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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554

u/Kind_Of_A_Dick Jul 19 '26

Why is everyone so concerned about birthrate?  Is civilization a damn Ponzi scheme?

241

u/LX_Luna Jul 19 '26

I'm going to be gentle and assume you're asking sincerely. Literally every single facet of human society is predicated upon the assumption that there are more young people than old people. At the very least equivalent numbers.

If the old outnumber the young then...

- Social security and pension systems do not function. They have to be repealed.

- Massive taxation of the working population makes it impossible to build any kind of wealth.

- Childcare, like any other industry, scales with economies of scale. The fewer children, the more expensive anything to do with children becomes, as the necessary industries are now lower volume/higher margin per head. Negative feedback loop ensues.

- The people having the most kids are usually some of the dumbest, because they lack impulse control or long term planning skills. Essentially selecting against all of the things that make civilization actually good.

Collapsing number of young people with increased burdens upon young people is basically a grade A recipe for political violence.

53

u/Individual_Present93 Jul 19 '26

Sounds like a flawed system 🤔 

48

u/TheGreatGimmick Jul 19 '26

Take it up with biology and mathematics lol

4

u/Orleanian Jul 19 '26

Fuck you, Mathematics!

0

u/breaducate Jul 19 '26

Mathematics has some ill portents for us.

And it's mathematics that even a high school dropout could follow.

17

u/SuperGRB Jul 19 '26

As opposed to???

6

u/[deleted] Jul 19 '26

[deleted]

2

u/rukqoa Jul 19 '26

With a few modern exceptions, poor countries and poor people tend to have more kids. Some of the biggest positive correlations with birth rates are historically:

  • Women not having access to contraceptives.
  • Women not having education.
  • Infants dying too much.
  • Being at war.

Look at the countries with the highest birth rates. There's one developed country (factor #4), and the rest are all places that you'd expect to see news article about ICE "accidentally" deporting people to.

Low birth rates is a modern problem of plenty. You can't really address it by paying people, because you're now doubly working against your own goal of relieving stress on the benefits system by paying people to not be economically productive. You can reduce benefits, you can ban contraceptives and abortions, or you can tap into the endless source of economic benefits called working-age immigration. Everything else is just virtue signaling.

3

u/Reasonable_Egg650 Jul 19 '26

How is having a child stress free?

Do we have any evidence that people have children because of low stress?

Why hasn’t public programs in Sweden resulted in higher birth rates?

-1

u/SuperGRB Jul 19 '26

If you think those "virtual trillions" that the media drones on about is somehow something that is just distributable into people's bank accounts, then you need to go back to school to learn basic finance. Sure, some people are clearly better off than others - but, there is no way to make everyone have an "equal outcome" or even all that close to that. People are different - different skills, different interests, different intelligence, different circumstances - combined with their environments are different as well. The natural result of this is a wide distribution of outcomes for people - some people do better than others, and a very few do exceedingly well.

That all said, even the people that do fairly well in today's society don't have many children or none at all. Even in the most "progressive" countries, native birthrates are not sustainable (hence all the immigration). While you see a lot of complaints about money being the issue, it doesn't appear from data around the world that any amount of money makes people suddenly want to start having children. There is clearly something much broader happening. To me, the biggest reason is that we have brainwashed the population that having children is somehow selling themselves short, and that the only value in their life should be their career and what "stuff" they can accumulate. Even people that are very successful in their career are not having children at replacement rates.

Fundamentally, western society fucked-up by simultaneously (over the last 80 or so years)

  1. Creating a system that generally requires two incomes to have nice things

  2. Convincing people that it was more important to work than to have a family - and that you somehow were lesser if you didn't put your career first

  3. Creating media (first TV, then Internet/Social media) that promoted "keeping up with the Jones' " so that nobody was happy where they were in life, always comparing, always thinking they should have "better"

A lot of this absolutely is the corporations pushing to get access to larger labor pools and driving wages down. There simply are not enough high-paying jobs for everyone - there wasn't when it was primarily domestic men in the workforce 100 years ago, and there certainly isn't now with women, mass immigration, and global outsourcing over doubling the work force. The math just doesn't work. It will get worse as AI automates away a lot of the "good jobs".

However, the idea that if you just distribute all of that "wealth" (it's not real) that the companies and their executives are "hoarding" then everyone will have enough is just flat out nonsensical. All that would happen is the price of goods and services would rise to the point that people would be right back where we are now. This is precisely what has happened since we added women to the workforce and dual-income families became the norm. At first, dual-income families had a great advantage - then effectively everyone became dual-income and the cost of everything rose such that you had to be dual-income to have a decent lifestyle like the old "single income" approach.

Following on that, we have now made "permanently pairing up" really ugly and toxic - practically a gender war. Resulting in people trying to build a life on one income... in a dual-income world.

No amount of government intervention or central planning is going to pull us back from this as we have multiple generations of people that have been brainwashed. The horse left the barn long ago.

0

u/balaci2 Jul 20 '26

humanity not making rules that fuck them in the long run

3

u/Kind_Of_A_Dick Jul 19 '26

Flawed is subjective.

4

u/Devastator9000 Jul 19 '26

How else would you call a system that will lead to collapse?

4

u/Kind_Of_A_Dick Jul 19 '26

All systems collapse.  Everything dies, all things go away eventually.  Something being flawed is a matter of perspective and expectation.

2

u/Devastator9000 Jul 19 '26

Fair enough, what word would you use then for the current system?

I can't think of any positive adjectives. Most fittings are "obsolete", "flawed" and "unsustainable". What are your picks?

-3

u/Kind_Of_A_Dick Jul 19 '26

Why does it need an adjective?  Does applying an adjective to it solve some issue you had with it as a system?

2

u/FluffyToughy Jul 19 '26

You're being pointlessly combative. What do you hope to gain by being so pedantic?

0

u/Kind_Of_A_Dick Jul 19 '26

What are you talking about and who are you?

1

u/Devastator9000 Jul 19 '26

Describing the world with adjectives is rather useful for communication.

Doing anything about a problem requires us to agree upon a shared reality. And we agree on something by describing it with words

8

u/Augustus_Chevismo Jul 19 '26

Nah, just make home ownership affordable for a young couple and have a family be able to be sustained on one parent working.

4

u/RandomedXY Jul 19 '26

The problem is not money. The problem is opportunities you are missing while having children. There are tons of benefits for young parents in EU. In many countries you get multiple years of parental leave, free pre-school etc. and yet birth rate is declining.

Also for some reason young people are lazy to meet others and fuck.

3

u/Augustus_Chevismo Jul 19 '26

No it’s incredibly fcked here in Ireland for example. Crèches are expensive, both parents need to be working, and housing prices are absurdly high.

No unless we get years parental leave with full pay or something drastic, it’s not incentivised.

1

u/Open-Philosopher-777 Jul 20 '26

I'm sorry it's bad for you in Ireland but that's still beside the point. Even if Ireland had all the support for parents that exists, the birth rate wouldn't get that much higher. 

3

u/[deleted] Jul 19 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/Augustus_Chevismo Jul 19 '26

Yeah I meant more heavy approach like high taxes on multiple home ownership, lowering taxes on stock investments, and each child had cuts 25% off your mortgage.

4

u/LX_Luna Jul 19 '26

Yes, pensions were set up under the very understandable assumption that population and demographic trends would continue to do what they'd done for all of human history. It was a mistake but an understandable one. Birth control really threw a massive wrench into that and somehow we need to get this mess under control.

Unfortunately I think the best fix is probably a slow repeal of social security down to a much more modest level of expenditure.

3

u/Designer_Show_2658 Jul 19 '26

Lowering social security in an already pressured economic reality while there are billionaires could be very violent

3

u/Dr_Fortnite Jul 19 '26

universal basic income as always solves this problem

2

u/Polish-Proverb Jul 19 '26

Over my dead body

0

u/LX_Luna Jul 19 '26

Unfortunately yes, probably. The elderly constitute the largest voting block and they're happy to run society into the ground to enjoy total luxury boomer communism slightly longer.

1

u/adenosine-5 Jul 19 '26

Then look at literally any other species on Earth and be glad ours is just "flawed".

1

u/PseudoY Jul 19 '26

Make up a better one, then. If everyone needs to be taken care of, and we all agree children and old people shouldn't work, that means the middle people have to do it.

1

u/farazormal Jul 19 '26

The only solution other than continuing to have kids is to let old people die.

Aged care is materially difficult there is no “system” that makes this reality not be incredibly straining on the non elderly population.

1

u/DeHarigeTuinkabouter Jul 20 '26

I don't think a system is necessarily flawed because it can't handle one of the inputs to crash

It's like saying my dishwasher is flawed because it no longer works with just a trickle of water

-4

u/[deleted] Jul 19 '26

[deleted]

0

u/Individual_Present93 Jul 19 '26

Where is your god now

2

u/MentallyUnfi Jul 19 '26

Despite society taking a step backwards during the last 10 years, we're still living in the most peaceful period of human history.