[JofArnold]

I suspect you're right. But I've just last night finished Brave New World and what strikes me is production of children in that book almost entirely for the purpose of labour.

So, I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time. I don't have children nor intend to - so likely this is a very cold take that doesn't apply to most - but the cynic in me says we've so far focussed on reproduction as individuals and at a country level to maintain productivity and extend the health and wealth of their elders. Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?

[gnfargbl]

I don't think much of the other proposed societal changes in BNW. They're a backdrop which Huxley uses to illustrate some aspects of human nature and to tell the rest of his story, but that's about it. We've had plenty of opportunity to move to the transient sexual model he outlines, for instance, and yet long-term relationships are still overwhelmingly the most popular choice.

I also don't believe people generally have children to fulfil a wider societal responsibility. As a parent myself, we had children mostly because we thought it would be nice to have children around. It has been much more than "nice," in a way that I could never really put into words. However, I can honestly say that the maintenance of my own health and wealth into old age has never been remotely a concern; if anything, I spend my time trying to find ways to insulate them from the consequences of an ageing society. I don't see those aspects of parenthood changing.

[squigz]

Societal pressures/responsibilities don't need to be consciously acknowledged by an individual for them to have an effect on that individuals' decision-making.

[graemep]

There are also societal pressures the other way. A lot of people do not have children because of the cost.

In the UK there has also been a cultural shift to regarding children as a lot of work - parents are under more pressure to do more and be perfect. That also deters people from having children.

Then there are those who argue that there are too many children so people should not have children.

There are pressures to have kids, of course, but its not clear to me that there is a net societal pressure towards having kids.

I had kids because I like having kids. Its fulfilling in a way nothing else is in most parents lives.

[gnfargbl]

True. My anecdata is that I don't see even the echoes of these pressures/responsibilities in my own historical choices, and as a result I doubt their effect on others.

[squigz]

In my experience, social pressure to have children is such a ubiquitous experience that it's difficult for me to think it doesn't have an effect. I wonder how this might vary between men & women

[dbspin]

I suspect it's enormously different between men and women, and of course inter-culturally. As a straight man living in Ireland, despite having extremely traditional catholic parents, I've faced literally zero pressure from family to have kids. My siblings (male and female) have both chosen to have kids (very closely together in time), and I enjoy being an uncle a great deal. But I don't have any interest whatsoever in parenting. I have some friends with kids - although they tend to fall off the radar if I'm honest, but haven't felt any pressure from them either.

[sebmellen]

Do you have kids? I find that my desire for children, and the ways in which I enjoy mine, are very “primitive” pleasures in the same way as my desires to eat or sleep are.

Maybe we eat because of social pressure, but obviously there is something deeper too.

[foobarian]

You have to keep in mind the millions of years of evolution that surely managed to leave some instinct-level mechanisms to encourage having children.

[Dalewyn]

>social pressure to have children is such a ubiquitous experience

One aspect of growing older that I eagerly can't wait for (unlike most others) is getting old enough that people will stop fucking pestering me about marriage and kids.

All those people can sincerely fuck off into their own bedrooms, pun intended.

Just about 20 years more of this noise...

[astral_drama]

Yes and it can be quite absurd and right on the nose.

While Putin feeds humans to the dogs of war, he will at the same time chide his countryfolk that they are not having enough children.

There is a softer version in the west where elders and the wealthy are 'concerned about birthrates' while at the same time squeezing their young on living costs(shelter+food).

[ZiiS]

Once society has accepted robot labour without rights and children without parents, the question quickly becomes is flesh or steel cheaper.

[Dalewyn]

>I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future

Leaving behind and continuing your legacy and heritage.

Personally I have no interest in pushing my blood, interests, and achievements and their endurement upon my hypothetical children, among many other reasons I have no interest in having children, but if someone wants to be that person then more power to them since it's none of my business.

[qgin]

It's already happened to a degree. People used to need to birth their own personal/family workforce (to work their land, for example). That was the main purpose of children. The idea that children are for some kind of top-of-the-pyramid self-actualization experience is really, really recent.

[nico]

> I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work

If robots are doing all the work, my bet is humans won’t be dominating for too long

Then if robots take over, and they spare us, the driver for human reproduction (for them to reproduce us) might just be to have pets

[horrible-hilde]

yes, and we’ll love it.

[scotty79]

People still make a lot of clothes even though huge percentage of the ends up in landfills after barely any use.

Future purpose of childbirth is fashion.

[trhway]

>what the driver for reproduction will be

the people without such driver are naturally weeded out, so due to such weeding out the majority of the population always naturally consist of the people who have such a driver, it may be some crazy one in any given particular case, yet it is there.

>in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time.

and with artificial uterine it would mean that some people, the wealthy ones, would be able to have a hundred, or a thousand of children. Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.

>would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?

the people who wouldn't be able to afford it as having children would be less beneficial for society as you correctly noted and it will be more like a personal luxury/indulgence and thus would be treated accordingly - taxed, no child support help from government, etc

[teeray]

> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.

Time could be the great equalizer here. Spending time with your children is pretty universally accepted as beneficial, so we could make it mandatory for extrauterine births over some threshold. It could be structured such that the more extrauterine children you have, the more of your 24 hours per day must be spent with them. I’m intentionally hand-waving over specifics of what that would look like and enforcement, but I’m sure you can come up with ideas. The goal is: if you want to artificially have hundreds of extrauterine children, society will take from you all the time you could have spent building rockets and running companies.

[scotty79]

We are limiting sperm donors. I don't see why wouldn't we limit future parents for the same reasons.

[lotsofpulp]

Time isn’t a sufficient measure to serve as a proxy for quality parenting.

[ben_w]

But it is a way to limit people to a fixed maximum number of children.

Say it's a requirement for an hour per day per child — no matter how many drugs Musk takes to stay awake, he can't have more than 24 kids.

[satvikpendem]

But, lots of people have many kids thst they don't take care of. Genghis Khan is one such example, apocryphally having so many kids as to constitute 2% of the current Asian population having had him as an ancestor. So I don't quite get your point, there is no maximum.

[ben_w]

The suggestion is to change the rules, so what people currently do is irrelevant.

Genghis Khan set the rules, which is why actually changing them would be very difficult.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

I think a lot of people living at that time would constitute 2% of the current Asian population having had him (or her) as an ancestor.

[gnfargbl]

> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.

I agree that is a very likely outcome. We've seen that behaviour before in history, e.g. the Ottoman Imperial Harem contained a minimum of several hundred women at its peak. We would almost certainly see it again. Remember, though, that those children still need to be cared for after birth, and that requires humans.

[rsynnott]

The main driver for that sort of thing was a system where production of heirs was seen as socially essential; this is now largely obsolete.

(Even then, the really extreme examples of polygamy were more about social status than practical concerns around succession; again, this is now largely obsolete in most societies.)

[FORGIVENHEROs]

OT, and maybe, my words ain't effective, but talking to a young woman, i thought i'd talked to "supermom". She told me what she'd "left and quit just to be a good mommy for her daughter." I looked at her, "wearing glasses -too big, to 'be modern'", a warm pullover - knitted, masking upper arms and (her) middle. But than i saw her grabbing a cell-phone (daughter call incomming...), she became 'supermom'.

So if any, could remember that there were 'telephone boxes' ...changing clothes...

[Reports:Humor]

HINT: Action Comics #1 (published April 18, 1938).[1] Superman has been adapted to several other media...

(-;

[1] quoting: wikipedia

[trhway]

>Remember, though, that those children still need to be cared for after birth, and that requires humans.

I think AI and robots would make human involvement minimally necessary, be it basic physical care or education.

[ben_w]

On the one hand, based on FSD, Musk would be one of the first people to attempt this, well before the AI was capable enough to do a good job.

On the other, super-rich people can already afford a lot of humans to assist with raising their kids. AI isn't strictly necessary for this, as seen with e.g. Genghis Khan.

But yeah, if the G and the I in AGI is good enough and general enough, then robots directed by it could do a good job of raising kids — but at some point, you have to ask what life is even for, why you're having kids at all if you don't want to be involved in raising them.

[trhway]

> a lot of humans to assist with raising their kids. AI isn't strictly necessary for this, as seen with e.g. Genghis Khan.

it willn't be just kids. It will be "designer babies". Cleaned-up DNA with imports from Mozart and Einstein DNAs, and countless other improvements and enhancements for higher IQ, stronger muscles, faster reaction, better health, etc and cyber-enhanced with Neuralink style connection from may be even before being born, etc. There would be not many humans who would be able even to just keep up, less serve as teachers and trainers to such kids.

> to be involved in raising them.

engineering them is also involvement.

[ben_w]

> engineering them is also involvement.

Have you ever played video games with cheats enabled? Some of them are still fun, others feel pointless. If you want to treat your offspring as a machine to be engineered rather than raised, why bother with flesh in the first place, why not regard the AI itself as the offspring?

If a child were engineered as thoroughly as you suggest, the distance between them and their parents would necessarily be as severe as the distance between them and their potential human teachers.

But also there is a practical issue:

Musk specifically may well test such things on his own kids before the tech is actually ready, but any sensible person would want these interventions to have passed a full clinical trial before reaching their offspring. Such trials would necessarily lead to there being many humans with any one of those enhancements before all of them, making any gap much smaller in practice than you anticipate.

[scotty79]

> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.

Something is stopping Elon from founding fertility clinic and sperm bank with just his sperm.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

If you think humanity is a good thing, and you want it to continue indefinitely into the future, then reproduction is essential. If you do not think this, then you want Earth to be a dull rock, with no civilization and no intelligent species. It really is just that binary.

>Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?

They already made that choice, decades ago, and there's no evidence anyone is rethinking it. Fertility levels are sub-replacement.