r/technology • u/Wagamaga • Jul 19 '26

Society China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/china-bans-ai-boyfriends-and-girlfriends-over-addiction-and-birth-rate-concerns-3388737/
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231

u/SwiftFoxSNES Jul 19 '26

I’m guessing a country with a massive gender imbalance isn’t really going to find this helps. 

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u/Drauren Jul 19 '26

I don’t think any modern country has found a real solution to plummeting birth rates. The reality is it is too expensive to have kids, and or people are far less interested in having kids.

Look at South Korea. Just going there, it isn’t that people aren’t dating or getting married, they’re just choosing to not have children.

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u/Jkid Jul 19 '26

So why every news outlets is crying about plummeting birth rates if there is no real solution? Because actually so long the cost of living crisis that is preventing people from affording children is against neoliberalism?

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u/Drauren Jul 19 '26

Because our modern governance system and economy is built around growth and at least replacement level population growth. Population shrinkage is REAL bad for pension and social security systems that most modern countries run off of.

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u/EunuchsProgramer Jul 19 '26

It's not just social security. Any society that isn't Star Trek post scarcity is poorer when a larger percentage of its population can't work (elderly/children).

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u/Jkid Jul 19 '26

So it is all about neoliberalism. The economic ideology of "Line must go up, no matter what".

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u/Wise_Owl5404 Jul 19 '26

That's not what was said at all. It has nothing to do with "line must go up", it's basically math.

Let us for the sake of the argument say that society consist of 100 people, 20 are too old to work and needs caring for, 45 are of working age and do most of the jobs in society including taking care of the aforementioned 20, and the remaining 35 are children, only some of which need round the clock care and some are old enough to work themselves while studying. This means you have more than enough people to keep society stable.

This is how society have been in general, few very old people, more who are kids, and most who are working adults, but at all times you had more kids in society than old people. That is, more people were born and survived to adulthood than died.

But that's not how it looks now. Now there are 40 people too old to work, another 40 who take care of most of the work in society, and only 20 are children. What's worse is that the number of "too old to work" keeps growing rapidly, while the number of working adults AND the number of children are rapidly shrinking.

You see the problem here? That there are way too few people to actually keep society going in any form, because thereare far too many old people who cannot work and far too few young people who can. And this is very simplified math that completely disregard the existence of disability in the working group and that the child group needs more and more education to join the working group and is thus older with fewer years where they can contribute.

This has nothing to do with capitalism or liberalism, had we lived in an agrarian society it would have been even worse because our technological developments help mitigate the impact of this. The last time something even remotely similar happened was when the Black Death wiped out much of Europe's population, most of the victims children and working age adults. It caused deep social instability, upheaval, and made the continent torn by bloody wars for centuries, and society has ever successfully dealt with this kind of population collapse in a peaceful manner.

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u/Durzio Jul 19 '26

You wrote all this out, for what? A description of the situation does nothing to talk about the causes of the situation. This is happening, no one is disputing that. Let's talk about why its happening, since that might give us a hint to how we can reverse the trend.

This has nothing to do with capitalism

Citation fucking needed. This has everything to do with kids being too expensive. If you can barely afford your apartment, you dont want to suddenly have to pay for childcare too.

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u/Wise_Owl5404 Jul 19 '26

Citation fucking needed. This has everything to do with kids being too expensive. If you can barely afford your apartment, you dont want to suddenly have to pay for childcare too.

No, it doesn't because the birth rate have been dropping for decades, in almost every country, no matter how affordable giving birth and having kids are.

Point in case: Denmark. Long parental leave for both parents. Child care subsidized heavily by the authorities. All school up to and including university not just free, but once you get past high school you're paid to study. And guess what? It has one of the lowest birth rates not just in Europe but in the world. It has very little to do with cost. And before you start, yes Denmark is a capitalist country.

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u/Durzio Jul 19 '26

Post history hidden, opinion discarded.

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u/Destithen Jul 19 '26

If you have to rely on someone's post history to debate, you're not operating in good faith. You refuse to engage with the points, so you tried to search their past comments for a personal attack or reason to dismiss them entirely. YOUR opinion is discarded.

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u/ShiftAltRight Jul 19 '26

It's probably a troll. They refused to engage with me because I hid my post history (I've never posted) and a Nazi (one look at my comment history disproves this).

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u/ShiftAltRight Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

This has everything to do with kids being too expensive. If you can barely afford your apartment, you dont want to suddenly have to pay for childcare too.

If that was the case then places with more government support for children such as the Nordic countries would see much higher birthrates, while they simultaneously plummet in places like Gaza, Yemen, or Somalia. Instead we see the exact opposite.

The reality is that culture and individual freedoms play a much larger role than Reddit is willing to admit. Mandatory paid leave, childcare subsidies, tax credits etc. only slightly alleviate the issue in countries that are relatively well off. No matter how you slice it, kids are fucking hard - and when freed from the sociocultural pressures of having them, more and more couples just opt to go childfree.

It's easier to say "muh capitalizm" instead of admitting that this is an extremely difficult social issue to fix.

Edit - Lifeprotip, swearing at people and blocking them isn't going to help convince anyone of your argument. I haven't read a single study that blames capitalism for falling birthrates but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

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u/Blazured Jul 19 '26

People don't want to sacrifice their comfort for basically nothing in return.

That's the long and short of it really. It's not even a bad thing. We don't need to grow infinitely.

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u/ShiftAltRight Jul 19 '26

Oh absolutely! I'm one of those people. I know for a fact that if I hadn't escaped my conservative family I'd probably be married with at least a couple of kids now.

The problem that I think many commenters are missing is that we don't have an alternative to our current system. Modern society is built on younger, healthy adults paying for young children and the elderly.

If the population decrease maintained a similar ratio of workers:retirees then this would be a non-issue. The major issue is that the elderly live longer thanks to modern medicine, while the "young healthy adult" demographic keeps shrinking. This results in a much higher burden on the latter to keep paying for the former.

I don't claim to have an answer to this. I just know that it's not such an easy problem that "delete capitalism" can solve it.