Reid Hoffman: belief

Transcript context

…How much do you worry about low and declining fertility as a social problem for the West, for East Asia? One thing that I thought about writing an essay on — maybe I’ll still do it — is, it isn’t, “Oh, God, the robots are coming for our jobs.” It’s, “Oh, God, can the robots get here soon enough?” Our whole system has been based upon the fact that we have a growing population so that the growing population can take care of the elderly. If you don’t have that, you have a serious reorientation of our entire society. China is going to run into that in a huge way, and so forth. Japan’s probably trailblazing. You see a little bit of that with the care and robots and everything else. I think that we desperately need the amplification in order to not create a massive burden for our children if that trend continues. Let’s say we can afford it because of something like robots or AI. Doesn’t that, in a sense, make the problem worse? We feel less of an emergency. South Korea — they’re at 0.8. Just keep the clock on ticking. Eventually, they basically don’t have people left. How can that work out well for us? And the fact that someone pays the bill for our collective extinguishing of the human condition doesn’t reassure me.…

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