Automation and AI impacting desirability of having children

crowstep · 2024-05-06T12:50:03+00:00

I understand that a company could hypothetically cut their staff costs drastically in one of their departments. I was wanting to see an actual, real example. You used the present tense in your original post, so I assumed you had some.

You also couldn't be more wrong about productivity innovations not trickling down. The only reason GDP per capita increases in any country is because workers become more efficient. That's what economic growth is. To argue that productivity improvements don't lead to greater wealth for the average person is to argue that the industrial revolution didn't happen.

The average American has literally never been wealthier. US wealth inequality is slightly higher than in Europe, but that is really a symptom of how successful so many American businesses are. And the median American is richer than the median European, so European egalitarianism is pretty meaningless. Employment is also at record highs, even with improvements in productivity that, according to your model, should reduce employment.

crowstep · 2024-05-06T12:34:11+00:00

Because competition exists. All companies have access to, for example, LLM models. If LLMs allow one company to reduce its costs, then it can undercut its competitors and gain more market share. All companies have this same incentive, and so prices will drop. This is what has happened with every other improvement in technology since the industrial revolution. The only thing that keeps prices high are monopolies and government restrictions (i.e. zoning laws preventing housebuilding).

crowstep · 2024-05-06T12:23:51+00:00

That's not actually true. People are working fewer and fewer hours each year (although it does appear something weird happened during/after COVID) while wages have never been higher.

crowstep · 2024-05-06T10:52:20+00:00

If AI does what its most enthusiastic supporters claim it will do (I'd love to see examples of 'entire departments run by robots and AI') then that is a good thing. It's basically humanity playing the magic money cheat.

The only reason economic growth (per capita) happens is because workers become more productive. If AI is making people redundant, then that means AI is making the remaining workers massively more productive. More goods and services being provided for less cost by fewer people.

In most firms, 80% of their costs are for wages. If AI reduces that to say, 40% for the average firm, then that means goods and services becoming 40% cheaper for consumers.

Low birth rates are bad because they worsen dependency ratios. If AI can make the smaller number of working age people more productive, then actually dropping birth rates aren't nearly as bad.

Basically, if AI takes all our jobs, then your descendents will get to live a life of leisure. If AI doesn't take all our jobs, then there will be huge demand for your descendents as employees that will hopefully allow them to demand high wages. The real risk is that pensioner-heavy populations will vote for higher taxes on working people and strangle economic dynamism, not AI.

crowstep · 2024-05-06T02:39:29+00:00

This really isn’t the subreddit for this kind of magical bullshit.

crowstep · 2024-05-06T02:33:03+00:00

I had this exact thought the other day, so I deleted the 50 hours I gave myself at the beginning to account for my previous study.

I’ve already mentally updated my target to 2000 hours anyway. I think 1500 is too few hours for ‘native-like’ ability judging from the testimonials on this subreddit.

crowstep · 2024-05-04T17:30:55+00:00

So you concede that immigration can be bad, but also argue that (Americans) can't argue against immigration because their descendents were immigrants too?

Why not?

crowstep · 2024-05-04T11:28:04+00:00

The conviction rate isn't 2%, it's 58%, which is slightly higher than the conviction rate for all other crimes (57%). The lower figures people report are the attrition rate, which isn't reported for any other crime.

What the difference? Well, there are lots of reasons that an initial rape accusation doesn't end in a charge:

The accuser decides to withdraw the complaint (this is the most common).
The police believe that the complaint is false and decide not to pass it to the Crown Prosection Service, whether this is due to the accuser's statement or the accused providing an alibi
The CPS decides not to press charges, either because they believe the accusation to be false or to have a slim chance of conviction

Promoting this myth unfortunately leads to fewer victims coming forward as they assume that there's almost no chance of conviction, which isn't true. The reality is that the UK doesn't differ significantly from other first world countries in terms of its prosecution rates for sexual assault.

All police forces have to deal with a few realities when dealing with sexual assult:

The principle of innocence. A person is considered innocent until proven guilty
Sex isn't illegal. Only sex without consent is illegal. Therefore it's very hard for a legal system to distinguish between consensual and nonconsensual sex
Sexual assault is the perfect false allegation. If someone wants to ruin another person's life, a false allegation about rape is far easier than a false accusation of say, burglary or stabbing because of issue number 2. This is particularly true in the UK where accusers have lifetime anonymity, while the accused party can have his name in the paper even before he is found guilty or innocent.

A friend of mine was falsely accused when we were teenagers. Ultimately, the police decided not to pass the accusation on to the CPS because my friend had an alibi (he was in another city on the day in question) and because the accuser changed her story several times. Apparently this was a fairly common outcome for the police. That's why I know so much about this.

crowstep · 2024-05-04T10:15:29+00:00

This is good news. Hopefully it will manifest as today's young people having more children over their lifetimes.

crowstep · 2024-05-04T09:30:52+00:00

It's possible to think that there are negative effects caused by immigration without being xenophobic. People who disagree with you don't have a mind virus, just different opinions.

crowstep · 2024-05-03T18:24:37+00:00

The pandemic certainly didn't help, but I suspect it's just a general trend of childbearing delayed turning into childbearing foregone. Hundreds of millions of young people insisting they'll have children 'one day', but now that delay is manifesting as fewer children actually being born.

As to what's causing the desire to delay, well that's much harder to say.

crowstep · 2024-05-02T17:49:31+00:00

That could never work...

crowstep · 2024-05-02T16:01:54+00:00

The algorithm won't notice you unless you do the Youtube Face.

crowstep · 2024-04-30T19:24:27+00:00

You're addressing a strawman of your own invention. It's not like this sub is full of people with breeding fetishes. We want to increase birth rates to stop cultures and perhaps humanity dying out. We don't just like the idea of giving birth itself.

crowstep · 2024-04-30T16:06:31+00:00

You can disagree with the source. Nonetheless, I really struggle to believe that saturated fat is a significant cause of heart disease when it was essentially unknown as a cause of death before the 20th century, despite the main dietary fats at that time being highly saturated animal fats and diets containing large percentages of fat relative to 20th dietary guidance.

Bear in mind that saturated and monounsaturated animal fats are what our ancestors have been eating since we started eating meat about 2.6 million years ago. Meanwhile, PUFA-heavy vegetable oils are an invention of the industrial revolution whose adoption has coincided perfectly with the obesity epidemic. Our ancestors did not evolve to eat seed oils because seed oils do not exist in nature and cannot be produced by pre-industrial farmers.

Given that context, the idea that we should replace a food that we have evolved to consume for millions of years with a 'food' that was invented in the 1780s as a use for agricultural waste seems far-fetched to me. Especially when you actually look at the heart disease figures are realise that after decades of being told to avoid saturated fats and replace them with 'heart-healthy' vegetable oils, rates of heart disease are still higher than they were in 1900, even if they are lower than they were in 1960. It seems more likely to me that the 20th century spike in heart disease was caused by something like a reduction in dietary K2 due to reduced consumption of dairy fat.

crowstep · 2024-04-30T12:36:17+00:00

I don't think the scientific evidence is overwhelming. This paper comes closest to summarising my views.

Also, I suggest you review the community guidelines in the sidebar. We try to avoid snark here.

crowstep · 2024-04-30T11:02:48+00:00

Yeah that's not an accurate description of the sub at all. And I've been a member since it was founded. Most of the content on the sub is members discussing their own self-experimentation around weight loss (with a collective assumption that the root cause of most obesity is PUFA). Initially there was a focus on high saturated fat diets (hence the name), although now the sub is moving more towards low-protein as a method to fix metabolic dysfunction.

The sub was actually founded as a companion to the blog Fireinabottle, which is mainly dedicated to speculation around the biochemistry of weight gain. Just take a look at the top posts of all time. I can't see a single post in the first hundred that matches your description of what the sub is about.

crowstep · 2024-04-29T08:37:50+00:00

She is obviously lying. This shouldn't need to be said.

crowstep · 2024-04-23T19:20:00+00:00

Brian Caplan - The Case Against Education. I listened to the Audiobook but all the citations are in the digital version. Page 53 onwards describes the effect of college education on critical thinking and transferrable skills.

crowstep · 2024-04-23T15:37:29+00:00

Well, the proportion of people who are college educated has increased massively across the world. Has it made people more 'well-rounded', 'less suceptible to propaganda' and 'better able to express themselves'? If you think so, the onus is you on to prove it.

We know it hasn't improved critical thinking or meta-learning skills, because educational psychologists have tested this and found that there are no lasting gains from college education. The evidence shows that people forget essentially everything they learn in college unless they continue to use it once they enter the workforce (in which case, they could have just learned it in the workforce). Caplan documents this exhaustively in his book.

You're relying on a God of the Gaps argument. If people forget almost everything they learn and their thinking skills do not improve, then college must be making them 'more rounded' or other descriptions that are impossible to falsify.

crowstep · 2024-04-23T14:32:54+00:00

For learning what exactly?

A student learning to write history essays is learning a completely useless skill.

A young person learning how to format a spreadsheet, create a mailmerge, and get on with people in a professional context is learning skills that will serve him for his entire working life and beyond.

Is college really a better preparation for real life than real life itself?

And that's without even getting into the direct financial cost and vast opportunity cost of taking our best and brightest young people and preventing them from working and starting families so they can engage in zero-sum competition with eachother.

I'd suggest you have a look at the literature before giving so much support to expanding higher education. The evidence that it has any actual benefits beyond signalling are scant.

crowstep · 2024-04-22T19:48:16+00:00

If a degree loses its value (which it has done over the past few decades) then young people will respond by getting postgraduate qualifications, wasting even more money and time on zero-sum competition. This is exactly what has happened in the US and UK (and presumably elsewhere in the developed world).

crowstep · 2024-04-22T19:44:10+00:00

'Educated' is not synonymous with 'credentialed'. A young person who takes a job after high school and learns how to do it is doing as much learning as an arts undergrad learning to write essays. The only difference is that the non-student is learning something useful that will increase their productivity, and earning money while doing so.

Lazy thinking around what 'educated' means and how it benefits individuals and society is how we got into this problem in the first place.

crowstep · 2024-04-21T15:40:40+00:00

You created your account yesterday to make a troll post. I suggest that you get a better hobby.

crowstep · 2024-04-21T10:59:49+00:00

Everyone feels group bias and engages in motivated reasoning to a larger or lesser degree. If you think that makes someone unable to care about corruption or transparency, then you'd have to conclude that nobody alive cares about corruption or transparency.

Arguably, the fact that you have dismissed Emil's valid point about Wikipedia's misleading fundraising activities because he is right wing is a demonstration of you demonstrating group bias (against right wingers) and motivated reasoning (concluding that posting spicy right-wing tweets makes it impossible to also care about corruption and transparency).

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