI is just one global (probably bloody) proletarian revolution away.

There has always been a "so who does the work nobody wants to do, then" blank spot at the end of the Marxist plan, that left all previous Communist revolutions floundering after the "revolution" part.

But "intelligent robots grow all the food autonomously, cook it, and give it out for free, while also maintaining themselves and the whole pipeline that creates their parts, to the profit of no one but the benefit of all — the mechanistic equivalent of Sikh Langar, accomplished at megaproject scale in every country" (and analogous utopias re: clean water, housing, etc) form a set of neat snap-in answers to that blank spot. I have always presumed that these are what AI advocates are vaguely attempting to gesture toward when they imagine AI "taking over all of the work."

[hnbad]

> I can imagine a declining population, a younger generation, that does not want to reproduce, neither working off the available work.

Luckily the future does not depend on what you can or can't imagine. And no, even if that imagination were accurate, AI would not be the solution for any of those problems. We know the root causes, we know the effects, having a bunch of companies boil the oceans to have AI generate mediocre copy and uninspired illustrations does not help with anything other than making those companies richer and displacing even more workers and shutting down even more career paths.

Young people don't want to have kids or work because all the aspirational goals previous generations had have become unattainable for them, we're counting down the years until the climate catastrophe becomes impossible to ignore even in wealthier countries and there is literally nothing the masses can do because politicians across the world have shown a complete disregard for human life in the face of a global pandemic that had a death toll in the millions before we simply stopped counting.

> So we need systems, that learns human knowledge, refines it, makes it better and takes over all of the work.

And how would that benefit anyone but those who own those systems and charge for its use? How would that benefit the "younger generation"? To the contrary this would seem like it would do what automation always does: drive down wages and reduce workforces while harming workers' ability to bargain for better working conditions.

As tech workers we should take the time to understand that the "Luddites" were not actually opposed to technological advancement but to the consequences of it in a system that always rewards the business but not the worker for an increase in productivity. You don't need to withdraw into a cabin in the woods to realize that the way we have set up the systems that govern us technological progress will always only accelerate the wealth drain to the rich, never reverse it.

And that doesn't even get into how most AI startups are completely unsustainable (as growth-oriented startups tend to be) or how the proliferation of underpriced AI has contributed to the destruction of knowledge via search engine spam, "content generation" and social media bots.

If you want to create fully automated gay luxury space communism, be my guest, but you'll also need to work on the "communism" part if you want to make the "fully automated" part not result in the opposite direction.

[skydhash]

What about education for all, better healthcare and a solution to hunger. Or discriminations? I’m not seeing anything trying to solve that in the AI space right now. It’s all about replacing workers and artists.

[avery17]

Well yeah cause its bad at all the things you want it to solve.