China demographics thread.

[Moonscape]

You... serious about immortality. AKA not serious.

What is your model? Quantify it.

Here, I'll do some basic scenario / math for you. Assume immortality and death rate converge with that of accidents fatality per 100k, population will increase by 0.75% per year at TFR 1.1, aka by 2100, PRC would have ~2 Billion people with 1.1 TFR with minimal death rate (cause if you've got immortality, you've also cured all of the diseases). That's how fucking stupid / not viable your idea is based on 2nd/3rd order consequences. And net pop would only grow, because then natural desire for having kids even with SHIT TFR would rapidly outgrow aggregate deathrate. Then you have opposite problem, but at much worse magnitude, people stay in jobs forever, no prospect for upward mobility because social structure will be entrenched. Even modest increase to 150 year life span = 1.4B population by 2100, 2B by 2150 w 1.1 TFR. @1.5 TFR, that's 2B by 2100, 2.4B by 2150. Then what? Pregnancy licenses for population control? You going to pick a system to choose who to hunger game / purge system based on dwindling resources, or is part 2 of plan aka "draw rest of owl" to get fusion / abundance / dyson sphere? Is that totality of your solution? Speculative AGI magic hopium?

PRC / CCP has done family planning before. It's one political system that has done massive demographic engineering. Historically societies have had much more kids under much worse conditions (i.e. post famine, post war). Indoctorinating and building system around contributing births to state is not unfeasible under right incentive / indoctorination structure.

Mass opposition can be managed. Emmigration can be managed.

The problem with thinking if AGI will work or not is the OR NOT. Need to manage alternatives in case of NOT.

Regardless, LBH, fundmental to these proposals is the notion that PRC wants to stay dominant Han. It could just do massive, massive immigration + sinicization and deal with hot mixies.

If AGI/amortality-tier tech exists, then so would automated energy and resource production tech, meaning the Earth can easily support 50-100 billion humans. More with solar system colonization and space habitats.

The CPC is not omnipotent. At least 50+% of the population (at a minimum, women + fathers of daughters) will not accept bureaucrats attempting to Chinese society back to fedualism. Remember, part of the raison d'etre of the CPC was women's equality. Mass opposition to extremist proposals of this magnitude cannot be managed.

 

[dirtyid]

And if AGI tech doesn't exist on relevant timelines? Ask yourself why PRC AI talent, despite representing 50-60% of global AI talent, including tier1 basically do not have any significant published / endorsed AGI timelines? Ask why actors fixated on AGI timelines are techbros working in western AI companies hustling for funding. Where are all the Chinese AI specialists predicting AGI by 2040/50 and warning to central gov that PRC needs to hammer clusters and power much more than they are now. Perhaps AGI is more marketting than horizon. Perhaps prudent to hedge for the absence of AGI.

Of course it can managed, slowly over time / generations / decades. The only thing we know that drives TFR to 2+ is "extremist" thinking which can be cultivated over time. IT WORKS. IT EXISTS. Need secular narrative that works as well as religious, which we know works for TFR 2+ vs depending on policies that can barely hit TFR 1.5. Need to slowly row out reward and punishment until women / couples incentivized to have kids for tier1 lifestyle and such behaviour becomes ingrained economic motivations. Don't want 80% income and inheritance tax from your 4 parents and 8 grandparents? Have 2 kids. Don't want family but want to fill loneliness with pets, donate a kid, get a pet license for 1 pet. Donate 2, you've done your part, here's unlimited cat lady license. All it cost was a 2x9months in your twenties that was heavily subsidized with xyz perks like free hsr upgrades until your 40s. Oh the men are busy wiping piss and shit from seniors for their 24 month civil service, so surrogating for state potentially gets you headstart. BTW employers won't mind you surrogating since women can work during pregnancy, but men are shit fucked because they have to take time off like national guard for geriatric. Queue dad and mom: have a kid, get it over with. If you don't we can't sell / transwer our apartment to you because 80% in escrow, 40% returned until your first kid, other 40% until your second. Want life on easy mode? Have a kid for the state first. Maybe sometime you're ready start a family with all these perks from having the first kid.

 

[Moonscape]

Where are all the Chinese AI specialists predicting AGI by 2040/50 and warning to central gov that PRC needs to hammer clusters and power much more than they are now. Perhaps AGI is more marketting than horizon. Perhaps prudent to hedge for the absence of AGI.

Just because you don't know about something, doesn't mean it's not happening. DeepSeek's founder is predicting AGI within 2-10 years optimistically, and within our lifetimes (so by 2050) pessimistically.

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AY: The recent OpenAI event did not feature GPT-5, leading many to believe that the industry’s technological curve is slowing down, and some have begun questioning Scaling Law. What’s your perspective?

LW: We remain optimistic. The industry’s progress is still in line with expectations. OpenAI isn’t divine; they can’t lead forever.

AY: How long do you think it will take to achieve AGI? Before V2, you released code/math models and switched from dense to MoE. What’s your roadmap?

LW: It could take two years, five years, or ten years—but it will happen within our lifetime. As for our roadmap, there’s no consensus even within our company. However, we are placing our bets on three directions:

1. Mathematics and code, which serve as a natural testbed for AGI—much like Go, they are enclosed, verifiable systems where self-learning could lead to high intelligence.
2. Multimodality, where the AI engages with the real world to learn.
3. Natural language itself, which is fundamental to human-like intelligence.

We are open to all possibilities.

 

[dirtyid]

I know about LW predictions during height Deepseek exuberance, baidu and ali are skeptical of near term AGI, which is polite way of saying they don't know. Meanwhile central gov isn't pushing compute with urgency that follows imminent AGI - they're not racing - the policy gap with power constrained US projected compute is still magnitude larger exaflop vs zettaflop. This is not policy aligned with betting on AGI. Backdate initial chart predictions and @1.1 TFR and by 2030 PRC already going to be 3m births short for stablizing at 800m in 2100.

>all possibilities.

Which includes the possibility it there won't be AGI.

>remain optimistic

You don't hedge against existiential demographic crisis with optimisim.

E: What is your answer to to the possibility of no AGI? What then? Immigration? You think PRC with current TFR can entice 3x US, i.e. 3-4m immigrants a year to keep pace with 800m pop by 2100? What is backup plan short of suddenly becoming technologically a kardashev type I civilization?

 

[Eventine]

I suspect you are underestimating how utterly exhausting and all-consuming raising children is, because you do not have kids yourself.

I do have kids myself. That's why I'm able to speak to it.

And yes, having kids is really exhausting. And there's not much economies of scale with raising multiple kids.

Yes there is. Families raise multiple kids all the time, and it doesn't require 2x or 3x the time, or else it'd be impossible to raise multiple children.

Also you can't trick people into raising 3 or 4 all at once. People will have 1 or 2, and say this is enough, we can't handle more regardless of the subsidy, and stop.

Yet the only way to raise TFR to 2 is for people to have 3 or 4, because for every woman who doesn't have children, you need another one to have 4 or two to have 3. And it's way way easier to have no kids than to have 3 or 4 kids.

I don't think enough people will bite the bullet and have 3-4 kids for any sort of conceivably realistic subsidy to cancel out the increasing number of people who have no kids or only have 1 kid.

How did people just 60 years ago have and raise 5-6 kids, regularly? Under Mao, China's population increased nearly 3x, you think that's not possible? Mao got it done in two decades.

Also, this isn't taking into account what kind of kids would be produced by parents who are motivated by subsidies to have kids, and whether those kids would be a net positive.

Sounds like more self-defeating talk. If TFR was easy to improve, everyone would've done it by now. The challenge is precisely what will separate the strong nations from the weak nations. It's a form of natural selection - the nations with children will inherit the world.

AGI/amortality is the only realistic way out. (They are interchangable since the former would lead to the latter). Otherwise we'll go extinct like Calhoun's rats. I personally think this is the Great Filter. We will know in about 10-20 years whether humanity has made it out - potentially sooner depending on how spicy the AGI race between the US and China gets.

Relying on a technology that may or may not come (people were hyping AGI back in the 1950s) seems like a sure way to screw yourself. Of course Big AI companies will tell you AGI is coming in <10 years. How else will they pump their stocks? Betting humanity's future on AGI seems awfully delusional. Have you forgotten that humanity as a species survived millions of years by just having enough children? What makes that so impossible in modern society? And if it is so impossible, doesn't that mean modern society is at fault, and should be replaced?

 

[tygyg1111]

It's just a mentality shift from, "I'm such a special kid with love and warmth all around me! I'm the center of my parents' world!" to "Everyone is equal; we are in a community together. We must be mindful of others, treat them as we want them to treat us." I don't think this is worse than traditional parenting because this model gets rid of the most hate-inducing factor of any society and that is unfairness, the kids who don't have parents or fancy clothes or expensive toys and big houses, watching those kids who do. I think in many ways, this fosters a stronger sense of belonging and togetherness.

It's also wonderful for the parents. Parenting the traditional way sucks. It can suck and be exhausting, or it can just suck. But there's no contest; childless life is so much easier and full of freedom. Even having a well-behaved child severely limits the things you can enjoy. If someone told me I could be a father of 4, rest easy that they'll be given taken care of and provided equal chances to any other kid to succeed, and I could continue to live the single life, hell man. Sign me up. Triple my taxes; I don't care; I'm in! Back to my old self again! Gym nights, bar nights, ladies of the night!

There are many second and third order effects you would need to consider, as the 'drop out' rate from such a society might be higher than planned for and the effects more disastrous. This is like an experiment where you shove every kid into a boarding school and see how things go; you might need a specialised re-education / deradicalisation program to deal with the drop outs.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

If AGI/amortality-tier tech exists, then so would automated energy and resource production tech, meaning the Earth can easily support 50-100 billion humans. More with solar system colonization and space habitats.

The CPC is not omnipotent. At least 50+% of the population (at a minimum, women + fathers of daughters) will not accept bureaucrats attempting to Chinese society back to fedualism. Remember, part of the raison d'etre of the CPC was women's equality. Mass opposition to extremist proposals of this magnitude cannot be managed.

if it takes that to just achieve stable population then humanity is doomed.

 

[Moonscape]

if it takes that to just achieve stable population then humanity is doomed.

Yes, that's my point. Without AGI, humanity is actually doomed. No government is going to be willing or able to implement social engineering sufficient to "get enough women to have 4 kids to cancel out the women who have no kids." Some of the social engineering "solutions" proposed in this thread are essentially rape -- no authority can sustain policies like that, not even in medieval societies that some in the thread are essentially proposing we return to.

Technology caused this problem. Technology is either going to solve it, or this is the Great Filter for humanity.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

Yes, that's my point. Without AGI, humanity is actually doomed. No government is going to be willing or able to implement social engineering sufficient to "get enough women to have 4 kids to cancel out the women who have no kids." Some of the social engineering "solutions" proposed in this thread are essentially rape -- no authority can sustain policies like that, not even in medieval societies that some in the thread are essentially proposing we return to.

Technology caused this problem. Technology is either going to solve it, or this is the Great Filter for humanity.

People are far more malleable than you think. See: lebensborn program in Nazi Germany.

Fascism is on the rise for a reason.

20th century is making a comeback.

 

[tokenanalyst]

Yes, that's my point. Without AGI, humanity is actually doomed. No government is going to be willing or able to implement social engineering sufficient to "get enough women to have 4 kids to cancel out the women who have no kids." Some of the social engineering "solutions" proposed in this thread are essentially rape -- no authority can sustain policies like that, not even in medieval societies that some in the thread are essentially proposing we return to.

Technology caused this problem. Technology is either going to solve it, or this is the Great Filter for humanity.

Culture changes, maybe today having 4 kids is not fashionable but maybe in 10 years people are more willing to have 4 or even 5 kids, maybe this current worry about demographics is the beginning of a cultural reversal towards larger families, less use birth controls and home friendly parents.

The biggest problem will be AI replacing jobs faster than society can adapt to it. Like good percentage of blue and white collar jobs replaced by automation and AI. if the happens the question is, what is the point of having high birth-rates and larger families?