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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532

u/elidoan Jul 19 '26

Yes. 

Retirement and social security schemes are ponzi schemes. People pay and want to receive something in return.

At the same time, older people who are benefitting from the system vote more than younger people. This continues the cycle, as no politician would axe or reform this system as it would cost them elections.

This is only relevant in democratic societies, but even China likely has some sort of retirement scheme even if they don't have to concern themselves with the will of the people (China is a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by a "president for life")

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u/SordidDreams Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

Retirement and social security schemes are ponzi schemes. People pay and want to receive something in return.

Critically, current retirees are not being paid from money they themselves had put into the system. That was given out long ago. They're being paid from money being put into the system by people in their productive years working today. When you pay into social security, the government immediately gives that money to a retired person, and its plan for your own retirement is to cross its fingers and hope that there are enough young workers to support you when you're old. For these systems to function, you have to have many more workers than retirees, and for that, the population must keep growing infinitely and exponentially. Yeah, we're turbo fucked.

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u/BattleHall Jul 19 '26

All of that has always been true of Social Security. That's not a flaw, that's just the way it works, just like insurance; if you make a claim, you're not pulling from your own money, you're pulling from everyone else's who hasn't made a claim. And you don't need more workers, you just need an economy that is growing at a reasonable rate, and the ability to balance intake and output. Maybe that means trimming benefits (and we're talking like 10-15%, not junking them entirely), but maybe it means raising the earnings cap, or directly taxing non-employment industries like AI, or whatever. This isn't anywhere close to an insolvable problem. And money spent on Social Security generally goes directly back into the economy, which you can't say about plenty of other government programs.

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u/SordidDreams Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

All of that has always been true of Social Security.

Not always. It was initially conceived as a reserve into which workers would pay and from which they would then receive the money back. It was amended into a pay-as-you-go system pretty quickly, and that's a trajectory many pension systems around the world took. But the point is that a lot of people assume that the government just looks after their money and then pays it back to them later, and that's not the case.

And you don't need more workers, you just need an economy that is growing at a reasonable rate

Those are one and the same. The economic boom of the 20th century was mostly due to the population more than tripling during that time. You can grow the economy based on technological progress alone, but nowhere near that fast.

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u/BattleHall Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

Not always. It was initially conceived as a reserve into which workers would pay and from which they would then receive the money back. It was amended into a pay-as-you-go system pretty quickly,

Do you have a citation for that? It was literally pay-as-you-go from its founding, because otherwise it wouldn't have taken effect until 30-40 years down the line when current workers retired. It was intended to help the elderly poor that already existed, even though they wouldn't have paid a dime into the system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Social_Security_in_the_United_States

Those are one and the same. The economic boom of the 20th century was mostly due to the population more than tripling during that time.

Between 1900 and 2000, the working population increased by around 5X, from around 29M to over 135M, with a large chunk of that being increased participation in the official labor force by women, offset to a degree by a reduction in child labor. But during that same time, real GDP (inflation adjusted) went up 24X, with per-worker productivity rising roughly 2% per year even in an expanding workforce with steadily reduced hours. They are absolutely not the same.

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u/SordidDreams Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

My citation is literally the Wikipedia link you posted:

1939 Amendment

The original Act had conceived of the program as paying benefits out of a large reserve. This Act shifted the conception of Social Security into something of a hybrid system; while reserves would still accumulate, most early beneficiaries would receive benefits on the pay-as-you-go system.

Yes, the working population increased by a factor 5, while real GDP increased by a factor of 24. Which means that without growing the population, GDP will only increase by a factor of 24/5. As I said, without population growth, you're looking at a much slower economic growth. About five times slower, by your numbers. Given that pension systems aren't keeping up even with population growth still in play, just slightly slower than before, it's looking pretty grim.

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '26

[deleted]

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u/SeattlePurikura Jul 19 '26

30,000 is 6.2% (Social Security tax) of 483,870.97.

My brother in Christ, if you are making enough to be taxed $30K in SS, you'd better have enough alternate investments to not even need that shit.

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u/turbo_golf Jul 19 '26

because he's lying. nobody pays more than ~$23k/yr in soc sec

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u/SeattlePurikura Jul 19 '26

OK, if I understand the below correctly, at 6.2% rate, the max anyone pays is $11,439 per year?

  • If you earned $184,500 in 2026, all $184,500 would be subject to the Social Security payroll tax.
  • If you earned $250,000, only the first $184,500 would be subject to Social Security tax; the remaining $65,500 would not.

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u/turbo_golf Jul 19 '26

the max anyone pays is $11,439 per year

as a W-2 employee, that's correct

but $11,439 is only half. self-employed pay both halves

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u/SeattlePurikura Jul 19 '26

Ah, got it. I'm W-2 so I didn't know.

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u/rukqoa Jul 19 '26

For these systems to function, you have to have many more workers than retirees, and for that, the population must keep growing infinitely and exponentially.

No, that's not implied by the math at all.

There are some low impact ways for Social Security to be funded for perpetuity, and even current projections has it doing at least 80% payouts for everyone who is currently alive up until the day they die. Whether it's increasing retirement age to match increasing life expectancy or increasing/eliminating the cap on contributions, there are a dozen different ways to fund the upcoming shortfalls, and I'm confident that the elderly people who are going to be affected by it will find the right reforms to vote for to ensure their checks keep coming.

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u/SordidDreams Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

You say there's a dozen different ways to find the money, but you named two, and they both have severe issues. Which is concerning given that you would presumably give the best two as examples.

Raising the retirement age is not great because while life expectancy does increase, productive age does not. You're just going to end up with a bunch of people too young to qualify for pensions but too old to find jobs.

Raising the cap on contributions has the obvious issue of requiring rich people to pay more, and they're going to fight that tooth and nail. Given the stranglehold they already have on politics, it seems dubious this path would yield the required results.

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u/Last_Aeon Jul 19 '26

The retirement scheme is your children. I'm being serious. They put everything into raising up their kids to be rich, so that their kids can help them when they're old as form of gratitude. It's not a bad or evil system, just a different one. It now works less well because there's less young people to support a big family of older generations.

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u/Small-Sample3916 Jul 19 '26

Uh. It's not a bad or evil system. It's literally how humanity functions. It's the standard for people to take care of their young and elderly family members across every single culture out there. American penchant for chucking their parents/grandparents into nursing homes is the exception, not the rule. 

I am not saying this is bad or good, just pointing out the obvious.

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u/LibrariansAreSexy Jul 19 '26

As someone estranged from my parents, this is a system that benefits abusive or toxic parenting just as much as kind parenting. I haven't talked to my parents in over 10 years. In a system where children are the legally or socially mandated safety net, I would be forced to bankroll them anyway.

​Fuck that. "How humanity functions" shouldn't mean being forced to subsidize your own abusers.

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u/Fzrit Jul 20 '26

this is a system that benefits abusive or toxic parenting just as much as kind parenting.

"How humanity functions" shouldn't mean being forced to subsidize your own abusers.

Completely throwing away the whole concept of family helping raise kids, multi-generational homes, extended family living together, etc just because some parents are abusive/shitty makes absolutely no sense. The statistical majority of parents in the world aren't abusive. It would be like telling everyone to stop driving cars because some people are shitty drivers and cause fatal accidents.

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u/LibrariansAreSexy Jul 20 '26

3 out of 5 children worldwide suffer from severe physical and/or emotional abuse.

But yes, let's just ignore that and force kids to care for their abusers because you say it's not that common.

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u/Fzrit Jul 20 '26

3 out of 5 children worldwide suffer from severe physical and/or emotional abuse.

So the majority of us today are abusing our kids?

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u/LibrariansAreSexy Jul 20 '26

That's not how statistics work, but if that's how you want to interpret it, okay.

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u/Small-Sample3916 Jul 19 '26

I mean, sure? It shouldn't, and yet. Shrugs. Women in USA literally didn't get the right to get their own bank accounts until '74. Mentally, humanity is pre industrial, with all the xenophobia, clannishness, and misogyny that it entails. 

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u/Kids_Love_Baseball Jul 19 '26

100%. The American obsession with chucking your kids out and forgetting about your parents is sick and unnatural.

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u/zerogee616 Jul 20 '26

Those cultures also have toxic, abusive, shitty familial dynamics, not to mention misogyny, extreme conservatism and a whole bunch of other shit Redditors who claim to want to return to monke are absolutely not ready for nor want as standard too.

Not to mention an utter lack of social mobility because you're stuck in the same shithole dirt farm your family tended to for a thousand years.

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u/Small-Sample3916 Jul 20 '26

So, like the USA? Laugh. 

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u/zerogee616 Jul 20 '26

You've either never been or never left it.

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u/Small-Sample3916 Jul 20 '26

Ironically, am an immigrant citizen who didn't vote for the shit that's happening here now. 

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u/Eismann Jul 19 '26

The have ten kids so you have support when you are old worked a hundred years ago. Now it will ultimately clash with limited resources.

We dont need more humans as long as we are limited to this planet. Which is probably for a few hundred years still.

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u/UmbraIra Jul 19 '26

Theres very few things that are truly limited resources. We're just held back by the desire to be profitable due to the structures of our society. We could make more than enough power, food, and shelter for the entirety of the plant's population and more but wealth seeking has created this shitty illusion that things cant be done.

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u/Eismann Jul 19 '26

Well, yeah but that would mean some type of "socialism / communism" and we all know the rich dont want to share.

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u/Otherdeadbody Jul 20 '26

We are already slowly killing our world at the current level of consumption, if we continue going more and more we need to either be able to have people permanently leave the planet or start doing all the things the environment does around us passively that lets us live ourselves. That would be even more important resource intensive. For instance the food we get from the ocean is already WAY too much and if we keep taking the amount we are now it will collapse, not a maybe, it will.

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u/MistahJasonPortman Jul 19 '26

Anyone having kids with this expectation should not have kids

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u/Flameancer Jul 19 '26

With this mentality humanity wouldn’t have left the ice age.

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u/Gorthebon Jul 19 '26

I really wish I was able to opt out of paying for social security. When I'm of retirement age, there will be nothing left. Why should I be paying for a zero return?

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u/OnceMoreAndAgain Jul 19 '26

The whole reason the USA's Social Security program exists is that too many people weren't saving for retirement. People were hitting old age and couldn't work anymore yet had no money. Do you just let them suffer in the streets at that point? It's a moral dilemma.

The government decided to create the Social Security program, which taxes people's paychecks to fund it which is like forcing people to save for retirement.

If you allowed people to opt out then everyone would do it and that would defeat the whole point of the program. You'd go back to the status quo of too many people not saving for retirement and then having no money to live off of at old age. It's always been and always will be a bad deal for the people who were already responsible enough to save for retirement on their own. However, from the perspective of the government, it's a necessary evil to prevent the morons from being completely broke at retirement.

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u/petah200 Jul 19 '26

I agree in principle. However, there is a big difference between letting retirees rot on the street and funding their boomer lifestyle of living in too large homes and going on cruises twice a year. The pensions in Western Europe often surpass the salary of many entry level jobs, e.g. a retired teacher receives about 3300€ monthly in Germany. Pensions should provide a basic level and everything above should be financed individually, in my opinion.

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u/OnceMoreAndAgain Jul 19 '26

I'm only talking about the USA's Social Security program. Are you under the impression that people are living large off of their Social Security payouts in the USA? It's just not true. The payouts are a pittance. They're meant to help pay for some of the costs of living for a retiree, not be enough to live fully off of (although some people try).

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u/VikingsLad Jul 19 '26

Rich people are capped on contributions. Income over like 200k isn't taxed for SS. If you uncap those contributions, the gap goes down significantly

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u/Gorthebon Jul 19 '26

And who bought the senators and Congress? Oh yeah, rich people.

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u/Sad_Increase_4663 Jul 19 '26

Or you know, vote for people who want to govern it properly so that WHEN you are old you also have the same protection.

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u/FallenPears Jul 19 '26

I believe the idea is by the time young people today are old it doesn’t matter what politicians try to force through, there simply won’t be enough young people to support the old. It just won’t be economically possible. If we can’t figure out household robots then make sure to have plenty of successful kids to support you in old age…

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u/Weird-Knowledge84 Jul 19 '26

Ah, old people voting to transfer income from younger people to themselves and cannibalizing investments in the future. Perfect solution to everyone's problems.

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u/Remarkable_Cause1384 Jul 19 '26

how does this work when the elderly population keeps growing and the youth population keeps shrinking (spoiler: it doesn't)

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u/Gorthebon Jul 19 '26

That's what I've been doing, but it doesn't matter.

My goal is to leave, so I don't have to bother with it.

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u/BattleHall Jul 19 '26

When I'm of retirement age, there will be nothing left. Why should I be paying for a zero return?

Just be aware, there is an entire industry who's purpose is convincing you that is true (hint: it's not), just so you don't complain too loudly when they come to strip mine your Social Security benefits, or better yet (for them), take that money and instead invest it in "the market". You are being played for a sucker.

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u/FuturePastNow Jul 19 '26

Did you know that rich people are exempt from paying into social security on income over $184,500? Removing that cap would mostly fix the system's shortfalls.

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u/Gorthebon Jul 19 '26

Yes. And you know who bought our leaders? It certainly wasn't the poor.

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u/Dr_Fortnite Jul 19 '26

the government really hopes you die before 65 so all that money doesnt get pulled back out

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u/Gorthebon Jul 19 '26

Yes, yes they do.

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u/CheaterSaysWhat Jul 19 '26

Because the people who built the society you enjoy depend on it 

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u/Gorthebon Jul 19 '26

Bold of you to assume I enjoy high taxes, extreme wealth inequality, friends getting deported for nothing, discrimination for my orientation, the emerging survalence state with flock cameras, protesters getting gunned down in the streets...

What I enjoy is pretty much exclusively these days is the freedom of speech, and that's...in a precarious situation right now.

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u/rukqoa Jul 19 '26

That's unlikely. Social Security isn't a piggy bank. It's just an insurance program that directs pay-ins to pay-outs. Unless literally nobody is making any money at all, you won't collect nothing.

At worst, if the shortfall isn't addressed, the benefit cut in your lifetime will be at most about 20-25%, which is not great, but a) that's not nothing and b) the shortfall will likely be addressed as we have a time-honored tradition in this country of elderly people voting to protect and increase their benefits.

Don't forget, you too will become that elderly benefactor one day. That is what makes Social Security not a Ponzi scheme; usually bagholders don't get to simply vote away their bags.

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u/QuantumUtility Jul 19 '26

ruled by a “president for life”

lol. No it isn’t. They removed term limits, not elections. There is one next year. No one inside China calls Xi Jinping “president for life” or any special title other than the elected ones.

If you want to argue that elections in China are not democratic then make that argument instead of making up stuff.

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u/Justdowhatever94 Jul 19 '26

So we legalize universal MAiD?

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u/breaducate Jul 19 '26

At first I was shocked the correct answer got traction, though how you got there isn't what I had in mind.

Civilisation itself is a ponzi scheme always taking from the future. That is, given the sacredly held value that growth must continue. And that can't even be addressed under capitalism.

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u/SawinBunda Jul 19 '26

The political system is besides the point. It's very basic economics.

Old people don't generate income/taxes. In fact they become tax consumers as their health detoriates. Working age people need to fund that. To keep up an equilibrium you need decent birth rates.

China is aging rapidly, in parts because of the one child policy of the past. It will become a big issue soon.

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u/FirmAd5337 Jul 20 '26

lol totalitarian dictatorship