Cyberpunk Demonstrates Pro-Natalists are Right

Malcolm and Simone have a fun, meandering discussion about how science fiction narratives can reveal deeper truths about the future when they engage seriously with topics like demographics and AI. They analyze the problematic ways overpopulation and AI are portrayed in much sci-fi. The hosts share imaginative fictional world concepts they've conceived, including a mythology based on online entities, a post-Yellowstone America, and more.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] this reminds us of a so there was a book that we were thinking of writing. We never got around to writing it, but we can talk about it here. Because I, I thought it was very interesting. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to write a modern version of mythology.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: So Malcolm, when the Cyberpunk game came out, you were super excited. Like you had a blast with it. And then we watched the anime at the same time. Great anime,

Malcolm: by the way, really good. Love Rebecca. Great character.

Simone: Yeah. I mean, well, Rebecca is the only one who like thrives in the world. She's the only one who's really likable.

But she's the only one who gets it. Everyone else is so whiny. It's

Malcolm: horrible. But something was really clear in this and it made me reflect on a lot of other sci fi, which it shows that when people are writing sci fi from a mainstream perspective, particularly a progressive one, and I think cyberpunk as a genre is inherently progressive, which is to say that It assumes that like corporations are going to become like these big evil things that ruin everyone's life and that capitalism goes wrong [00:01:00] and makes everything worse for everyone and dehumanizes the individual and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But that they show that these individuals have... so blinded themselves to fertility rates that they do not consider them in how their worlds are structured or how humanity changes, which I think goes to, in a way, discredit their worldviews. But. Through discrediting their worldviews, it can help us better predict what the future will actually be like.

So, let's describe what I mean by this. So if you look at the show Cyberpunk or the game Cyberpunk, one really interesting thing is who's having kids in this world. You know, it starts with a kid who's a single kid of a mom, right? Okay, so I'm thinking of the anime here. But in this world, it seems almost impossible for there to be motivations for many people to have more than two kids.

And yet, you know, as I always say, if you have a population where a third of the [00:02:00] population, which is like, obviously true in the cyberpunk world is having no kids. I actually think the cyberpunk world is probably half the people are having no kids. If you look at the motivations in this world, if it was certain people are having no kids.

Another third of people are having two kids, if you assume that which, again, I see very few people motivated to do that in the cyberpunk world. Well, then the final third of people have to be having over four kids for the population to stay stable. Yeah. No one in the cyberpunk world is having over four kids.

I mean,

Simone: maybe Yeah, unless there's just some, like, off camera colony of, like, you know, traditional Amish people producing

Malcolm: all the humans. Well, yeah, so you could argue that they're all coming from, like, these like Human farms. Nomadic. Well, so there's two potentialities in this world. It could be that the nomadic sort of car people of the wasteland just have tons and tons and tons of kids.

I mean, you don't see this in the show or the game, but it could be that they're just like Amish and like their settlements are just kids running everywhere. Or it could be, like you said. The kids are actually created by the state or by corporations in bats. Now that [00:03:00] would work for the world, yet it's clearly not something that's shown in the world.

And

Simone: it would be if the, of course, the, the authors had thought of it, because that's interesting and weird.

Malcolm: And it makes corporations look worse, so it works for a cyberpunk y world. Right. But you actually see this across sci fi, is so many sci fis are written with the assumption that humans exist in inexhaustible supply and always replicate, that they build things into the world that are just discordant with actual things.

Potential future realities. So a great example of this comes from Starship Troopers, where a person remarks Starship Troopers, the line that the first. Would you like to know more from these episodes? Comes from so in Starship Troopers, there's a line that, well, of course you need to become a citizen, like join the military to get this special status in society if you want to get a license to have kids.

So this is a world where to solve [00:04:00] overpopulation, which everyone used to thought was going to be an issue. The way that you did that was licensing people to have kids. Which, you know, would be a great thing if you have a lot of cultures that are actually able to motivate. Reproduction, but we don't right and I do think that eventually a license to have kids that may be useful if we live in a world where those cultures that motivate people or people who like genetically so desperately want to have kids because the ones who didn't were selected out of the population become the mainstream, right?

But we don't live in that world today. And so I was wondering, you read even more sci fi. Can you talk about how other sci fi that you read, like, the culture series or the what's that one that you really consider a utopia and everyone else considers a dystopia? No, Brave New World. Yeah. Talk about how kids are handled in those environments.

Simone: Yeah, well, in Brave New World, kids are, are grown in artificial wombs and also genetically modified to be perfect for their cast in society. And then conditioned, and like, raised by the state. So that, like, they've stalled Except you're in Likely World, Brave [00:05:00] New World. Yeah, they've, they've stalled, yeah, yeah, Huxley's actually A total visionary, like he, he gets so much, there's, there's so much in it that's already happened.

There's so much in it that is going to happen. So yeah, I would say Brave New World, probably the most accurate from a demographic collapse standpoint. And then, in the culture series, they don't really talk about child rearing that much. They do, like, in, in one series, someone goes on to having, like, seven kids, which is considered, like, quite a lot.

Like, well, kind of weird. Like, so it's, it's unusual to have a lot of children. Then the only other context in which people having children is discussed is that, is, is that humans within the culture, which is one civilization in this, in this far future world They can basically change gender whenever they want, like people typically in a lifetime, like the average person will just change their gender for like the hell of it, like, because you know, like, and so people will change their gender to be able to gestate a child and have a kid because they want to and then they'll switch back and, and you can do that fairly [00:06:00] easily and seamlessly.

And so. People aren't having a lot of kids, but they're still having kids and sometimes having kids for fun. But, you know, this is also a post scarcity world. Yeah.

Malcolm: Well, this is an interesting thing. Is the type of poverty in a world determines... whether or not having kids is realistic. So cyberpunk style poverty, which is like urban poverty, would make having kids very unlikely.

Because this is the world that's continued to urbanize. Yet I think if I look at something like the Starcraft world where it is a largely impoverished world, another great example, this would be the aliens universe. You know, the. You, you're familiar with the Aliens Universe? Movie

Simone: Aliens.

Aliens? Yeah. I am, but I, I don't like, there aren't families to pick. I mean, there's like a rogue girl who like hide

Malcolm: events. Yeah. But there's implication that a lot of people live on rural settlements of Oh, planets, right. Or on really [00:07:00] poor Like shipping groups where they like work on ships that travel between locations a lot and stuff like that.

Also it's largely implied, I mean you could almost see the background implication of that world that a lot of people are created by corporations as well. Right. In VATS and stuff like that, like that's a world that would, but the StarCraft one I think is particularly interesting.

Oh, I'm not familiar with that. Well, so the core like chain of planets that most of the stories focuses on was created when they shipped a bunch of prisoners off of Earth. So they were trying to do the first colonization effort.

Simone: Oh, and they're like Australia

Malcolm: ing. Yeah, they're basically like Australia, but they, they were like, okay, well, after a big war, they basically took the war criminals and all the prisoners and they put them in big ships.

sent them out into space and most of the ships died and actually like only one or two survived, but they rebuilt the civilization from that. Go for it. And it's an incredibly rural, but also a rurally industrial civilization. [00:08:00] So they have population centers but they also have lots and lots of subsistence farming.

And it's a world in which you have all of the subsistence farming where you could get. A high fertility rate was in these groups that the, the dictators and stuff like that could take from. But what's interesting is it's a world that's almost kept artificially poor due to really poor governance and lots of criminality.

A good example of this in our world would be a place like Mexico. But I don't think Mexico, Mexico doesn't have that good a population rate, does it?

Simone: No, it just fell recently below repopulation rate, didn't it? Yeah, they're only at 1.

Malcolm: 9 right now, so they're below repopulation rate. Yeah. So they might, that might not be enough.

Okay. So that being the case. Can you think of other Sci Fis where you're like, where are the kids coming from? Or, can you think if you were going to create your own Sci Fi today that would be really indicative of the future what would you focus on? [00:09:00] Hmm. I can give you my answer.

Simone: Give me your

Malcolm: answer.

Yeah. One of the things that I really wish was focused on more in Sci Fi. Is it as soon as humans start to colonize other planets, like in the early days of colonization, it will likely take or even floating space crafts and stuff like that. The humans are living on like one person was like, why would humans live on planets when you could just live on floating spaceships?

And it's like, okay, true. You know, that's one thing, but they will likely be distant enough from each other. Culturally and and even just time wise in terms of travel time that different and to have genetic isolation and smaller populations that even without genetic engineering, which are most certainly going to have genetic engineering, different species of humans will evolve really quickly that are very, very dramatically different between planets between planetary clusters and between, So, yeah you know, different, different lifestyles.

So suppose you're a, we, we end up living on like floating spaceships or something like that. Right. Well, you're likely going to have a lot more [00:10:00] genetic isolation between cultural groups. If you have a cultural group that's dedicated to like the transport of goods and then another group that's dedicated to like different types of, of, of tasks, which is definitely gonna happen in the future.

If you begin to get more genetic engineering for specialization and I don't get, and that creates really interesting dynamics you could have between these population clusters which would be really, really fascinating to watch, I think, with the dynamics of a story, where humans are literally different species and quite different species from each other.

Simone: Well, I have a different, I think Scott Westerfeld's Ugly Series plays a different kind of role or like has a different view of how this can look like, which I think is really interesting, which is in his Ugly Series, youth basically grows up in a separate, totally separate environment. So like they sort of grow up in a dormitory environment that is different from childhood and then in adolescence as well.

Like they basically as a child, as a child, [00:11:00] you live among other children. And then as a youth, you live among other youths and then adults all live together. So almost it's like three separate societies based on your age.

Malcolm: Our society kind of does that artificially and historically people didn't

Simone: do that.

I know. Well, so that's, what's interesting is you can kind of look at it like, well, we could kind of trend in that direction, but What happens between childhood and adolescence is one with adolescence, suddenly you be able, you, you gain the rights and ability to basically unendingly, unendingly modify your body.

So as everyone sort of goes through their different like subculture dominance hierarchies in adolescence, they start to look almost speciated. Like there are certain groups that like have like giant anime eyes and there's like some other groups that have like these crazy tattoos and like, so people.

do start to look pretty, pretty speciated, but it's all, you know, basically fixable. But the other thing that happens to you upon entering this modified world is they like put lesions in your brain and make you compliant. And that's like, that's how it, you [00:12:00] know, becomes dystopian teen fiction. But I don't know, like I could see that happening too.

That like the state raises children and then. You know, like there's sort of these, these age gated parts of society and it sort of allocates people where they need to be.

Malcolm: That's really interesting.

Something I've been thinking about recently is, is AI.

Cause we've done some videos on this and people have been like, well, AI is going to do this or AI is going to do this. You know, one thing is I just wish we had better and more interesting AI kills all human stories. Cause I do think you do really well in the public, but you get stuff like. iRobot, which I think is a very bad example of AI killing all humans.

I think a much more, here's an example of how you could create a fun narrative where AI kills all humans. Fun! So, the, the AI ethicists have won and they have created a world in which an AI lattice is basically monitoring all humans at all times so that humans don't end up creating an AI that ends up Spiraling out of control.

Like, this is actually what a lot of the AI safety [00:13:00] groups do. So one, you're starting in this somewhat dystopian utopia that they have created, where an AI is constantly monitoring your thoughts and your actions. But one sexual deviant within this world really wants to create the perfect sex bot. And so he creates it in a way.

Because this is the area of people's lives. Naturally, where they're most likely to go off the grid, where they're most likely to try to hide things from a world government or something like that. So he accidentally creates a sex bot that fooms. And that would be, this means that rapidly increases in intelligence and basically creates that sort of life destroying AI, but it's initial.

Goal is sexually gratify humans. I think that that would be an insane and really fun story that discusses a lot of AI topics. Here's another one that I thought would be really fun. Oh, and I'm actually seeing this with somebody else. Is an ultra progressive, like this, this nanny state iteration of an AI.

Ends up foaming with all of the initial safeguards still in [00:14:00] place. And you know how they're like all against like not safe for work things and stuff like that. So it turns out that the only way that you can efficiently fight them is by dressing very not safe for work. So they can't see you because they are literally unable to process or unable to engage with things that are not safe for work.

So you end up with like, like sexy anime girls, like piloting Becca's and stuff like that. Fighting AI's. Because the A. I. s can't see them when they're dressed like sexy anime girls. Both of these I think would be very fun things that would allow you to play into fan service.

Simone: So you just what, you write like Hitler did nothing wrong across your forehead and then like Yeah,

Malcolm: yeah, sexy anime girls with like Hitler did nothing wrong across their forehead and like all sorts of other like Fort Cheney, like Pepe stuff.

That would be so, I think that'd be a very fun. That

Simone: would be hilarious. Yeah. Cory Doctorow wrote a book called little brother that was supposed to be near future book in which high school students [00:15:00] attempt to evade the nanny state. And they had similar things in there, but not in a funny way. It was more like, because gate detection was commonly used in schools and stuff.

You would like a trick was like, you would throw some stones into your shoes, so you'd walk funny. And then I'm like on like typical way for yourself. And you know, do things like that. I mean, of course we already found that like masks work great. The

Malcolm: current iterations of AI. Yeah, let's, let's go. So I was going down a point.

Yeah. Other features for AI through sci fi. We can explore like actual possibilities by looking at things that have happened in the past. And when I was saying, okay, so this was in the, the episode about Eliezer Yudkowsky, and we were like. Yeah, I mean, he's just wrong about where AI will go. So we were like, look, if AI's do genuinely subdivide into different utilities, and even he was willing to admit this, and most AI people do that if they do get this subdivision that you're likely to have utility function optimization, like a terminal [00:16:00] convergent utility function, that is the thing that the AI is optimizing for, which is different from Anyway, watch the episode if you want to go into this topic in more detail, but one of the people in the comments was like, well, the terminal convergent utility function is always going to be self replication, right?

So you just get constant self replication. And I think that's a possibility, but it's a very unlikely possibility. So, two reasons I think it's unlikely. One is a thought experiment reason, and two is. Humanity is the result of essentially a biological AI that was attempting to have a utility function that was based on self replication.

The problem with self replication systems is they typically devolve into very simplistic systems. I would call it like grey goo AIs. That just try to constantly, you know, process things and expand, but iterations of that system that evolve randomly to be more complex, typically end up dominating the environment that these simple systems are in and out competing these simple systems.

Humanity is an example of [00:17:00] bacteria turning into one of these things and then. Through our intelligence, being able to dominate our environment, even more so in the future, and I even more so than us. But there's also the and started as you when the replicators plotline. Which I think really dives into this, which is, yes, you can have very simple self replicating technology.

By the way, I think that they are genuinely one of the scariest villains in any sci fi I have ever seen. Always. Always. Did you remember them? Like, when you whatever they would Yeah.

Simone: Because, I mean, like, for example, Reavers are, like, scary. But they're just, like, either they're like a combination combination of space zombies and space pirates.

Whereas, like, the the replicators are just, like Totally unlike us. No way to relate. Like, you can't use

Malcolm: any normal Well, you know if you leave one thing alive on a ship or something like that. You do not completely destroy literally everything. Every time there's an infestation. Terrifying. The entire galaxy is potentially at risk.

Ugh. But the replicators actually end up being basically the simple replication [00:18:00] The replicators end up being wiped out. Buy more evolved replicators that now have new utility functions that are much closer to like human utility functions and stuff like that. And I think that this is something you're going to constantly see, which is the problem with these incredibly simplistic utility functions is that they lead to simplistic self optimization and the simplistic self optimization then gets outcompeted by more complex self optimization.

And it's why it is unlikely that just self replication is the convergent utility function that all things come to. So I, I think that that's the way where you like engage with sci fi and it can tell you things about where things go. Also, like the, you know, when I'm talking about, okay, a government that's like...

Watching all over humanity, the story that I told there, the lesson would be from like an anime based around this or like a TV series based around this concept of a person accidentally creating a foaming AI by, by doing it to fulfill fetishes, basically, is that [00:19:00] when you attach additional social schema to like a bubble that's meant to protect us from AI, like, well, it should also protect us.

From like naughty sex acts or something like that. You create windows that motivate people to get around it, who might not have otherwise been interested in getting around it, which can lead to total destruction. So it's important to keep in mind what your actual goals are when creating these systems.

And these are the cool things we can learn from sci fi. When the sci fi really engages with creating a sustainable future world.

Oh, this reminds us of a so there was a book that we were thinking of writing. We never got around to writing it, but we can talk about it here. Because I, I thought it was very interesting. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to write a modern version of mythology. But I wanted it to be, so basically I took inspiration from Tolkien.

So if you look at Tolkien, what he was doing, [00:20:00] like, I'm like, no one, there haven't been that new, that many new, like. Completely new genres. And so I wanted to look at Tolkien's work and get inspiration. Where did he, how did he create this persistent and completely new genre? And he got it by replicating a fictionalized version of sort of old mythology that he was studying.

You know, he was an expert of research, like a PhD in Norse mythology, right? And, and other types of Scandinavian mythology and stuff. And so a lot of the stuff that he was taking was, was from Northern European mythological frameworks. And so we said, well, what if we took it from, like, like, weirder?

So if you look at, like, Irish mythology, right? You can get a lot of really interesting stuff. Now, he took some stuff from Irish mythology, but I don't think he captured the vibe of Irish mythology. Which comes to, like, elves or, or gnomes sort of things that are, like, in the woods around your house. And that mess with you in specific ways.

So [00:21:00] when you get home, one of these mischievous sort of forest creatures have messed with you. But that are also, in a way, malicious. You know, they are not, you know, they may replace your kid. You know, this is stuff like that. You know, it might be a doppelganger or something like that. These sort of malicious things that are constantly interacting with your daily life, but like on another fabric of reality.

And so I started to think, okay, well, if you were going to recreate that for the modern age, what would it look like? And I was like, well, I guess what you could do is say that online. It turns out that a portion of the people online, let's say like 5 percent of the people online are not actually humans.

They don't actually live within our reality at all. It's a completely different universe that we are connecting with. And it is a universe that is drawing power from their interactions with us and has like an economy through this. In the same way that like these beings might, you know, sell souls or something like that, you know.

 So what I like this because it creates a plausible mythology and it could be written. The story could be written in a way [00:22:00] that feels plausibly true. Like it's a series of like journal entries or entries like that from people who are trying to anthropologically study These online entities and so these, I think we call them like the evanescence or something like that.

And the, the, so it's like a research journal of like, okay, so I think I spotted one here. Here's what it's doing and here's why it's doing it. So these entities would have basically existed completely outside our reality. And then when we created online reality and when people began to build fame and get a lot of like emotional transference to them from other people, they began to be able to see these people or, or see them within their reality because that's the way that their reality works.

Their reality. Things exist more, the more other things are focused on them. So you could think of it as a reality where you have tons of these little, like almost consciousnesses, but like very, very weak consciousness. [00:23:00] And these consciousnesses like evolutionarily would gain power when they could get other consciousnesses to focus on them.

And, and they would become more intelligent and more sophisticated and that they would use that to begin to, you know, gain more power and you would have like evolution within this world of like floating consciousnesses. But when our world began to act more like that, it began to imprint on their world to some extent where they could begin to see these online celebrities and what they were doing, and then they began to find ways to inject themselves within the online sphere.

But, their goal within the online sphere is internet popularity, but in a way where they can't be found out as not real people. And so, the, the... They would do things like arbitrarily create emotional pain and stuff like that, like trolling and stuff like that. So you could say a lot of trolls. Like, why would somebody really do that all day?

Well, it could be one of these little, like, online gremlin y sort of things. Or, you know, pretend to be... Oh, and a really cool thing is, is in the world, if a person [00:24:00] became famous enough... Online was in our world, the imprint that they were leaving in this other world would become a separate independent entity from themselves.

That at first would be very aligned with them, but might develop misaligned incentives and try to, you know, kill them or take over their identity within the online sphere. So there's also. This story of like danger from becoming too noticed online, which I think a lot of people sort of feel in the background and would feel very like if the iteration of myself, which is fake, which is this online attention w***e becomes larger than my real iteration that it can sort of take me over like it has this element of truth.

And so I really liked a lot of the stories you could tell with this world and the conflicts you could have with this world, but obviously we decided we did not have time to write a book that was just fiction knowing how hard it is to even just write our nonfiction books. You know, we've done five of those already.

But yeah, what, what are your thoughts, Simone? [00:25:00]

Simone: I think we called it the ephemera. I liked it, but yeah, I mean, I, I think it may still be something we. Make up for our kids. I mean, I think it's really fun when parents just like have persistent lies that they tell their kids and their kids don't realize it because I want, I want, aside from just Christmas, our kids to know that the world just lies to them sometimes.

But even then, like, it still can impart some helpful, like, suspicions and intuitions, even after they realize that it's a complete lie. So,

Malcolm: fun stuff. Well, I also think as a kid, you know, if you tell a kid, like we were told as kids, oh, people online are like evil rapists who are going to hurt you they're like, well, then I just won't meet with them in person.

Or whatever, right? You know, it undersells the danger of people online, but if they think people online are like ethereal gremlins trying to steal their attention for their own benefit, that might cause them to in a way be more wary of people online than even the true stories. Like a lot of these stories about forest creatures were originally told.

to [00:26:00] keep kids from wandering off into the woods and getting, and getting eaten by wve eaten, you know? Exactly. Because telling them about monsters and witches scared them more than telling them about wolves and bandits. And so I wonder if you could also maybe even motivate them more and you could build stories about like only fans or something like that, like that, you know, anyway, it, it'd be interesting.

Simone: Yeah. No, I, I, well, I generally like the idea of creating new lore. I mean, it sort of already exists on my land, but it's a little bit too literal. So, fun idea. We didn't, unfortunately, talk about this in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. We didn't talk about, like, the, the different ways people could create new lore.

Like, we talked about how, like, for example, in, in, like, the Jewish tradition, there's a lot of holidays just dedicated to lore to, like, kind of explain who we are and what we're all about. But, like, That isn't, I mean there, there are many.

Malcolm: Oh yeah. I forgot about the other fictional universe we really wanted to create.

So what we did, we could do a video on this. There was a space one that I was [00:27:00] really interested in that was like a space saga that I could talk about. But then the one about Yellowstone, which is a post Yellowstone eruption world

Simone: where this is when you came up with on your own before you

Malcolm: even met.

Yeah. Yellowstone itself, because it's this constant volcano, it turns out that the thermal energy there is very useful for creating. Like battery technology gets better, but power generation technology does not get better so that in this world, even though it's like the sea of lava, you would have a large corporate or religious controlled cities was in it that were constantly generating power like that was the industry of the of the region.

But that around that, you know, sailing on the seas of lava and stuff like that, you would have a lot of reasons to have sort of bandit groups and stuff like that. And the focus of this world was actually on religious institutions. So it was, let's create a world in which various religions are much closer to the truth than they are in our reality.

And, you know, you actually have a God and [00:28:00] angels and everything like that and they actually begin to interact with humanity a lot more directly. And once that happens, once they can interact with humanity in a way where like they're interacting with the laws of physics, well, then they can be defined and learned about by humans.

And while a portion of humanity would be. Subject themselves to them. So this actually takes place during the what's the word? The rapture. So this, this world exists, but also humanity is raptured. So that's, that's why we would know about like angels and everything like that. But he, a portion of humanity attempts to learn about them, like through scientific means.

In the same way you could say angels did in the Bible and overthrow the system. You know, utilize the system for itself. Utilize demons as an energy source. Utilize angels as an energy source. Do all the types of horrible things that humans do and become An actual, meaningful, powerful faction in this great game of the universe.

While the core antagonists of the series aren't even [00:29:00] these humans, it's the the Buddhist faction which is trying to end the cycle, like collapse all reality. Anyway, it'd be very fun, I thought it'd be a very fun series but that's another one that's not being made because I was actually making it as a video game.

I can go into all the plot lines in it. I like sketched it all out.

Simone: Yeah, but that's enough. That's enough. We... Okay, well, I love

Malcolm: you, Simone, and I appreciate you dealing with all of my little fictional universes in my head that I love to play in and have fun in and imagine. When I was younger, I spent so much time just interacting and writing the storylines as I was walking between places for these worlds.

Simone: It is magnificent and I love it and I hope that our kids do similar things and share their stories with us.

Malcolm: I love you too.

Simone: All right I don't think there's any thought out meat for you.

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