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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   25291 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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AI could probably do all these things if you handhold it, but these things are all general computer use which is something that AI is currently quite bad at so I doubt current models could do these types of things consistently. Bad performance at general computer use is a colossal bottleneck for all sorts of things where progress has been pretty slow.

The idea we're not going to have jobs in the future due to AI is just classic Lump of Labor fallacy. Something like 80% of the world's population were simple peasants in 1500, while after the Industrial Revolution that number dropped to ~1% for most advanced countries. If national economies could go from the vast majority of people simply scratching out enough food for themselves and their immediate families to fully industrialized societies without widespread unemployment, then the same can happen for AI.

Similarly, even though they're no longer needed as draft animals, horses are doing just fine.

In 1900 there were about 21 million of them in the US, whereas now that mechanization has made them much cheaper to feed there are, let me see... oh, no. Oh, no no no.

For anyone wondering, about 6-7 million horses in the US today.

Mules, being sterile, have fared worse.

Human population decline is already priced in thanks to demographic transition. No AI required.

I'm pretty sure that, if you could ask them, a horse would rather be a random horse today than a random horse 130 years ago.

But would they rather be a random horse 130 years ago, or not exist at all? Because that's what happened to the majority of horses that would have been here today; they were simply never born.

But given fertility rates, that's the case for people too- essentially voluntarily.

Calling the fertility crisis "essentially voluntarily" is disingenuous.

From Kevin Dolan's 2023 Natal Conference speech:

A consistent 95% of Americans say they want kids but it looks like only about 60% of Millennials will get there and it's much worse for the Zoomers. Fertility decline often gets characterized as inevitable: you give people the freedom to choose and it turns out parenting just isn't a desirable choice.

But that's not the story that you hear from childless people. In surveys only about 10% of childless people say it was a conscious decision. Another 10% deal with some form of medical infertility. But in 80% of cases it's what demographer Steven Shaw calls "unplanned childlessness". You'll hear more about exactly what that means, but bottom line: the infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated employed paired off and raising kids has just broken down.

So I view this is fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding we wouldn't say "wow I'm so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health" or "they're spoiled; they're just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors". And we certainly wouldn't say "good there's too many Bengal tigers; Bengal tigers are ruining everything". Instead we'd look at their environment and try to figure out what changed; what's disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative.

I can believe that the median horse life 130 years ago was net negative. Seeing a horse being beaten literally broke Nietzsche's brain.

Even if it was net positive, unless you'd like to bite the bullet of the repugnant conclusion, I don't find it to be too compelling.

Horses are gigantic temperamental finnicky assholes who die if you look at them funny. Especially racehorses.

Counterpoint, Hell is other people.

My neighborhood has feral horses. They're fine, follow the rules, look both ways when crossing a street, and look after themselves.

Afaik feral horses and work horses are a lot better than racehorses but my personal experience is 99.5% racehorses who are bred for explosiveness via chronic inbreeding and thus are the worst.

I must be looking at them wrong. I've had too much experience with them and keep a beady eye on every one I encounter, but I've yet to kill one with a funny look.

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