Fertility rate may be important but to me it’s not worth restricting (directly or indirectly) people’s personal choices for.
This is a radical libertarian view that most people don’t share. Is it worth restricting people’s access to hard drugs? Let’s abstract for a moment from the numerous negative secondary effects that come with the fact that hard drugs are illegal, as well as from the crimes committed by drug users: if we can imagine that hard drugs could be just eliminated from Earth completely, with a magic spell, should we do it, or we “shouldn’t restrict people’s choices”? With AI romantic partners, and other forms of tech, we do have a metaphorical magic wand: we could decide whether such products ever get created or not.
A lot of socially regressive ideas have been justified in the name of “raising the fertility rate” – for example, the rhetoric that gay acceptance would lead to fewer babies (as if gay people can simply “choose to be straight” and have babies the straight way).
The example that you give doesn’t work as evidence for your argument at all, due to the direct disanalogy: the “young man” from the “mainline story” which I outlined could want to have kids in the future or even wants to have kids already when he starts his experiment with the AI relationship, but his experience with the AI partner will prevent him from realising this desire and value over his future life.
I think it’s better to encourage people who are already interested in having kids to do so, through financial and other incentives.
Technology, products, and systems are not value-neutral. We are so afraid of consciously shaping our own values that we are happy to offload this to the blind free market whose objective is not to shape values that reflectively endorse the most.
This is a radical libertarian view that most people don’t share. Is it worth restricting people’s access to hard drugs? Let’s abstract for a moment from the numerous negative secondary effects that come with the fact that hard drugs are illegal, as well as from the crimes committed by drug users: if we can imagine that hard drugs could be just eliminated from Earth completely, with a magic spell, should we do it, or we “shouldn’t restrict people’s choices”? With AI romantic partners, and other forms of tech, we do have a metaphorical magic wand: we could decide whether such products ever get created or not.
The example that you give doesn’t work as evidence for your argument at all, due to the direct disanalogy: the “young man” from the “mainline story” which I outlined could want to have kids in the future or even wants to have kids already when he starts his experiment with the AI relationship, but his experience with the AI partner will prevent him from realising this desire and value over his future life.
Technology, products, and systems are not value-neutral. We are so afraid of consciously shaping our own values that we are happy to offload this to the blind free market whose objective is not to shape values that reflectively endorse the most.