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Notes -
I'm quite whitepilled on this particular issue. In no particular order,
-This is definitely a cultural evolution issue. It will sort itself out, and not by 'replacement by the Amish' - high TFR subcultures will emerge from every group, and the ones that are also highly functional (eg, not the Amish/Hasidics/islamists) will dominate. You need to be isolated, limited in total population and insular to commit cultural suicide via celibacy and our culture is none of those. This is actually nothing to be too excited about, low TFR is a much less pressing problem than Malthusian collapse and I'm not eager to jump back on that heading.
-I'm very much not afraid of the developing world. I'm afraid for them, but probably their TFR drops fast enough that populations level out before coming to a very unpleasant head. Immigration is somewhat more complicated, but I think it is likewise self-correcting: pretty soon developing countries are going to have less surplus people and start seeing foreign poaching of their most able young people as the beggar-thy-neighbor strategy that it is. As usual this will be mostly bad for the people in developing countries (exit restrictions are bad) instead of us.
-There's definitely an element of 'making babies is extremely hard for women' that is understandable and understated. This can be broken down into 'pregnancy and childbirth suck', 'children are hard' - both are solvable!
Artificial wombs could exist quickly if there was political will for their development. Lacking them, the state could subsidize surrogacy (or outright fund it themselves), while building infrastructure for and normalizing same. Nations have experimented with communal child rearing (orphanages, kibbutzim) and the outcomes tend to be worse than nuclear families, but this seems solvable too. I'm especially bullish on AI taking a big role in this regard - even if a cold machine can never show a mother's love (#doubt), it can definitely take a big role in the baseline supervision role that parents spend a huge chunk of their time on, and be better at it too. (eg - kids at the park are much safer with an AI drone keeping ceaseless watch on them than with a parent glancing up from their phone every five minutes) Then you can focus on getting humans to provide the active nurturing - the actual fun part of parenting!
-Maybe this leads to us becoming very different that we currently are - more hedonistic, even less in touch with nature (eg: meat comes from the store), less responsible for the powerless in our care. But the same is true for every technology to some degree - suffering builds character, but we're still pretty happy about eradicating polio. Future humans aren't going to be shackled to my values, whether I like it or not, and this doesn't seem like an unreasonably dystopian outcome, especially compared to the other likely options.
-TFR is cratering just as longevity technology seems to be taking off. This is a happy coincidence!
-technological singularity more generally obviating any problem that only really gets bad 20/50/100 years from now
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