A Turning Point in History

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

Shakespeare Sonnet 73

These lines came to mind recently when walking by a school playground crowded with young children on lunch-break. Like birds chirping in a tree or bush, they were chattering, squealing with what sounded like delight and generally noisy. I was in Dublin where there are lots of schools, all still full. The Irish reproductive rate has not yet fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

In some parts of Britain, Japan, Korea and elsewhere reproductive rates have fallen well below 1.0, with many European countries heading the same way. Schools have been closing. Playgrounds are silent. Japan now makes more nappies for the elderly than for the young. Scenarios like these were recently unimaginable. The times are unprecedented.

Health and Wealth

Medicine became critical to nation states in the eighteenth century, when governments realized that public health might contribute to their nation’s survival. Where else would armies come from? The more people, the more recruits to the military. For over 200 years, the French have been keenly aware of the need to have as many of them as there were Germans.

In the early twentieth century as international tensions grew, pronatalism became state policy for all developed countries including the atheistic Soviet Union – The Cradle of Civilization and Liberty Equality and Fertility.

Emmanuel Macron echoed these ideas in early 2024. Alerting the French to their falling reproductive rates, he called for a demographic rearmament  Sex Fertility and France.

In his State of the Nation address, a few weeks ago, Putin called on the women of Russia to assist the current and perhaps future special military operations by having more babies.

South Korea’s recent declaration of martial law puzzled a lot of people. Where’s the crisis?  Its vanishing population puts it at growing risk of being over-run by North Korea who have no population crisis. Pretty soon, South Korea will only have a Dad’s Army.

The defense of our borders is just one concern rapidly declining or aging native populations pose for politicians. Despite giving out about immigration, politicians in the developed world have quietly allowed increasing immigration – even Trump seems to be coming around to the idea.

As their native populations shrink and as youngsters increasingly turn to shrinks instead of work, or can’t be enlisted because of pre-traumatic stress disorder, politicians recognize the need for others to do the menial work and pay the taxes needed to keep social structures in place.

Demographers in most advanced countries figure there are tons of babies being born in Sub-Saharan Africa, and there will be for some time to come. Where’s the problem, they openly say, we can let them all come here.

It looks like most Europeans figure these others might be good for athletic gold medals and our football teams, but they are diluting our national identities. Japan, Korea and Switzerland go further than just worrying – they don’t offer permission to enter other than on a temporary basis

There is another angle – can these others be depended on to die for us? Some militaries, like the American military, may be figuring that future wars will be robot wars and there is not the same need to be worried about a falling native population – Fertility the Moon and the Military.

Get Storks

That Time in History Thou May’st in Us Behold

For several decades, France, Korea, Japan and lately China and other countries have put schemes in place to boost native birth rates. Better parental leave and increasing financial incentives have been tried. Short of boosting the stork population, nothing seems to work.

There have also been debates about pollution as a cause of infertility.

SSRI antidepressants did not initiate the fertility problems which began before the SSRIs emerged but if 15% of our populations are on drugs that wipe-out our ability to and interest in making love, and compromise both male and female fertility, this is highly likely to stand in the way of being able to remedy the problems – Fertility and Desire and Pharmageddon and Fertility

We normally only think of informed consent in terms of the person about to be prescribed a drug.  But in both the sexual and fertility domains, surely a partner, who may be equally affected, should also be informed and have a say.  Given growing demographic concerns – what about a national conversation?

Sexual and Fertility effects of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors: What Role for Informed Consent has just been published.  A copy can be sent free to anyone on request.

The airwaves and print media right at the end of 2024 have featured a way to resolve the situation other than a pipeline from sub-Saharan Africa.  Resolve though is not quite the right word.

Cassandra like from the Walls of Troy, Geoffrey Hinton a godfather of A.I. has for some time been prophesying our doom if we let the Digital A.I. Horse into our lives and politics. From the start he has been saying that with A.I. there has always been scope for bad actors to avail of its superior-to-human intelligence but that he figured the potential for this to actually happen lay decades in the future – giving us some time to put controls in place if we have the wit to do so.

This year, since getting a Nobel Prize, he has changed his tune. He thinks the likelihood of bad actors taking over are higher than he once thought and things are developing so quickly and we have been so slow in thinking about the situation that we have probably passed a point of no return. We will definitely be living among entities that are smarter than ourselves and it is increasingly likely they will not be on our side. The crunch will arrive within two decades. Whether Geoff will live to see it will be touch and go matter.

Shipwreck of the Singular

I had a great editor for Shipwreck of the Singular. But when I ended the book with the outline of another option to the Hinton one, he protested vigorously at it being included at all, let alone as the key message. I was surprised. This was the only point at which I opted not to take his advice.

The final section of Shipwreck envisages a near future in which the machines take over. It offers an answer to the question – what can we do that they can’t?  The answer is that we can make people. This is not just a matter of conception and birth – we may not need people for that, although the results may not be the same. Pregnancy likely involves a lot more than adding series of cells to each other.

The most important bits of people making happen after birth and for years afterwards and likely for the rest of our lives. Babies and later infants do a lot to make themselves but they ideally need someone attuned to the stage they have reached and what might next be within their grasp – their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).

Are women better at this than men?  Are they naturally attuned to an infant’s and child’s ZPD or is that just social conditioning? The same issues come up at the end of life.  Is it a matter of social conditioning that women take on – get landed with – the job of caring for an increasingly infirm mother or father?  Could men do the job as well?

One way to answer some of these questions is to recognize that people making is the most important and creative job any of us gets called on to do. Truly accepting this would mean paying those who do it accordingly. If our people makers were paid more than CEOs or managers we might find out whether men can do it as well as women. The social conditioning element of women being dumped in menial caring roles might have to give way to a recognition that they are naturally better at critical work like this rather than just forced to do it.

Of course, the rearranging of the work force would not exclude men least of all excluding whatever it is that they can also offer.  A good deal of people making goes on in education and health.

Would this restructuring of society land a bunch of less intelligent, less useful and able proletarians – the word literally means offspring – to share space side by side with our new masters?

We might be living amongst machines that are more intelligent than us but they won’t be more moral. Being moral requires feelings – a body that senses and has an expiry date. An ability not just to recognize mistakes but to appreciate how our actions shape the person each of us ends up being.  Without this there can be no Good or Evil.

The machines will be amoral, neither good nor evil. If they take over and eliminate us, it will indicate that our story was meaningless from the beginning. Words like redemption never had a meaning. And Geoffrey need not have worried. Nothing will really have changed.

Not Quite the Ending

Before we are eliminated, however, some very intelligent machines might opt to run an experiment to get an answer to something that has puzzled lots of humans for millennia. Men may well bring some things to the creation of a person, but they almost certainly aren’t likely to be as good at creating and managing male egos as women are.

If person making is recognized as the most important work and rewarded accordingly, and women are recognized as better at it, will male egos survive the new dispensation? Perhaps they will. Perhaps women will recognize them as not particularly useful but interesting nonetheless. A spare rib to tickle.

Sara, little seed,
Little, violent, diligent seed.  Come let us look at the world
Glittering: this seed will speak,
Max, words!  There will be no other words in the world
But those our children speak.  What will she make of a world
Do you suppose, Max, of which she is made?

George Oppen: Sara in Her Father’s Arms