Hypocrit

The existence of condoms and women wanting normal life. Also the cost, time and money involved in creating a competent person.

countries which are doing well,

lol phony metrics. the entire planet is burning.

also declining in countries which are doing well, across all social strata

So when someone says "fucked up world" you imagine not country destroying wars, fascist presidents at the top of biggest countries and threat of a looming world war but how well someone's economic situation is? Interesting perspective.

Also I don't think anything I have said provides a simple explanation for declining birth rates. It simply suggests an ordering between AI chatbots and fucked up world as causes of declining birth rates. So your comment doesn't really apply.

It's contraceptives. It started dropping as soon as they became widely available, starting in the West, and never stopped. (The norms around family rearing certainly changed as well, in response)

People really like sex. Kids get a more mixed reception.

Yeah I am aware of this fact too. The effect of sentiments about life and economic level are I think interleaved in someways. Sentiments about life might have a bigger effect when you are in a certain economically comfortable zone that you can really start to think about how the future of the world will effect your life. In fucked up places, people just live day to day and are in survival mode. I believe I have once read something that goes along the lines of "poorer demographics generally have tendency to make more children because they think that more children is the most sure way to secure their near future for when they get older". Another possibility is that in a certain comfortable economic zone you have more time and opportunity to receive knowledge about what is going on in the world at large and therefore get psychologically affected by it more. In survival mode you don't have much other chance than really just thinking about day to day businesses.

I think it's because we've "solved boredom". Sometimes with heavy, hectic, stressful events that come one after the other, sometimes with passive media, or algorithmically generated media, or doomscrolling: shows, clips, or posts designed to engage or entertain, other times with little clicker, distraction-style games; all of it seems to just drain every last drop of dopamine anyone can muster until there's no room for anyone to have volition of their own. It tends to put a damper on the amount of time and energy one has for more longer meaningful interactions, and you end up almost, but not quite, completely content to microdose human interaction with single-serving friends by making comments on posts like this one (or the various parasocial interactions with internet micro-celebrities, or much worse, hallucinating a meaningful conversation with a statistically probable paragraph generator like the ones in the post).

I have the answer: https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310

"Cogsuckers"!! Thanks for expanding my vocabulary!

AI is no better.

Thing is, having people grow accustomed to the idea of romantic ai bots has very negative implications.

AI on it's own is already problematic, every clanker is a yes clanker, the erosion of common knowledge and perception, the polution,.... But with romance/erotica involved it's probably not too far fetched that there will be people who grow up into the idea that panties should drop just because you said hi. That's how we get incels and rapists.

Did you mean to post this comment somewhere else? Not trying to be insulting but it just feels a little out of context.

I swear the next global superpower will be determined by whatever country has the least problems.