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Do most people even care about this question/topic? Maybe that's part of the answer. Culturally, fertility topic has gone through "we will never be able to fee

by 627467 1y ago

Do most people even care about this question/topic? Maybe that's part of the answer. Culturally, fertility topic has gone through "we will never be able to feed everyone in the world" to "we should have absolute control over when/how many kids to have" and "I can't afford having kids and keep my lifestyle" and "why kids?" Even when in economic discussions around labour availability, retirement sustainability, the topic just essentially focuses on migration policy. Societies have moved towards a group of "empowered individuals" model, leaving behind families as a fundamental unit model

dinfinity 1y ago
The distress is due to a lack of imagination about how the future could look and reasoning from the world model people are familiar with. 1. "We need kids to make money for us!" — Economic output (not per capita, but just absolutely) is still almost monotonically rising. Whether done by human or artificial labor is irrelevant. The idea that a small, young generation can't economically support aging populations is only true if we let all the capital accumulate in places where it hardly contributes to supporting the population and demand that all of the required resources come from labor. 2. "We need kids to wipe our asses!" — Contentious, but long-term AI and robots will 'take (a lot of) our jobs'; it is a matter of when, not if. There is an incredible disconnect between being afraid for "too few people to do the jobs" and "there won't be any jobs for humans anymore". The idea that we will have too few people to care for the aging population is not compatible with being afraid all white-collar human jobs will disappear. Changing our societies to work with the impending new reality will require moving past our primitive notions of what is "fair" (unemployed == moocher) and past the ever-frustrating false dichotomy between free-market capitalism and 'communism' (We should introduce a variant of Godwin's law where whenever somebody mentions communism or socialism as the alternative in a discussion on capitalism, their argument is immediately void).

by 627467 1y ago

dinfinity 1y ago

The distress is due to a lack of imagination about how the future could look and reasoning from the world model people are familiar with. 1. "We need kids to make money for us!" — Economic output (not per capita, but just absolutely) is still almost monotonically rising. Whether done by human or artificial labor is irrelevant. The idea that a small, young generation can't economically support aging populations is only true if we let all the capital accumulate in places where it hardly contributes to supporting the population and demand that all of the required resources come from labor. 2. "We need kids to wipe our asses!" — Contentious, but long-term AI and robots will 'take (a lot of) our jobs'; it is a matter of when, not if. There is an incredible disconnect between being afraid for "too few people to do the jobs" and "there won't be any jobs for humans anymore". The idea that we will have too few people to care for the aging population is not compatible with being afraid all white-collar human jobs will disappear. Changing our societies to work with the impending new reality will require moving past our primitive notions of what is "fair" (unemployed == moocher) and past the ever-frustrating false dichotomy between free-market capitalism and 'communism' (We should introduce a variant of Godwin's law where whenever somebody mentions communism or socialism as the alternative in a discussion on capitalism, their argument is immediately void).