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[deleted] t1_ix41t3d wrote

Yeah, I think it's worth considering the possibility that future advancements might not come as fast as you want them to, or in the domains you want them to, and to take action now to try to prevent future negative things from happening, rather than always deferring action to the future, where you assume that action will be more impactful as technology improves.

That said, I think the broader point to make is that the future is really hard to predict, even in terms of just sentiment - will things get "worse" or "better"? This is why I always find it amusing when people say they're not having kids because they think the future will be awful because of climate change, or whatever the excuse.

For example, consider the world the Baby Boomers were born into. The world had just gone through two World Wars. People have invented amazing new ways to kill each other, including the atomic bomb. The world feels, and will feel for decades, balanced on the razor's edge of WWIII, where America and the Soviets will slug it out for global dominance one last time.

And then... nothing happened. Everyone got very wealthy from industrialization and international trade, there was no WWIII, nuclear weapons were never used in war again, the USSR just kind of disintegrated as a "Great Power", and the Baby Boomers are still widely regarded as the luckiest and wealthiest generation to have ever lived. There were reasonable rationales for expecting bad things to happen, but they didn't, for myriad reasons, that probably don't sound entirely as compelling as vivid and imaginative descriptions of nuclear holocaust.

It would have been a shame if everyone had held off having children because they knew WWIII was around the corner, and didn't think it was moral to have kids that would just die in a nuclear holocaust, and therefore did not create a demographic dividend for the West, that ultimately led to this massive prosperity.

I truly hope we discover ways to restore health fertility to women in their 60s and 70s, because I'm worried a lot of people are just going to regret the decisions of their 20s and 30s, when it turns out that the world is great in 30 or 40 years.

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