If you took someone from the 1990s and dumped them in 2026, I think one of the biggest shocks to them would be how optional humans are everywhere. You can't get a human on the phone when you call a business anymore. We check out our own groceries with machines now. We order fast food from a kiosk or app instead of a person. Self-driving taxis. Robots doing work and AI making content. Apps mediating all kinds of relationships (personal, romantic, business, employee-employer) rather than the humans themselves. We've kind of just allowed technology to start making us all irrelevant. What is the return on this investment?

> maybe the average person kind of sucks, or the way relationships are treated sucks

It's friction right? The last 150 years of progress have been all about removing friction.

And relationships are a great source of friction.

As a side note, I think it's this push for frictionlessness, this is the same force which has resulted in the loss of meaning.

Structure and community are seen as oppressive.

At last, we have been liberated from both.

My $0.02 is when it comes to dating, social media ruined people’s “standards” [0]

People would rather chill and be single than date the wrong guy, even if they aren’t bringing much to the table themselves…

[0] - same energy as the teen girls have low self esteem due to magazine covers and instagram.

Off topic, but I have always wondered if the real advantage of an AI therapist is it has little power over you and will not snitch you to the authorities if you say something "wrong." People walk on eggshells when talking to human therapists because they know if they say something about hurting themselves or others, they can end up in a mental institution, losing their jobs, the custody of their children, their home, everything. AI companies seem to just not care enough to monitor the chats for these kind of things. For better or worse.

If people are born into a situation or simply have had bad luck with who they decided to trust, after enough betrayal you decide that juice of relationships isn't worth the squeeze. I'm pretty much there in my life, I don't seek companionship in AI (nor can I ever imagine doing so) but more than casual friendships and especially romance is not worth the work or the pain.

I'd recommend checking out Sherry Turkle's work. It's not as much about availability as friction. Ai does not come with the friction IRL does, so people turn to it as an "easy mode"

I applaud the CCP for getting out in front of this one. It's way more a concern in my mind than data centers

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Zero AI child policy

That will only be true until it occurs to them to tax robotic productivity. This whole issue feels like a temporary one.

Maybe we can have the government provide token quotas as you have offspring.

Zero children = you (the parent) get zero tokens

One child = the parents get 18-years worth of tokens

Two children = the parents get 2 x 18-years worth of tokens

...

I wonder how that looks per capita. I'd wager very similar between China and the US.

Given comparison reports between people's opinions of AI and the future between China and the US, I think it is.

Personally no amount of social outlook would want me want children. I simply don't want to have them I don't like raising or interacting with children it's just not in my nature and I really feel like a lot of that has to do with how people are nurtured.

As a society, we do need to think about what "responsible ai" means and how we legislate for it without over regulating Ai outright

Yes, it already exists and it's called dating apps