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Most developed countries are already worried about declining birth rates (many are already below replacement rates). The rise of AI companions is going to abso

Most developed countries are already worried about declining birth rates (many are already below replacement rates). The rise of AI companions is going to absolutely drop the bottom out of even the most pessimistic birth rate outlooks. It's easy to imagine a future where the majority of all young people give up on trying to establish real relationships and just resort to AI companions for the cheap and easy dopamine. And I think we're going to see the rate of mental illness, suicide, mass shootings, etc continue to climb to numbers that not long ago would have been unfathomable. I don't want to be an AI luddite but I am terrified.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Most developed countries are already worried about declining birth rates Yes, because of housing, healthcare, childcare and education costs spiraling out of control and the difficulty of getting well paying jobs to cover those costs are pushing youngsters to spend their youth and most fertile years hunched behind a desk studying and working to climb the corporate ladder to afford a home bigger than a shoebox in the sticks with a 30 year mortgage, not because of AI generated porn. Graphic porn has been around for over 100 years and blaming it now for falling birthrates has got to be the silliest things ever, up there with blaming avocado toast for millennials being poor. Present society is economically fucking the young generations for monetary gains, and they're aware everything is stacked against them, so instead of taking part in this impossible to win ratrace/squidgame, they choose to check out of the most expensive things in life (traditional marriage and having kids) and instead spend their adulthood on various hobbies and individualistic hedonistic endeavors (smoking pot, VR porn and anime waifus, videogames, being a perpetual nomad in cheap countries, avocado toast, lattes, etc.). All these things are the effect, but not the root cause.
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  > People shouldn't have kids if they can't afford them! People can't afford kids and aren't having them > shockedpikachu.gif
- dcchambers 4y ago
  I'm not saying AI porn is the cause of it, I'm saying it's going to be another thing added on to the stack of issues that already exist.
- rohit2412 4y ago
  I'm sure they play a role, but I have read that even teenagers are having less sex. I don't think teenagers are thinking about housing and childcare when not pursuing sex.
  - matwood 4y ago
    I don't know about teenagers, but when I see stats like 20% of the men get 80% of the dates on dating apps it's obvious why people give up. To your point, there are multiple reasons causing people to have less sex and less children.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    It may be the case that teenagers are having less sex, however I don’t think we should be too worried about a decrease in birth rates due to unplanned pregnancies. What matters is planned pregnancies, and to that, housing and childcare absolutely factor into that decision.
  - staticman2 4y ago
    >but I have read that even teenagers are having less sex. This is a funny way to frame it. A lot of people are trying to stop teenagers from having sex. When I was a teenager the parents sponsored a "post prom" Carnival, I believe with the intent of having kids doing something with their dates after the prom that didn't involve having sex. Some religious people work every day towards the goal of making sure a female teenager's life will be imperiled if she has a medical problem as a result of sex. And will tell her if she doesn't like it, she shouldn't have had sex. Who is working in the other direction and trying to get teenagers to have sex?
- mr_00ff00 4y ago
  Jobs getting harder or bot paying well is a odd explanation of low birth rates. After all, quality of life is way better than 100 years ago, and 100 years ago people would have 8 children at like 25.
  - bediger4000 4y ago
    Those folks in the past had children because the children paid for themselves beginning about age 7 or 8, and were an ongoing source of labor, quality of life or not.
    - mr_00ff00 4y ago
      This is a fair point except it would imply only the poor had more kids. The rich (who didn’t use them as a source of labor) also had much higher birth rates.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    How is it an odd explanation? the opportunity cost of having children has risen dramatically, that tracks with improved quality of life.
    - mr_00ff00 4y ago
      So the opportunity cost in your example is the quality of life that you end up losing by having a child? The missing time that (with our higher quality of life) is way better? I don’t have any studies to disprove that, so I can’t argue against it. But then wouldn’t making jobs higher paying and life better make the issue worse? Now kids mean you give up an even better life.
      - comte7092 4y ago
        >But then wouldn’t making jobs higher paying and life better make the issue worse? Yes, which is what we see in the data. People with higher incomes have fewer children than those with lower incomes. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
- standardUser 4y ago
  Cost of living is a factor, but the demographic shift we are seeing throughout the developed and developing world is well-documented and has many causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition I know a lot of 20 and 30-something urbanites who don't plan to have children and I doubt cheaper rent or free childcare would make them change their entire life trajectory. There's a lot of other factors at play.
anonzzzies 4y ago
This is how AI will destroy us? It’s like the holodeck on Star Trek: if that would exist, almost no human would do anything else than be there 24/7. The low-fi versions we will have the coming years might be enough to at least keep the male part of society permanently occupied.
- xnx 4y ago
  Video games are already a very good approximation for virtual worlds.
spacemadness 4y ago
This is simple moral panic backed up by nothing but gut feel.
- dcchambers 4y ago
  Is it? The number of teens that do things like date, have sex, drive, work, or hang out in person/go to parties has already fallen off a cliff thanks to social media.[^1] Who is to say AI won't make that trend even worse? [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340562787_Students%27_Cognitive_and_Emotional_Development_during_the_Transition_from_High_School_to_Design_School https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340562787_Students%...
  - mettamage 4y ago
    Hmm, the issue that I am experiencing is an economic one. It’s expensive to have children. With that said, dating can be tough too. I worked hard to get my dating skills to the level of being with someone that I want to be with (I’ve met others that tried and failed. It took 3 years of constant rejection, I learned to deal with rejection by necessity). Also, having a relationship is tough. I had two that lasted both around 4 years. Currently learning non-violent communication to become better at having a healthy fight since that’s where things always went wrong. The thing is: 50 years ago, you sort of married the first person you had a kid with and did your best to suck it up (that’s what I see around me in The Netherlands anyway). However, nowadays we want our relationships to be much nicer than “make it work, somehow”. I feel we’re more picky. I know I want a relationship that feels fulfilling, I’d rather be alone otherwise. And I think 50 years ago, people were less picky about that.
  - staticman2 4y ago
    The term "social media" appears nowhere in that article.
- haswell 4y ago
  You might be correct that some people are panicking about this for moral reasons, but I don’t think we can conclude that’s all that is happening here, or that this is a baseless concern. Taking morals out of this, and instead focusing on human nature along with current trends, it’s not hard to imagine this having a real impact. I don’t think any of these possible downsides are a foregone conclusion, but neither should we dismiss the unpredictable impact of developments that fundamentally alter the sources of satisfaction for basic human biological drives. We already know that we’ll happily trade the future for short term satisfaction, so when something new comes onto the scene that encourages the proliferation of this behavior, we should bring curiosity, not dismissal. We’ve already observed similar phenomena in nature [0] (the bottles were eventually redesigned to protect the species), and while this doesn’t prove that humans are as susceptible as beetles, it’s worth considering the nature of unintended consequences. The term moral panic has started to lose its meaning, and caution about AI should not be conflated with unjustifiable beliefs about culturally controversial pastimes. They are orthogonal and unlike each other, and the nature of the concerns are quite different. - [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-6055.1983.tb01846.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-6055.1983...
voldacar 4y ago
This would just select for people who actually want kids, and after the initial population bottleneck the species would be fine
- wowyallsuck 4y ago
  Nobody thinks there’s a biological cause to the demographic challenges so many nations look to be facing. So what you’ve stated is true but tautological with respect to all of the potential causes of the bottleneck. The real concern is getting through the bottleneck at all, and without societal upheaval.
staticman2 4y ago
Since we're imagining things, we could choose to spend our time imagining good things! The comic book Marvelman has Marvelwoman invent the ultimate A.I. algorithm to help people find romantic partners. The latest William Gibson novel has a benevolent A.I. tell people things like "Your Mom just woke up, I can tell because she's scrolling Twitter. You should give her a call."
JoeJonathan 4y ago
The perennial panic on HN over declining birth rates seems like thinly veiled cover for cultural conservatism. First off, if we want to bring the birth rate back up, we would probably do well to implement social policies that makes having kids less of a nightmare for everyone but the very rich or very poor: generous paternal leave, some kind of childcare (a creche-like system), better tax credits, good public schools, etc. I understand that well-paid developers might be less attuned to this kind of thing, but as a non-dev professional in a HCOL city with a young baby, I promise you that economic factors are the major reason we will not have another child. Second, while I understand that the economy is organized around ever-growing populations, it seems like at some point, we'll have to figure out how to deal with declining or flat birthrates. We can't just grow forever, can we? Could the planet really sustain triple or quadruple the current population?
- tomjen3 4y ago
  Can you point to some places that have implemented some, or all, of your policies and have seen some sustained growth in birth rates.
- e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
  Demography is in some sense the primary driving factor behind an economy. The ratio of working people to the unproductive cannot stray too low, otherwise you run into the double whammy of economic problems where fewer workers sustain the pensions of more elderly and political problems where the elderly, who wield more political influence, vote to increase their own pensions (or just never decrease, which effectively raises taxes on the working as fewer of them support more elderly) at the expense of the working. The key indicator here is the "age dependency ratio". > First off, if we want to bring the birth rate back up, we would probably do well to implement social policies that makes having kids less of a nightmare for everyone but the very rich or very poor: generous paternal leave, some kind of childcare (a creche-like system), better tax credits, good public schools, etc. I understand that well-paid developers might be less attuned to this kind of thing, but as a non-dev professional in a HCOL city with a young baby, I promise you that economic factors are the major reason we will not have another child. Oh boy, tell that to all the developed asian economies. What you're describing is known as pro-natalist policies, and many east asian countries have tried (and failed) to raise fertility by implementing them. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, all have varying degrees of pro-natalist policies, none of which have been met with much success. I think there's a case to be made that their demographic problems would be worse if they didn't implement these policies though. > Second, while I understand that the economy is organized around ever-growing populations, it seems like at some point, we'll have to figure out how to deal with declining or flat birthrates. We can't just grow forever, can we? Could the planet really sustain triple or quadruple the current population? Quite trivially. America alone throws a huge portion of its perfectly good food into making biofuels and feeding livestock; the primary constraint on food is not that we can't grow more, it's that it gets more expensive on the margin. When farmland runs out, you move to hydroponics, then to aeroponics, and those can grow 10x the food in the same amount of space. Water from the oceans is effectively limitless, desalination is just more expensive. Not everybody can have cars, but that's why you build public transit. And on and on it goes. Resources are not finite, it's not a video game where earth has 1000 units of iron and that's it. They just get more expensive on the margin, which then shifts consumption patterns to establish a new equilibrium. Recycling starts becoming profitable, some metals get too expensive and are only used in high-end applications, etc.
moonchrome 4y ago
I can't really relate to this. Since when is dating and having kids about conversations ? If porn didn't sidetrack me getting a kid I'd say chatbots wouldn't even be a factor in the equation.
PeterisP 4y ago
On the other hand, if the birth rate decline results in a significant population decline (i.e. not corrected by migration) then there are various balancing economic factors that should counteract it on the scale of a generation or so. A major component in the affordability to raise a family is the cost housing in desirable locations, which is mostly driven by a population increase there, and would fall during a population decrease; and a decrease in work-aged people combined with an aging population obviously pushes salaries up, if other things in the job market stay equal. And if we're speaking about the world as a whole, we're so far from a population crisis - the current trends of global birth rates still imply a population growth until something like 10 billion; while even a halving of population from the current number to 4 billion wouldn't be something to be terrified, I mean, the world had 4 billion people during 1970s.
codedokode 4y ago
You people and governments want high birth rate but do not want to pay for it.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>Most developed countries are already worried about declining birth rates Yes, because of housing, healthcare, childcare and education costs spiraling out of control and the difficulty of getting well paying jobs to cover those costs are pushing youngsters to spend their youth and most fertile years hunched behind a desk studying and working to climb the corporate ladder to afford a home bigger than a shoebox in the sticks with a 30 year mortgage, not because of AI generated porn. Graphic porn has been around for over 100 years and blaming it now for falling birthrates has got to be the silliest things ever, up there with blaming avocado toast for millennials being poor. Present society is economically fucking the young generations for monetary gains, and they're aware everything is stacked against them, so instead of taking part in this impossible to win ratrace/squidgame, they choose to check out of the most expensive things in life (traditional marriage and having kids) and instead spend their adulthood on various hobbies and individualistic hedonistic endeavors (smoking pot, VR porn and anime waifus, videogames, being a perpetual nomad in cheap countries, avocado toast, lattes, etc.). All these things are the effect, but not the root cause.

wlesieutre 4y ago
> People shouldn't have kids if they can't afford them! People can't afford kids and aren't having them > shockedpikachu.gif
dcchambers 4y ago
I'm not saying AI porn is the cause of it, I'm saying it's going to be another thing added on to the stack of issues that already exist.
rohit2412 4y ago
I'm sure they play a role, but I have read that even teenagers are having less sex. I don't think teenagers are thinking about housing and childcare when not pursuing sex.
- matwood 4y ago
  I don't know about teenagers, but when I see stats like 20% of the men get 80% of the dates on dating apps it's obvious why people give up. To your point, there are multiple reasons causing people to have less sex and less children.
- comte7092 4y ago
  It may be the case that teenagers are having less sex, however I don’t think we should be too worried about a decrease in birth rates due to unplanned pregnancies. What matters is planned pregnancies, and to that, housing and childcare absolutely factor into that decision.
- staticman2 4y ago
  >but I have read that even teenagers are having less sex. This is a funny way to frame it. A lot of people are trying to stop teenagers from having sex. When I was a teenager the parents sponsored a "post prom" Carnival, I believe with the intent of having kids doing something with their dates after the prom that didn't involve having sex. Some religious people work every day towards the goal of making sure a female teenager's life will be imperiled if she has a medical problem as a result of sex. And will tell her if she doesn't like it, she shouldn't have had sex. Who is working in the other direction and trying to get teenagers to have sex?
mr_00ff00 4y ago
Jobs getting harder or bot paying well is a odd explanation of low birth rates. After all, quality of life is way better than 100 years ago, and 100 years ago people would have 8 children at like 25.
- bediger4000 4y ago
  Those folks in the past had children because the children paid for themselves beginning about age 7 or 8, and were an ongoing source of labor, quality of life or not.
  - mr_00ff00 4y ago
    This is a fair point except it would imply only the poor had more kids. The rich (who didn’t use them as a source of labor) also had much higher birth rates.
- comte7092 4y ago
  How is it an odd explanation? the opportunity cost of having children has risen dramatically, that tracks with improved quality of life.
  - mr_00ff00 4y ago
    So the opportunity cost in your example is the quality of life that you end up losing by having a child? The missing time that (with our higher quality of life) is way better? I don’t have any studies to disprove that, so I can’t argue against it. But then wouldn’t making jobs higher paying and life better make the issue worse? Now kids mean you give up an even better life.
    - comte7092 4y ago
      >But then wouldn’t making jobs higher paying and life better make the issue worse? Yes, which is what we see in the data. People with higher incomes have fewer children than those with lower incomes. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
standardUser 4y ago
Cost of living is a factor, but the demographic shift we are seeing throughout the developed and developing world is well-documented and has many causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition I know a lot of 20 and 30-something urbanites who don't plan to have children and I doubt cheaper rent or free childcare would make them change their entire life trajectory. There's a lot of other factors at play.

anonzzzies 4y ago

This is how AI will destroy us? It’s like the holodeck on Star Trek: if that would exist, almost no human would do anything else than be there 24/7. The low-fi versions we will have the coming years might be enough to at least keep the male part of society permanently occupied.

xnx 4y ago
Video games are already a very good approximation for virtual worlds.

spacemadness 4y ago

This is simple moral panic backed up by nothing but gut feel.

dcchambers 4y ago
Is it? The number of teens that do things like date, have sex, drive, work, or hang out in person/go to parties has already fallen off a cliff thanks to social media.[^1] Who is to say AI won't make that trend even worse? [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340562787_Students%27_Cognitive_and_Emotional_Development_during_the_Transition_from_High_School_to_Design_School https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340562787_Students%...
- mettamage 4y ago
  Hmm, the issue that I am experiencing is an economic one. It’s expensive to have children. With that said, dating can be tough too. I worked hard to get my dating skills to the level of being with someone that I want to be with (I’ve met others that tried and failed. It took 3 years of constant rejection, I learned to deal with rejection by necessity). Also, having a relationship is tough. I had two that lasted both around 4 years. Currently learning non-violent communication to become better at having a healthy fight since that’s where things always went wrong. The thing is: 50 years ago, you sort of married the first person you had a kid with and did your best to suck it up (that’s what I see around me in The Netherlands anyway). However, nowadays we want our relationships to be much nicer than “make it work, somehow”. I feel we’re more picky. I know I want a relationship that feels fulfilling, I’d rather be alone otherwise. And I think 50 years ago, people were less picky about that.
- staticman2 4y ago
  The term "social media" appears nowhere in that article.
haswell 4y ago
You might be correct that some people are panicking about this for moral reasons, but I don’t think we can conclude that’s all that is happening here, or that this is a baseless concern. Taking morals out of this, and instead focusing on human nature along with current trends, it’s not hard to imagine this having a real impact. I don’t think any of these possible downsides are a foregone conclusion, but neither should we dismiss the unpredictable impact of developments that fundamentally alter the sources of satisfaction for basic human biological drives. We already know that we’ll happily trade the future for short term satisfaction, so when something new comes onto the scene that encourages the proliferation of this behavior, we should bring curiosity, not dismissal. We’ve already observed similar phenomena in nature [0] (the bottles were eventually redesigned to protect the species), and while this doesn’t prove that humans are as susceptible as beetles, it’s worth considering the nature of unintended consequences. The term moral panic has started to lose its meaning, and caution about AI should not be conflated with unjustifiable beliefs about culturally controversial pastimes. They are orthogonal and unlike each other, and the nature of the concerns are quite different. - [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-6055.1983.tb01846.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-6055.1983...

voldacar 4y ago

This would just select for people who actually want kids, and after the initial population bottleneck the species would be fine

wowyallsuck 4y ago
Nobody thinks there’s a biological cause to the demographic challenges so many nations look to be facing. So what you’ve stated is true but tautological with respect to all of the potential causes of the bottleneck. The real concern is getting through the bottleneck at all, and without societal upheaval.

staticman2 4y ago

Since we're imagining things, we could choose to spend our time imagining good things! The comic book Marvelman has Marvelwoman invent the ultimate A.I. algorithm to help people find romantic partners. The latest William Gibson novel has a benevolent A.I. tell people things like "Your Mom just woke up, I can tell because she's scrolling Twitter. You should give her a call."

JoeJonathan 4y ago

The perennial panic on HN over declining birth rates seems like thinly veiled cover for cultural conservatism. First off, if we want to bring the birth rate back up, we would probably do well to implement social policies that makes having kids less of a nightmare for everyone but the very rich or very poor: generous paternal leave, some kind of childcare (a creche-like system), better tax credits, good public schools, etc. I understand that well-paid developers might be less attuned to this kind of thing, but as a non-dev professional in a HCOL city with a young baby, I promise you that economic factors are the major reason we will not have another child. Second, while I understand that the economy is organized around ever-growing populations, it seems like at some point, we'll have to figure out how to deal with declining or flat birthrates. We can't just grow forever, can we? Could the planet really sustain triple or quadruple the current population?

tomjen3 4y ago
Can you point to some places that have implemented some, or all, of your policies and have seen some sustained growth in birth rates.
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
Demography is in some sense the primary driving factor behind an economy. The ratio of working people to the unproductive cannot stray too low, otherwise you run into the double whammy of economic problems where fewer workers sustain the pensions of more elderly and political problems where the elderly, who wield more political influence, vote to increase their own pensions (or just never decrease, which effectively raises taxes on the working as fewer of them support more elderly) at the expense of the working. The key indicator here is the "age dependency ratio". > First off, if we want to bring the birth rate back up, we would probably do well to implement social policies that makes having kids less of a nightmare for everyone but the very rich or very poor: generous paternal leave, some kind of childcare (a creche-like system), better tax credits, good public schools, etc. I understand that well-paid developers might be less attuned to this kind of thing, but as a non-dev professional in a HCOL city with a young baby, I promise you that economic factors are the major reason we will not have another child. Oh boy, tell that to all the developed asian economies. What you're describing is known as pro-natalist policies, and many east asian countries have tried (and failed) to raise fertility by implementing them. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, all have varying degrees of pro-natalist policies, none of which have been met with much success. I think there's a case to be made that their demographic problems would be worse if they didn't implement these policies though. > Second, while I understand that the economy is organized around ever-growing populations, it seems like at some point, we'll have to figure out how to deal with declining or flat birthrates. We can't just grow forever, can we? Could the planet really sustain triple or quadruple the current population? Quite trivially. America alone throws a huge portion of its perfectly good food into making biofuels and feeding livestock; the primary constraint on food is not that we can't grow more, it's that it gets more expensive on the margin. When farmland runs out, you move to hydroponics, then to aeroponics, and those can grow 10x the food in the same amount of space. Water from the oceans is effectively limitless, desalination is just more expensive. Not everybody can have cars, but that's why you build public transit. And on and on it goes. Resources are not finite, it's not a video game where earth has 1000 units of iron and that's it. They just get more expensive on the margin, which then shifts consumption patterns to establish a new equilibrium. Recycling starts becoming profitable, some metals get too expensive and are only used in high-end applications, etc.

moonchrome 4y ago

I can't really relate to this. Since when is dating and having kids about conversations ? If porn didn't sidetrack me getting a kid I'd say chatbots wouldn't even be a factor in the equation.

PeterisP 4y ago

On the other hand, if the birth rate decline results in a significant population decline (i.e. not corrected by migration) then there are various balancing economic factors that should counteract it on the scale of a generation or so. A major component in the affordability to raise a family is the cost housing in desirable locations, which is mostly driven by a population increase there, and would fall during a population decrease; and a decrease in work-aged people combined with an aging population obviously pushes salaries up, if other things in the job market stay equal. And if we're speaking about the world as a whole, we're so far from a population crisis - the current trends of global birth rates still imply a population growth until something like 10 billion; while even a halving of population from the current number to 4 billion wouldn't be something to be terrified, I mean, the world had 4 billion people during 1970s.

codedokode 4y ago

You people and governments want high birth rate but do not want to pay for it.