Comment by xp84
5 hours ago
> The kids (and adults) having infatuations with LLMs probably were liable to not reproduce at replacement rate in the modern environment anyway
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.
I don't think they're opting out of companionship as much as opting out of the brutal game of Top Trumps that is modern dating, where the decks seemed stacked against 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.
>with even more devastating effects due to the very bad ratio of retirees to workers.
But with great effects on reducing carbon emissions and other waste products in the environment.
I see you're among the group I was referring to which feels that the entire human race dying out or descending into stone-age collapse is a W as long as 'carbon number go down.'
There is absolutely no reason we need to continue increasing the human population when we clearly have trouble using and allocating the limited resources we have now. Doesn't concern me one bit if birthrates are falling. I might start to look into it if population falls below a couple billion, which it was for all but the last 100 years. 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.