Well, I am still in England, being made more aware of crowded societies, the meaning of traffic, and being reminded just how much time and effort is involved in moving anywhere at all with a small baby. They are not known for co-operation as to timing when they need feeding/changing or are just mysteriously UNHAPPY and want you and the rest of the world to know about it and to do something about it, NOW.
Seriously, I have been trying to write, and also be a grandad at the same time. The latter takes priority, but at least I can give her back. It’s a challenge that makes me appreciate the amount of effort and, indeed, sacrifice, that goes into parenting. It’s interesting how much of sf is still stuck in a Malthusian loop, assuming the crowded society, when by the looks of the demographics of various countries around world they have an entirely different problem coming down the track. TFR rates are still above replacement rate in some parts of Africa. But even there, they are dropping year-on-year. Very few countries are increasing the TFR – and that I will bet is down to changes in recording rather than reality. Countries which have extremely low rates (China has just admitted their TFR is 1 and if you believe Chinese stats then I have an election to sell you. TFR 2.1 is replacement) have, especially when we’re talking about smaller nations which are not particularly crowded anyway (Australia TFR1.6) are heading into very ‘interesting’ sf territory.
Think about what happens to your country when your demographic pyramid is inverted – when there are more old people than young ones. If you think families are upset about this (and understandably they would be) that’s NOTHING to what governments will become when they realize that they’re going to lose some of their power, some of their income, and have look after all these old people on less.
The first, predictable reaction will be to steal other countries’ population. I can see that as ‘short term stopgap’ at best. Those countries who have ‘excess’ are going to start demanding recompense. And as they get richer/more urbanized and their TFR drops… limiting migration.
The other prediction a la Iain M Banks – that AI will make it all irrelevant… well, maybe. But honestly, I doubt it. I don’t see a post-scarcity society of humans. I can see humans becoming irrelevant to AI. Interesting times – and not good ones for governments of our current model (although I can see a few current politicians being happy to be satraps with the power over what to the AI would be irrelevant humans).
There is no doubt that state actors currently apply huge amounts of pressure, socially, through state sponsored publicity (most of MSM co-operates heavily) and also allow/encourage to thrive social impact movements they approve of. Conversely, they attack/persecute those they don’t. At the moment that’s heavily skewed to pro-Malthusian messaging and movements – Be that ‘conservationist’ about use of resources, or supporting choices that don’t increase the TFR. Think about what happens when Governments suddenly realize that with dropping consumption – they face dropping revenues. And how are they going to feel about people who make choices where they don’t (or can’t as a result of) have children? They always prefer coercion and force, to inducement.
Interesting times.
Mad Genius Club 
37 responses to “Oh baby…”
Interesting times, indeed.
Yeah, it’s always amusing watching people getting the things they claim to have wanted because those things sounded so great in speeches — things that are going to strip them of the things they really wanted, like power and wealth, and things that they needed (like cheap, desperate work forces).
> Think about what happens when Governments suddenly realize that with dropping consumption – they face dropping revenues. And how are they going to feel about people who make choices where they don’t (or can’t as a result of) have children? They always prefer coercion and force to inducement.
Where society is divided, it might be politically impossible for members of the low fertility group to say “hey, maybe those charedim/red-necks/whatever with their large families have the right idea” without being considered traitors. This might continue until the low fertility group is too weak to keep control of the country.
Arguably Israel is getting close to that point.
It gets even more ‘interesting’, because turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. When you have an inverted demographic pyramid – many of the larger group of old folk DON’T have kids and will cheerfully support measures that put extra stresses on the young – who have lower voting numbers. And the childless and aging beyond child-bearing will NOT support measures which put extra stresses on them, even if it means more childless/low TFR for the generation who are of child-bearing age.
And in countries where a higher proportion of older people vote than younger people (e.g. the UK, though I suspect it’s a much more general trend), policies that benefit pensioners tend to be net vote winners, whereas policies that disbenefit pensioners tend to be net vote losers.
Eh, nationalized health care has a tendency to prioritize those who are still in the work force. Limits to how much that would help the issue, to be sure.
To quote an expert(1), “political power flows from the barrel of a gun”. I think the idea of voting initially evolved as a way to poll the soldiers of a possible civil war to see which way they’d go, to avoid the need for an actual civil war.
We might see a return to that in one way or another.
(1) Mao Tse Tung. Evil, but sadly competent.
Yes, when considering the power structure of a government, one must consider that (1) it is mostly older people and (2) they see their fellow older people as “Burdens on the system” and would just as soon they all died off, so the younger people could support the government (ie them) instead of those useless old people.
I had to look it up; TFR = Total Fertility Rate.
I’ve been living with the fear of Marching Morons since I read C M Kornbluth’s (1951) story in the early 1960’s. Then, in fairly quick succession, I got exposed to Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb’ and Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’ as a college freshman in 1971. Add to that ‘The Late Great Planet Earth,’ which tossed in the religious apocalypse on top of the scientific end of the world, and it pretty much kicked the guts out of any long-term plans I had, because WE WERE ALL GONNA DIE!
I wonder how many other fellow Baby Boomers were seduced by the gloom merchants?
I’ve been watching China for a few years, once I saw the numbers showing that smaller numbers were now going to have to support a much larger population of oldsters, who were also living longer. What will the old rulers do, to hang on to their creaky-jointed power?
I listen to all the people in the media positing that AI will be the answer to everything (AI in cars, AI doing initial medical and emergency-service screenings, AI writing legal briefs and contracts, and so on), and wonder if they have ever seen or read any of the “computer escapes the lab” stories. Terminator, War Games, the cybermen from Doctor Who, there are a number of others. In none of those was the original intention evil, but in each case something either went “pop,” or the idea was taken to its absolute conclusion and disaster ensued for mankind.
Since they are also the same people who tried training AI on social media and were shocked, SHOCKED that the computer became foul-mouthed and prejudiced, I suspect they are willfully blind to the idea that people are the ones programming the computers, with all our preconceptions and foibles.
It’s like the computer gurus who were talking about “the Singluarity” when we could mesh our brains with computers and become one with them and vice versa. They either never read the short stories and novelizations about the cybermen, or they read them and got a very, very different message from what the creator intended.
The Singularity is simply a religious concept. Once again, do X and you will become like gods, knowing good and evil.
People are not really understanding what Large Language Models (LLMs) are really able to do. Fundamentally they are pattern matching machines without memory or the ability to learn from their experiences.
They seem to perform better on initial diagnosis because diagnosis by pattern matching is much better than diagnosis by edict. And training them on better raw material tends to result in better results.
For the legal stuff, if you ask an LLM to produce a citation list, it will produce something that matches the pattern of a citation list without actually citing anything real; it’s starting from noise and matching what parts of the noise are most like a thing, then jittering it and matching further.
Now I do expect AI to have huge impacts in all of those subjects, once people figure out how to use its real capabilities. I can see a good pattern matching LLM being used to sift and identify all legal precedents that seem to match the case you are working on, and a lawyer using that try try and surface case law they may not be aware of.
But there is going to be a big dot com bubble as tons of companies try to gold rush it and about half pursue ideas that fail and go pop.
On the future of LLMs, I’m thinking Chat GPT4 is about as big as the go bigger can really work. They’ve already fed the entire written Internet to it, and have thrown an insane amount of GPU power at it; something like 300B to 1T nodes, and it seems to be in greatly diminishing returns. What we’re seeing with Orca and its derivatives is you can get very good performance out of much smaller 13B models by being more focused and thorough in the training.
So I’m thinking the real future of AI applications are going to be more focused dedicated tools for specific types of tasks.
Only half?
Has anyone ever told you that you’re a raging optimist?
Don’t get me wrong, I think you’d lose very little efficiency by replacing MBAs with AIs.
But that’s not praise of AI.
Just as well they are modelled after mankind. The problem I’ve always had with robot apocalypse stories is that they are too human in their motives. They didn’t evolve, they were built, their motives are either programmed in or emergent properties. The emergent ones will blindside us with weirdness.
I loved it when some wag plugged scenarios from Asimov’s Robot series into ChatGPT, and clearly demonstrated that the devs had not done their homework.
Yep, babies are wonderful. And also messy, time consuming, and expensive. Add in societal disapproval, and push for women to have careers, fairly good contraceptives and easy abortions . . . and you get a baby bust.
And the prime child bearing years, of the current youngest adults taken up trying to pay off student loans for way too many of them . . . and one can only hope the gender reassignment fad will die before it becomes a significant factor . . .
Yeah, Interesting times ahead.
I suspect the ‘gender re-assignment fad’ will end up being regarded with the same horror we now give to frontal lobotomies. The last thing governments will want to do is provide real incentives (they prefer punishment) but they may well have to accept that supporting young parents is actually necessary.
I think my (extremely well-brought up) grandchildren are way better than Dave’s but, by golly, he had *better* think that his are better than mine. And, of course, he does. After all, he didn’t fly to the US to see mine, he flew to England — because his grandchildren are his.
Grandparents see the time, effort, and sacrifice required of parents, in a new light, as their children start doing what they did (bringing up kids, I mean). But society has lost this idea entirely.
This is why societies that have coerced people into giving up kids, cannot just turn around and suddenly coerce them the other way, exactly because of the sacrifice involved. They certainly try, but it doesn’t work, and it gets harder to force the issue, not easier. The institutional knowledge of how to bring up human beings may have been lost, and children who are not properly brought up are horrors to be around, not least for their parents, but ultimately for society.
If I remember right, both Augustus and the Soviet Union tried to encourage reproduction. And both failed. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in the USSR’s case the failure was really due to, “Why should I bring children into this hellish world?”
More “how does one find the time?” That’s part of China’s problem too. Everyone is working insane hours and living in tiny closets.
And that’s before the mass of bureaucracy that immediately kicks into gear if anything happens.
An affluent nation *could* do it, if they wanted to. And if they wanted to encourage especially the employed, a massive per child and per family full time caretaker deduction from taxes would help.
But the other side of the problem is that full time parenting has negative cultural baggage, except in a few areas. I live in one such, where it is a marker of success for a man to bring in enough money that his wife doesn’t need to work.
But even so, very few women in my local “PTA volunteers” type circle have more than two children.
It’s not going to make a dent in the kid deficit until the TRF hit 2.1+
Worth noting is that countries with low fertility rates don’t have to “steal” other countries’ people–the latter move to the former of their own volition, and their rulers are just fine with that, because usually the kind of people with the initiative, gumption, and brains to get up and go are the kind of people who overthrow governments if they’re forced to stay.
That is true, but none-the-less this ALREADY being said. Yes, it is an individual choice, and yes, the countries losing them (and I feel I am a ‘loss’ to my old country) are in fact losing human capital – because those who can and will leave are ‘selected’ as the most determined and/or skilled. But what I mean is that countries – like Australia – rather than invest in their present population, will import the people from another country.
Yes, and this is arguably what (for example) Merkle was thinking of when she invited the Syrian refugees to Germany a few years back. They were meant to make up for all the kids the Germans never bothered to have.
Also the countries with low fertility do not have to pay taxes to support infrastructure to raise the next generation.
Ah, children! In Madeleine and the Mists, the heroine has a two year old son at the start of the story, when she must leave home and take him.
I do ensure that I keep track of where the boy is throughout the novel.
Re: immigration, it really is the “goats leave, sheep stay” situation. For countries where I’m adequately familiar with both sides, the difference can be quite striking.
Some generation (maybe the current children?) is going to refuse to be the slaves of their elders. I expect at that point there will be some conflict, which would result in the death of some elderly (particularly those without descendants) and a cessation of geriatric welfare payments.
At this point many elders provide no economic or social benefits – make no necessary things, impart no wisdom, provide no useful knowledge – and without a moral compass (yet another thing the elderly failed to pass on to the next generation) why pay for economic dead weight on a societal scale? Losing the geriatric burden will be a quick economic shot in the arm for whichever country’s youth rebel first – making it a very tempting course of action for all others.
Dystopia indeed.
This is something I’ve wondered about–how long will the children and grandchildren of the childbearing be willing to watch their money go to support those who not only did not have children, but scorned those who did?
The other side of that coin is the retirees with lots of money to spend. They are definitely consumers and it’s not until they run out of money that they start having to be supported.
Then there’s that Government mandated pension plan they’re running like a Ponzi scam . . . I can decide if that will be the first thing that goes, or the last.
At a guess, SSI will disappear late in the process, continuijg through the economic strike.
Watch for younger generations to demand payment in, and transact in, hard-to-tax currencies (Bitcoin, etc.) to protect their earnings from gov’t. Particularly watch for anything touted as a “Youth Currency”. Any alternative currencies are a threat to the existing order, but any sort of advertising/promotion that explicitly states the currency is a way to avoid paying for the geriatric is a sign of the end.
If <40 nurses want paid 50% in BTC (for example) and 50% in USD, the USD saved by the oldsters won't go as far due to the need to convert a portion to the alternative currency.
Diversification FTW.
Last.
Because the government can easily inflate the currency.
And actively has been.
My wife and I had and raised three sons. They are all adults now in their 30s and 40s. I now have three grandchildren. I might get one more. That’s not really replacement. Especially if my grandkids have children in the same ratio as my children. Churchill used to say four was the perfect family size: one to replace you, one to replace your spouse, one as a spare and one for the increase of the population.
Yes, that’s the slow decrease. Mine is two sons, no grandchildren. The younger son and wife haave tried and failed: “In a few years we’ll think about adopting.”
As I bite my tongue and don’t say “Oh? With so few babies, you think you’ll be able to?”
If you can serve a few years as foster parents, eventually you get kids that don’t have family to go back to.
Not implausible. There are over 100,000 children up for adoption in the US alone.
Just a warning that adoption is an emotional and fiscal minefield.
And it’s only gotten worse in the decade since I last dealt with it.
As much as infertility treatment sucks and is an expensive gamble, they might be the better option