I want to say that I appreciate posts like this by parents in the community. I’m an alignment researcher and given how fast things are moving, I do worry that I’m under-weighting the amount of impact I could lose in the next 10 years if I have kids. I feel like ‘short timelines’ make my decision harder even though I’m convinced I want kids in 5 or so years from now.
Some considerations I’ve been having lately:
Should I move far away from my parents, which would make it harder to depend on someone for childcare on the weekends and evenings? Will we be close to my future wife’s parents?
Should I be putting in some time to make additional income I can eventually use to make my life easier in 5 years? Maybe it’s easier for me to do so now before AGI crunch time?
The all-encompassing nature of AGI makes things like the share of household work a potential issue for a couple of years. I feel bad for thinking that I may have to ask my future wife if I can reduce housework in those couple of years of crunch time (let’s say 2 years max). It feels selfish… Ultimately, this will just be a decision my future wife and I will have to make. I do want to do at least 50% of the housework outside of the crunch time.
It particularly feels bizarre in the context of some wild AGI thing we aren’t even confident about how it will go. But like, if someone is the CEO of a startup, it feels more reasonable for their partner to take up additional housework if things get intense for a while. Or maybe a better example is that a pandemic is starting and one of the parents is head of some bio-risk org, I would find it odd if they tried to keep the household dynamic the same throughout the crucial time to limit the impact of the pandemic?
Overall I’m trying to be a good future husband and stuff like this weighs on me and I don’t want to make the decision in some terrible and naive way like “my career is more important than yours.” :/
Jacques—these are really tough questions. Deciding whether to have kids is one thing in a relatively technologically & economically stable society (e.g. 12th century Europe). It seems incredibly uncertain in 2023, given expected accelerations in certain technologies (e.g. AI), and short time horizons for influencing their development.
I will say this though: probably in every generation since the Industrial Revolution, young potential parents have faced what seemed to be historically unprecedented rates of acceleration in technology and social disruption, that required their urgent attention. When I had my first kid in the mid-90s, it seemed like the Internet would change everything, China would overtake the West very soon, EU integration would change the whole economic fabric of Europe, etc—and that all sort of happened, but it didn’t really change family life all that much. I’m glad I didn’t wait to see how it would all play out, and that I didn’t devote every waking hour to trying to nudge Internet development in more human-aligned directions.
In other words, the near-term future might be radically different from now, but that’s been true for a couple hundred years, and parents and kids carry on doing their thing regardless.
I want to say that I appreciate posts like this by parents in the community. I’m an alignment researcher and given how fast things are moving, I do worry that I’m under-weighting the amount of impact I could lose in the next 10 years if I have kids. I feel like ‘short timelines’ make my decision harder even though I’m convinced I want kids in 5 or so years from now.
Some considerations I’ve been having lately:
Should I move far away from my parents, which would make it harder to depend on someone for childcare on the weekends and evenings? Will we be close to my future wife’s parents?
Should I be putting in some time to make additional income I can eventually use to make my life easier in 5 years? Maybe it’s easier for me to do so now before AGI crunch time?
The all-encompassing nature of AGI makes things like the share of household work a potential issue for a couple of years. I feel bad for thinking that I may have to ask my future wife if I can reduce housework in those couple of years of crunch time (let’s say 2 years max). It feels selfish… Ultimately, this will just be a decision my future wife and I will have to make. I do want to do at least 50% of the housework outside of the crunch time.
It particularly feels bizarre in the context of some wild AGI thing we aren’t even confident about how it will go. But like, if someone is the CEO of a startup, it feels more reasonable for their partner to take up additional housework if things get intense for a while. Or maybe a better example is that a pandemic is starting and one of the parents is head of some bio-risk org, I would find it odd if they tried to keep the household dynamic the same throughout the crucial time to limit the impact of the pandemic?
Overall I’m trying to be a good future husband and stuff like this weighs on me and I don’t want to make the decision in some terrible and naive way like “my career is more important than yours.” :/
Jacques—these are really tough questions. Deciding whether to have kids is one thing in a relatively technologically & economically stable society (e.g. 12th century Europe). It seems incredibly uncertain in 2023, given expected accelerations in certain technologies (e.g. AI), and short time horizons for influencing their development.
I will say this though: probably in every generation since the Industrial Revolution, young potential parents have faced what seemed to be historically unprecedented rates of acceleration in technology and social disruption, that required their urgent attention. When I had my first kid in the mid-90s, it seemed like the Internet would change everything, China would overtake the West very soon, EU integration would change the whole economic fabric of Europe, etc—and that all sort of happened, but it didn’t really change family life all that much. I’m glad I didn’t wait to see how it would all play out, and that I didn’t devote every waking hour to trying to nudge Internet development in more human-aligned directions.
In other words, the near-term future might be radically different from now, but that’s been true for a couple hundred years, and parents and kids carry on doing their thing regardless.