stopMotionSickness
weird bozo
- Mar 2, 2026
- 56
I just watched a video about people starting romantic relationships with AI chatbots. It's pretty bleak, as I'm sure even the people having them would agree, and the commentator went a good ways to point that out. He put some emphasis on sympathy for the loneliness, and mentioned in passing how there's a need for 3rd spaces and whatnot.
But it got me thinking. AI relationships are sad, but to only look at that feels like such a narrow view of the problem that social behavior of humans as a species is basically just failing. Like did you know the global average birth rate since 1960 has halved? 60% of the world population now lives in countries with below-replacement rates, and the remainder is exclusively poor countries. And the moment a country's economic conditions improve, the fertility rate drops. Most estimates put the global population never passing 11 billion (after African economies improve).
Furthermore, I just found out that no country has ever reversed their status from lower to higher fertility rates. Like no country in history has ever gone below replacement and returned to above replacement. And no country has ever gone below 1.0 births/woman and then come back out of it. Even when they do try to fight it by policy. Even when Denmark gave huge mandatory paid leave and tax credit, and even when Hungary basically did state-forced birthing, their birth rates slightly increased for a while but then continued to decline anyways.
That makes me ask: even if we were to build 3rd spaces, would that actually improve our social habits? Like the 3rd spaces weren't an issue in the 60s, where that wasn't a thing and birth rates were high anyway. Same for the 90s, when 4 times as many people had 10+ friends and only a quarter as many people had no friends, as compared to today. Why would we think that 3rd spaces is the missing ingredient, when they've always been absent? It really just seems like the moment we succeed materially, our social behaviors just fail.
And that gets me thinking about the context of it all. It took not even a century for the birth rates and friendships across the world to be decimated, and there is no convincing evidence that that's ever going to come back. Then start thinking about how the rest of everything is failing now. Dictators and fascist parties, not even a century after the horrors of ww2, are already thriving across the world, while the democracies only crumble. Forest fires destroy millions of acres every single year. The rate at which species are going extinct is about the same as when the dinosaurs died. The total population of insects has halved since 1970. If you ask any ecologist, that fact alone is practically apocalyptic. And that's not to mention how wild animal populations have fallen by 70% in the same time.
And then think about it; mass extinctions, even the one that killed the dinosaurs, usually take many thousands of years to actually play out. Any particular spinosaurus wouldn't have noticed all that much, except that it's just really hard all the time to get enough food to survive. But that was just how the world was, since the day its parents were born to the day its children died. I can't help but feel like in we're all in the middle of the same thing. I think a lot of people keep ringing the alarm about how everything is "about to" go down hill, but miss that we already are a good ways downhill, and with a lot of momentum that's yet to catch up with us. To complain about people having relationships with AI feels like saying something should be done about the smell the growing pile of corpses is making. The only solace (if you can call it that) is that the loss will (probably) take place on a time scale no one will truly appreciate in their one lifetime.
So yeah idk, some late night thoughts is all. maybe its a bit overdone but idk I just somehow never realized how solid all the data about anything important is so overwhelmingly like this.
But it got me thinking. AI relationships are sad, but to only look at that feels like such a narrow view of the problem that social behavior of humans as a species is basically just failing. Like did you know the global average birth rate since 1960 has halved? 60% of the world population now lives in countries with below-replacement rates, and the remainder is exclusively poor countries. And the moment a country's economic conditions improve, the fertility rate drops. Most estimates put the global population never passing 11 billion (after African economies improve).
Furthermore, I just found out that no country has ever reversed their status from lower to higher fertility rates. Like no country in history has ever gone below replacement and returned to above replacement. And no country has ever gone below 1.0 births/woman and then come back out of it. Even when they do try to fight it by policy. Even when Denmark gave huge mandatory paid leave and tax credit, and even when Hungary basically did state-forced birthing, their birth rates slightly increased for a while but then continued to decline anyways.
That makes me ask: even if we were to build 3rd spaces, would that actually improve our social habits? Like the 3rd spaces weren't an issue in the 60s, where that wasn't a thing and birth rates were high anyway. Same for the 90s, when 4 times as many people had 10+ friends and only a quarter as many people had no friends, as compared to today. Why would we think that 3rd spaces is the missing ingredient, when they've always been absent? It really just seems like the moment we succeed materially, our social behaviors just fail.
And that gets me thinking about the context of it all. It took not even a century for the birth rates and friendships across the world to be decimated, and there is no convincing evidence that that's ever going to come back. Then start thinking about how the rest of everything is failing now. Dictators and fascist parties, not even a century after the horrors of ww2, are already thriving across the world, while the democracies only crumble. Forest fires destroy millions of acres every single year. The rate at which species are going extinct is about the same as when the dinosaurs died. The total population of insects has halved since 1970. If you ask any ecologist, that fact alone is practically apocalyptic. And that's not to mention how wild animal populations have fallen by 70% in the same time.
And then think about it; mass extinctions, even the one that killed the dinosaurs, usually take many thousands of years to actually play out. Any particular spinosaurus wouldn't have noticed all that much, except that it's just really hard all the time to get enough food to survive. But that was just how the world was, since the day its parents were born to the day its children died. I can't help but feel like in we're all in the middle of the same thing. I think a lot of people keep ringing the alarm about how everything is "about to" go down hill, but miss that we already are a good ways downhill, and with a lot of momentum that's yet to catch up with us. To complain about people having relationships with AI feels like saying something should be done about the smell the growing pile of corpses is making. The only solace (if you can call it that) is that the loss will (probably) take place on a time scale no one will truly appreciate in their one lifetime.
So yeah idk, some late night thoughts is all. maybe its a bit overdone but idk I just somehow never realized how solid all the data about anything important is so overwhelmingly like this.
