Animats wrote that in the top level comment.

> The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman) are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.

>There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."

I can imagine some other developments. Maybe parenting will become professionalized, kids will be born in artificial wombs and specialized pairs will take care of 10 of them at once.

It sounds wild, but we already professionalized a lot of other activities that were "naturally" done by households, such as fuel gathering, cooking, home construction and small agriculture.

What a brave new world. But what happens when the machine stops?

What happens if other machines stop? The ones that carry food into megacities or provide drinking waters to millions?

We are now very, very far from our hunter-gatherer roots.

I'm aware of that. That's why I questioned the validity of the idea, because it seems too risky to rely on. Probably unsustainable because the ever faster changes of the 'meteorological machine' will disrupt many other mechanisms, because they are too slow to adapt.

The idea of mechanizing/automating/centralizing that stuff is irking me in general. One could argue that the biologisms which evolved us, and we with and through them, are just another, rather imperfect way of doing this, by slow, biologic means.

IMO this only leads to transhumanism, which I consider BS, because it will produce shadows/weak simulations of the real thing and philosophical zombies.

Didn’t ECHR take note of a Austro Hungarian imperial law still in the books to that effect?