To not have children due to the potential threat of AI

[NP101]

I realise this probably makes me sound like a fully paid up member of the tin hat society but I'm increasingly worried about the threat of AI.

It has made me re-evaluate having children as the future looks pretty bleak - I can envisage the internet more or less being unusable in 5 years time and then the subsequent fall out of this - both socially and economically.

I realise I probably would have had similar feelings had I been around in various other points in history and subsequently regretted not having children but this current threat seems even more existential.

Oh yeah, of course. That was kind of what I meant. If people think it's hopeless to the point of choosing not to have kids then we may as well all just jump in front of a train now.

To be fair though most people would not have had reliable contraception even if they didn't want children or laws to be unable to say no to sex from a spouse! There was religion which usually tells you suicide is a sin and you wouldn't even go to heaven, a strong hierarchal order in most countries and a philosophy that this was your lot. Collapse all of that and add in more education for women and the birth rate plummets.

Generally, it is more educated women that choose to have less children. Perhaps this isn't so surprising really. When you have choice you can think about activities that would be very commonplace otherwise. I mean to even consider not having children you need access to reliable contraception, to be allowed to say no to sex within your marriage, to defy cultural norms (might have been harder in the past with more religion and hierarchal social structures).

@OutsideLookingOut that's not what I mean. I'm not talking about choosing to have fewer children, I'm talking about women who want children but are preventing themselves from having them because they are anxious/scared about possible futures for those children.

I think you're mad to worry about what the world might be like in 50-100 years time. It might be worse in a lot of ways (in your opinion), but then again it might be better. Children born now are not going to know any different. And humans adapt.

AI does have advantages...like all tools.

How can the world possibly be better in 50-100 years time? With maybe entire continents no longer able to support human life and climate wars and mass migration?

AI can't do everything though. I think about an area of work which I was one of the first in the world to think about and write publicly about. AI couldn't have done that - though given the number of now published articles it has a half decent attempt at writing a similar article now.

Well, no. I don't think life is going to become unbearable in my own lifespan, though I can see it becoming more uncomfortable and necessarily more restricted. But I do believe things are going to get pretty awful in the lifespan of my hypothetical children.

Will someone please explain to me very simply what consequences of AI are people worried about?

Job losses is a major one for most people. We have 1 DS and the only thing stopping us having more is the age gap (he will be 10 this year). I think aviation has had the potential for AI for years but has never done it for very good reasons, I imagine most things will be like that.

At the end of day garbage in = garbage out when it comes to data (what AI is based on). Educations is going to become more important as AI takes over some traditional middle class jobs

And let's not forget AI hasn't passed the Turing test yet. That's when we really have to start worrying!

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/30/risk-of-extinction-by-ai-should-be-global-priority-say-tech-experts

”
AI’s potential to exacerbate existing existential risks such as engineered pandemics and military arms races are concerns that led Osborne to sign the public letter, along with AI’s novel existential threats.
Osborne said: “Because we don’t understand AI very well there is a prospect that it might play a role as a kind of new competing organism on the planet, so a sort of invasive species that we’ve designed that might play some devastating role in our survival as a species.”

I get your point but pre industrial agrarian and religious societies were ruled by religious calendars there were feast days, fast days and days that were religious and, as I understood it, to the pious majority, sex on demand wasn’t really a thing. A roll in the bay was scandalous because it broke all these conventions. More like sex happened on set times of the year (fertile summer rituals) or certain days of the week provided women didn’t have their periods etc. to ensure there was enough food to go around. Fertility would have also been subject to nutritional health.

In some cultures raising the animals was seen as more important than raising children as children were extra mouths to feed (until they could contribute) where as animals were the source of food.

Contraception was definitely a thing too, there’s one Roman herb that was so effective it was made extinct from excessive use. But people kept having children. “be fruitful and multiply” or “mashallah” or they cycle of rebirth. Certainly in modern times educating women and girls has led to lower birth rates, but in the preindustrial times not many people could read, write, were educated etc. I’ve read something that said we consume more writing in a day than someone who lived 1000 years ago would experience in their whole life. All that knowledge brings extra information and extra things to worry about.

Imagine being born in 1850 and dying in 1950. The world would have changed massively in that time period. We’re seeing the next big workplace evolution right now. Previous generations feared the advent of cars and automation and yet eventually found different jobs anyway - jobs they couldn’t have conceived of just ten years previously. Example - many blacksmiths whose bread and butter was horsehoes became mechanics.

As for AI - the advances in deep mind aren’t possible without corresponding computer chip advances (so called quantum computing) which are decades away from being affordable even for huge companies like Amazon and HSBC. I should also point out that when those chips to become commercialised the goal might not be to create robots / AI deep thinking systems but to create technology that can be used seemlessly by people - so be prepared for huge transformations in healthcare. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cancer as a disease becomes as treatable as HIV within the next ten years.

Isn’t that the point though, that we all managed fine before it. Personally I think it’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened (even though I use it). If we could just have mobile phones (for phoning or texting only) the world would be a better place (imho of course). We are too privy to the thoughts and opinions of everyone on the planet now and I just don’t think that’s healthy.

Probably because they realise just how precarious it all is.

Something like an Ebola like pandemic and our society will collapse. Covid was bad enough but the mortality rate was very low compared to some of the viruses out there.

Most of my life is behind me and I can't, hand on heart, say I'm sorry. My children are pushing 40 now and neither of them have had children which again I can't say I'm sorry about, although obviously that is their decision.

good point

Wish I hadn’t read this thread, so worried for my lovely 5 year old Dd and her future, the not being here to see if she’s ok is horrendous.

I don’t understand the opening post, why will the internet be gone in 5 years?

@SalviaDivinorum life is always precarious. I can't get with the doom and gloom and panic about the future. I agree that we may well see rapid change again, but humanity is flexible and adaptable and that change does not inevitably lead to dire outcomes.

People are imagining that it won't be gone, it'll be unusable because every site in the world will be overrun with AI-generated spoof content.

That's patently not going to be the case, not least because the amount of computing resource required to do something like that would be exhorbitantly expensive, and there would be little point to it.

A more realistic concern would be that it will become even harder to get support from an actual human, because more and more companies will begin to use AI agents instead. Of course, that presupposes that the AI agents would be worse than the human agents...which, in my experience, is a rocky assumption.

I already have kids and it wouldn’t stop me having kids or warn my kids off having babies of their own.

But I do think AI is likely to kill off the human race before climate change gets us.

I guess I’m a cheerful pessimist. Expect the worst, hope for the best!

Why is this a threat to humanity?

Individual humans nowadays are not the same as they were in the past. We are all far more dependent on "the system" than we ever were before.

Money barely exists - it's all virtual. If the banking system fails we are all wiped out financially.

Few have land or enough land to grow their own food let alone the knowledge and skills and the UK is not self-sufficient. Without supermarkets and the sophisticated delivery systems behind them most of the population would starve very quickly. There's enough fuss when they run out of tomatoes at a time of year when tomatoes wouldn't naturally be available.

Levels of strength, fitness, and sheer resilience are much lower. How many can walk 10 miles nowadays? We are not used to depending on our own efforts to keep us alive.

I am not hopeful for the future. We need a complete sea change in human behaviour and that just isn't going to happen. If there was any hope then companies like Temu and Shein would not be the successes they are. There have been mass extinctions in the past and there is no reason why humans are exempt.

I think climate change is more of a worry, but nobody can know the future. Assuming it will be bad is just what people have done through the ages with so many inventions. It’s doom-mongering.

Perhaps AI will bring benefits - nanobots to mend the body, for example?Perhaps in 10 years time or less, we’ll have discovered more about the universe and be able to use that to our advantage (eg understanding dark matter, finding an additional force)? Perhaps we’ll make alien contact and share wonderful tech and knowledge? Perhaps we’ll find a way to mend and preserve our climate and ecosystems? Perhaps these new discoveries will lead to a greater global community?

Who knows, but to not have children because of some hypothetical possible threat seems daft IMO. If we all thought like that, the human race would have died out centuries ago.