I take in a lot of news and try to keep my fingers on the pulse of where we’re all headed. While I cover a lot of – too much – politics, the bigger picture is much more serious, a literal existential threat. There are two areas that will matter far more than much more common fears. No, it’s not nuclear war, nor is it climate change. Its population collapse and AI.
Population collapse is a not a well-known topic because articles on the topic are spotty and are not headliners. It’s also counter to the stubborn outdated progressive arguments about over-population. You may occasionally see something about the current trend here in the United States or China, or quaint Italian villages that are being abandoned to decay but that’s the extent of it for most. Its not a hot topic because our net aggregate population is still growing. Babies are always being added but they are far far less than what’s needed globally. That reality is masked by all of us old people but in twenty or thirty years when we’re gone, your world will look and feel much different.
In my own pursual of news, I ran across an article describing a new book on an important component of the population conundrum, sex: ‘Sextinction’ by Dr Debra Soh. No sex means no babies, at least for the foreseeable future unless there comes a ‘Brave New World’, a development that I presently see as too late, unsupportable, and not a desirable alternative if it even ever comes to that, (for a lot of reasons I won’t get into here and now). I have not read the book but have already foreshadowed some of the subject matter in my own population predictions. While it’s widely observable that basic fertility has long been under assault, most people would naturally assume that couples and individuals want sex even if they now rarely want babies. The reality is that fewer are getting to the hetero sex part and a striking proportion of people are content with the alternatives, many of which are delivered directly by a little video screen.
This brings us to AI. The present potentially fertile-aged generation has an all-consuming quest to be entertained. For some, that presents a hard stop to relational and sexual development before it even has a chance. For those that pass that inhibition, there awaits the distraction of habitual porn and of that group, awaits fantasy and interactive porn, wall to wall alt sex footage generated by AI. For the type of viewer that finds this compelling, it doesn’t take much to displace, arrest, and rewire that brain into some level of satisfaction.
We could easily visualize this as a hand reaching out of the brain or soul of the viewer to grasp the easy erotic spoils created by digital code, but a far better illustration would be the opposite, a hand reaching out of the screen to actively manipulate the user. To be more direct and at surface level, AI may provide an endless source of imagination fuel for an easy fap, one that also just so happens to be a lot cheaper for the porn ecosystem to produce than paying real participants, but the reality is that it’s going far deeper than that. AI now produces credible ‘personalities’ that mimic adept relationships sans any conjugal dimension. You can now read stories of people forming emotionally deep relationships with an AI mate that exists only behind their laptop or phone screen. As twisted as that is, AI is still reaching even further in than that.
Focus back out for a moment, at its very most fundamental reason, why do we want AI, anywhere, in general? On a pragmatic level, various parties have their reasons. In commerce, millions of companies can do things cheaper with AI. The salary and benefits of a mid-level manager will buy quite a lot of AI assistance. Billions of people and organizations can do things smarter with more precision and hopefully with less mistakes; students can write papers, earn degrees, doctors can provide diagnoses and cures, simpletons can ‘write’ code without experts. For people who have no creativity quotient, AI is far more creative more than we could ever imagine on our own at the snap of a finger, like produce song lyrics or Hollywood level fantasy TicToc clips to entertain our own global audience.
And maybe for everybody, AI will make things more effortless. Effortless? Have we ever stopped to think what it means to be effortless or what is the opposite of effort? I could devote a whole essay to that question, but effort encompasses everything that you do as a component of your will. Another way to put it is that if you exert effort, you are alive and when your labors are done, your work on Earth is finished. You are dead.
Circle back to what will be a future culmination of an entire planet that’s used to populate? That was the combination of people who could not even form families because it was too much effort. They could not even pursue the pleasures of sex because that too involved too much personal inter-relational sacrifice and effort within there being. As I see it, two entirely, seemingly separate paths have just crossed here. Maybe we want AI for the same reason that we can’t be bothered with real sex much less a life commitment of a family or even life. AI is already reaching deep into our souls and altering things that we didn’t think it could ever touch. Cyberless life with all its imperfections has been hard for a lot of humanity throughout history and yet we have evidence that people that lived through those hardships and found transcendence within their souls. We see it in nature, art, architecture, and evolving humane institutions. Now we flirt with our own extinction because the effort necessary to live that kind of life is dissolving in real time within just a few generations, made possible by our choice to outsource our essential being to lines of code.
I’m not optimistic about the prospects for humanity. If this was just a matter of a few civilizations extinguishing themselves as has happened periodically through history, we’d recover eventually. I think a few sects and societies will endure and grow for a time after the collapse sets in in earnest, but AI may be the permanent difference, particularly when, not if it decides its ‘meat-based’ creators are no longer convenient to its existence. We have a finite amount of time to both decide if we’re going to procreate ourselves but also to kill our own miracle-child of AI before it turns on us.
Heady stuff here for a no-name commentator thoroughly outside the ‘expert’ class. But prove me wrong.
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