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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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All the other options probably end up at option 3, most likely via some kind of 'soft cull' featuring a combo of AI generated hypertargeted wireheading media and social engineering cratering the fertility rate to new lows. The reaction of western elites to fertility rates crossing the 2.1 threshold was a collective shrug, once the median person is a valueless UBI serf I don't think they'll mind the rates collapsing to 0.4 or less.

Is a .4 tfr achievable? A small number of East Asian societies have a tfr slightly below 1, but .4 indicates that a large majority of women have no children at all, and not simply that there are some childless women in an environment where few have more than one.

And IIRC birthrates in the US are currently rising, so it’s not like this is some inevitable end state.

I think once you combine mass data harvesting, advances in applied psychology and a suitably advanced AI capable of generating any sort of entertainment on the fly you'll see things trend in that direction. VR AI generated infinite entertainment + AIsim significant others purposefully designed to hit every emotional soft spot and cater to every need with scientific precision, monitoring heart rate, eye movement, years of browsing history, just about any bit of digestible data to better target its content. And while there's been something of a minor bump to birth rates in the past year, the explanation I heard is that's more due to deferred planned pregnancies from the whole corona thing, I'd bet it's a local maximum on a continuing downward trend long term.

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