By Luisa Rodriguez and Robert Wiblin  |    Watch on Youtube   |   Listen on Spotify   |    Read transcript

Episode summary

Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the rate of decline has increased 4.5-fold. In many wealthy countries, fertility is now below 1.5. While we don’t notice it yet, in time that will mean the population halves every 60 years.

Rob Wiblin is already a parent and Luisa Rodriguez is about to be, which prompted the two hosts of the show to get together to chat about all things parenting — including why it is that far fewer people want to join them raising kids than did in the past.

While “kids are too expensive” is the most common explanation, Rob argues that money can’t be the main driver of the change: richer people don’t have many more children now, and we see fertility rates crashing even in countries where people are getting much richer.

Instead, Rob points to a massive rise in the opportunity cost of time, increasing expectations parents have of themselves, and a global collapse in socialising and coupling up. In the EU, the rate of people aged 25–35 in relationships has dropped by 20% since 1990, which he thinks will “mechanically reduce the number of children.” The overall picture is a big shift in priorities: in the US in 1993, 61% of young people said parenting was an important part of a flourishing life for them, vs just 26% today.

That leads Rob and Luisa to discuss what they might do to make the burden of parenting more manageable and attractive to people, including themselves.

In this non-typical episode, we take a break from the usual heavy topics to discuss the personal side of bringing new humans into the world, including:

• Rob’s updated list of suggested purchases for new parents
• How parents could try to feel comfortable doing less
• How beliefs about childhood play have changed so radically
• What matters and doesn’t in childhood safety
• Why the decline in fertility might be impractical to reverse
• Whether we should care about a population crash in a world of AI automation

This episode was recorded on September 12, 2025.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Coordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore

Highlights

Feminist rage over the horrors of pregnancy

Rob Wiblin: How have you found pregnancy so far? You’re six months in.

Luisa Rodriguez: The honest answer is I’ve found it pretty terrible. I had a good chunk of, I don’t know, two or three months in the middle that were very nice. But the first three months were beyond what I could have expected terrible. Just the nausea, the hormones affecting my mood. I think there are probably smaller other discomforts, but mostly the nausea just made me feel like I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work as much, I didn’t want to socialise. I felt like I just wanted to be in bed all the time. And three months is a long time to feel that way.

I think not everyone has this experience, but I think some people will at least somewhat relate. I just did not know it was going to be that bad. And it’s gotten pretty bad again recently in the third trimester. I think I’m still extremely excited to have a kid, but I’m like, why are we not outraged about this? Like a bunch of people are going around spending six months, or nine months if you’re really unlucky, having an absolutely terrible time while pregnant. It just feels totally unreasonable to me.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, that sounds horrible. I really don’t envy women’s role in this entire process of having children. My wife had a reasonably hard time, I think not quite as bad as that. But you’ve definitely drawn the short straw of the two possible roles you could have.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, now that I’m in it, I’m like, it’s totally unacceptable that we haven’t solved this. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this much kind of like feminist rage. I feel like it’s not your fault that you don’t have to experience this, but boy am I mad and jealous and feel like we should have solved this. Or there are aspects that probably we could have solved better and haven’t — probably because of some of the systemic gender-y stuff that happens when women suffer from problems more than men, and science just decides to solve those problems less.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I think I’ve heard from some people that probably doctors under prescribe anti-nausea medications to women during pregnancy. Is this something you’ve looked into?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, definitely. There are a bunch of different ways that with nausea in particular, we’ve just been really let down. Like there are drugs that work well but like there have been some scares about whether they were safe or not in pregnancy, so pharmaceutical companies have taken them off the market and not put them back on, despite lots of further tests showing that they are safe and they’re doing it kind of out of risk aversion. And I think doctors too are doing things out of risk aversion, and it makes me so livid.

Rob Wiblin: It feels like you should be the one making that choice about how much risk to take.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. And doctors, the thing they always say is like, “You can do X if the benefits outweigh the risks” — but offer no sensible guidance about whether the benefits outweigh the risks. So they’re like, “If you’re doing really terribly, you can…”

Rob Wiblin: But they kind of pressure you not to. From what I’ve heard, the risks are in fact very low.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think for most of these things they’re very low.

Rob Wiblin: Around children and pregnancy, there’s always this desire to absolutely minimise risk at almost any cost. Especially to mothers.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I feel very just not valued as a human when all healthcare professionals I talk to… This is actually not entirely what my experience has been like, but some are like, “Yep, that thing you’re feeling is normal. There’s not much we can do about it.”

I have migraines, so a big one was what migraine medications can and can’t I take? And the kind of ignoring of how painful a migraine is in favour of, “We don’t know with 100% certainty that that drug isn’t going to have any costs for your baby” just feels like….

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. “We know it’s debilitating for me.” So can’t we at least kind of calculate what’s the probability, like what fraction of drugs actually are bad? Is there any story or any mechanism that we’re aware of by which it could be bad?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly.

Fertility rates are massively declining

Rob Wiblin: The maintenance fertility rate is actually 2.1, but let’s just say it’s 2 for the sake of simplicity. So if you have a fertility rate of 2, then on average your population is going to be stable. If you have a fertility rate of 1, that doesn’t mean that your population halves. It means that your population halves every generation — so it halves, and then it’s a quarter, and then it’s an eighth, and then it’s a sixteenth.

And that really adds up over time. And there’s quite a lot of countries now that do have a fertility rate around 1 and so should expect… I mean, I would say that it’s kind of a population crash basically.

I think in the UK and the US it’s more like 1.5, so you get a 25% reduction in population every generation. So not quite as much of a cratering, but a pretty significant change socially in like how much tax revenue you’ll have to support older people. And of course it’s going down. So it’s at 1.5 now, but we might expect on current trends to hit 1 in 20 years’ time or something like that if nothing changes. And I don’t really expect anything very much to change. I think all of the trends that are pushing people to have fewer children will probably only continue.

…

I should say I actually don’t worry about this at all. Despite what I’m saying, I’m not putting any effort into this. I find it an interesting intellectual exercise. But that’s because I have a fairly unusual take about how the future is going to go, which is that humans in the labour market, in terms of just influence over the world, are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence in coming decades. So there is no medium term in which we need humans to continue supporting the economy. I kind of do just expect us to be substituted, and for this to not create any kind of serious crunch, a big problem. …

But among the people who don’t expect that, who think that AI is going to be a bust and don’t really expect a full replacement, I think for those people it’s a very interesting question, at least: is this a problem? What impacts will it have? Should we do anything? Is there anything that can be done? And some people are taking that seriously.

Other people prefer not to think about it, perhaps because it’s an uncomfortable issue. It can be very uncomfortable sounding like you think that people should have more children than they want to have. I don’t think anyone wants to go to a world where people are kind of obliged to have children to benefit their country or something like that. But at the same time, if your country is having its population halved every 25 years, effectively, you might wonder, perhaps we need to change the tax system or change how our cities are organised in order to at least slow that down.

Why do fewer people want children?

Rob Wiblin: I think that definitely the fact that it costs both money and time is a reason that people don’t have more children. But that has always been the case; it’s always been expensive to have children. And in the 18th century, when it was expensive to have children, people were substantially poorer, and nonetheless, they had like three times as many children as we do now.

So I think that money is a terrible explanation for the changes that we’ve seen recently. Because in general, countries have been becoming richer. But as countries become richer, fertility tends to decline. If you look at richer people in countries like the UK and US, they used to actually have less children than people who had lower incomes. Now it’s about even. There’s not really a correlation between the amount of income that people have and how many children they have.

If it was primarily a financial issue, you might think that people who have like two or 10 or 20 times as much income as others might have more children. But in practice, the effect, if there is any, is very small. In general, income is rising even in countries like the UK or the US or Australia, which are already reasonably developed. And growth rates are somewhat slow, but fertility is crashing.

So really, I think almost none of the correlations support this, except that in some places at the very top end, people who are in the top few percent of earners, sometimes they have slightly more children than other people.

So that’s the financial cost thing. But I think an explanation that makes more sense is: while it’s not more expensive to have children objectively than in the past, perhaps people’s incomes have risen, but their expectations for how much they should spend on their children have increased even faster, maybe substantially faster than that.

So yes, social norms around spending on children might have risen a lot. But the other thing that I think does make more sense rather than just financial cost, is thinking about the cost of time. All of us only have so many hours in the day, and if we’re having children, taking care of children, then we can’t do other stuff that we want to do. So we have this big opportunity cost of doing one thing rather than another.

And I think a big explanation for why people are having fewer children is that the non-child options have gotten better. Having a child has gotten easier — I think it has gotten substantially easier, actually, than it was even a few decades ago, objectively at least, to accomplish the same level of care that you would have in the past — but the quantity and quality of things that you can do other than having children has increased enormously in the digital age. People just have so many other distractions, things that can occupy their time that they might find more fulfilling and interesting, so the competition between children and other stuff is looking pretty bad for having children. …

People talk about all kinds of different things that they want to do other than have children: people want to pursue careers, that’s very important to them; they want to be learning and they want to be travelling. They want to be doing all these other things.

It’s become kind of a catchall explanation for all kinds of modern social trends is people are spending more time on the internet, digital stuff, phones. But I think it actually is, to a first approximation, the best guess that you should have a lot of the time. … I think in terms of time use, that is the biggest change. And so it’s naturally potentially a big driver of changes in culture and behaviour and priorities. But there is other stuff.

…

So we’ll link to a whole lot of articles in the Financial Times recently over the last year or two about this issue. They had one gem of a statistic, which was I think that in 1993, [61%] of young people in the US said that having children was an important part of a flourishing life for them, and it’s now down to [26%]. That’s a radical change in whether that is part of their kind of dream life at all. So yeah, there’s probably a lot of factors going into that.

Another potential driver that I think probably has been unappreciated until the last couple of years, at least among people who I read, is changes in what fraction of people are having relationships that could plausibly lead to the decision to have children. …

So in the EU, the rate of people between 25 and 35 who are in relationships went from 67% in 1990 to 53.5% today, which is a bit over a 20% decline. Now, if you’re just not in a relationship in that kind of age band, even if you wanted to have children, the odds are starting to get stacked against you. So you would expect that to kind of mechanically almost lead to a 20% reduction in the number of children, almost.

…

And that’s one where I can see people probably don’t say, “I don’t want to have children because I want to be scrolling TikTok” — but in practice, if you spend a lot of your time just on your phone or just reading stuff on the internet, even stuff that you endorse, even doing things that you think is actually super educational, in fact, you end up spending less time with people. You’re less likely to meet someone who you want to form a relationship with. Maybe you just somewhat lose interest in dating, or your social skills or your extroversion begins to decline.

Is parenting way harder now than it used to be?

Rob Wiblin: I think there’s been a huge change in expectations for how much parents are meant to actively play with children. Certainly compared to pre-industrial times. In the 18th century — I’ve consulted with the LLMs on this — it was not at all common, the idea that parents would be playing games, playing imaginary games, physical games, playing with toys with their children, for many different reasons.

In part people were poorer then; they worked many more hours than we do today. They just didn’t have the slack in their time to be playing with a two-year-old toddler like that.

And secondly, they didn’t have to, because families were much larger. There were so many more kids in society. A larger fraction of people in your local area were under 18 or under 10 or under five — such that it would be very easy for them to find playmates. And rather than doing imaginative play and games with their parents, they would do it with the five-year-old or the four-year-old or the three-year-old who they’re playing with. It was much more normal for kids to be entertaining one another rather than actively being entertained by parents who are acting as kind of court jesters or something like that.

But that kind of is the norm and almost the ideal, I would say, in society today: that a really good parent is one that comes home and spends hours playing with their child, and really enjoys that and spends their weekend filling up with engaged activities with their kids. That was I think already beginning in the 1950s and it’s only become, I would guess, kind of monotonically more so as the decades have worn on. Does that match your perception?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it definitely does. And it’s kind of surprising to me that I’m already preparing for the feeling of guilt for not playing enough with my child. It feels definitely like something I will experience. So the norm has been instilled in me, despite the fact that I was extremely independent as a kid and had a great time. I spent loads of time playing with friends in like parking lots, making up pretend businesses that we had. I just had a wonderful childhood that was extremely…

I mean, I also had very loving, attentive parents, but they worked plenty, and we entertained ourselves and it was great. And yet I’m currently already like, oh man, I better find ways to play enough with my child. I need to be doing that 24/7.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, yeah. I think it really is important to dwell on the fact that this is a peculiar attitude basically that only exists in the modern era, that is only kind of in our culture, that is I guess a function of peculiarities of modern life. It’s not even necessarily common outside of the richest, WEIRDest — Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic — countries.

For that matter, I think it’s less common even among people who have lower incomes or have less well-paying office jobs, even in countries like the UK — because it’s just not possible if you work much longer hours in a difficult labour job to then come home and be playing with your children for so many hours. This is not at all a human universal, so it is not required for children to do well.

…

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you have a sense of what specifically people think is better about doing loads more play with their kids? Is it something like people think it’s actually better for the kids and their development? Part of me just feels like it’s kind of random that now the ideal good parent is extremely present and doing all this playing, when I can’t really think of very good reasons that that should be the recommended approach.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. This reminds me of, I put up a poll on Twitter a couple of months ago where I was very curious to know what people would think of this hypothetical: Is it better to play with your child yourself, or hire someone who is much better at playing with children — some sort of supernanny who the child finds even more enriching and even more enjoyable to play with, because they’re a professional who does this, who has been selected for being the most capable and the most entertaining for toddlers? Hire them to do it in your place.

I was like: Is this good parenting, OK parenting, bad parenting, or very bad parenting? People were almost uniformly distributed across that. About half of people thought that this was good parenting and half of people thought it was bad parenting.

I think it’s a case that pulls apart two different desirable aspects of parenting. One is providing entertainment and happiness and enrichment and education for the child — which is being perfectly well served in the second case, where you have an extremely good nanny playing with them and taking care of them — and having a very deep personal relationship with them, where you’re taking your time not to just make them happy and educated and capable, but they love you in particular.

So you can kind of see it both ways to a point. But I would say that in order to have a positive relationship with your older child, and for them to love you, I don’t think you have to be playing with them obsessively all weekend to the exclusion of others. I think it just isn’t the case. Many people, including me, have very positive relationships with their parents, despite the fact that they didn’t feel this intense pressure to play with them all the time when they were toddlers. It’s not like I have any memory of ever, “If only my parents had played with me, I would love them so much more, or I’d feel like I had a deeper connection to them now.”

It does remind me though: Did you ever have the experience when you were young of being bored? I remember just being at home often saying, like, I’m kind of bored.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah, I did.

Rob Wiblin: You know, I almost forgot about that. But I don’t think that is a thing that children today almost ever feel, because they’re always entertained. We would be like, “My child is bored? What a nightmare!”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. “I’m failing.”

Rob Wiblin: “I have to fix this immediately.” But when I was five, I think my parents would say, “Well, go find something to entertain yourself. Go read a book, go figure out a game to play. It’s not my job to entertain you.” And I think I did most of the time, eventually.

Are there any good options to encourage people to have more kids?

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you have a sense of what our options are for increasing fertility rates globally?

Rob Wiblin: I think probably pretty poor. … I think if we were willing to spend more than 10% of GDP, we could drive up the number of children that people have pretty substantially. The strongest options are consistent transfers to people: free childcare on a really ongoing basis and a tax system that basically just hands people money based on the number of children that they have every month. I think evidence suggests that that does cause some people to have more children.

It’s really difficult though, because almost all of these policies, the big challenge is you end up paying for all of the children that would have happened anyway. Because you can’t say that this person would have had two children otherwise —

Luisa Rodriguez: “This is the marginal child.”

Rob Wiblin: — we’ll pay them for the marginal third child. You don’t know how many they would have had. And also, people would regard it as kind of unfair, I think. So in practice, you end up doing redistribution for every child, and most of them would have existed anyway. So if you’re driving up fertility from 1.5 to 1.6, then you end up paying 16 times as much as if you could perfectly pay someone to have an extra child.

Again, I’m not so much an expert on this, but I think experience across different countries — France, I think Norway, I guess not so much the US, what other countries have had fertility bills? Singapore, Hungary — if you’re willing to spend a couple of percent of GDP, you can drive up fertility by like 0.2 or 0.3. Countries have done that, but I think almost no one has managed to really counterfactually increase it by much more than that — because I think you run out of people who are willing to have that many more children. You’re just running into people actively don’t want to have children anymore. It just is not part of their picture of their life.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, these just aren’t addressing the problem of someone wanting no children. And how would one even address that problem?

Rob Wiblin: You also run into the problem that people are single.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. You have no lever for them.

Rob Wiblin: I mean, people talk about things that you could do with housing or urban design, or different kinds of government policies that might cause people to spend more time socialising and be more likely to form relationships. You can get rid of tax penalties that sometimes in some countries you get for being married or having a partner.

But another quote that I heard many years ago that stuck in my head is, “Some things we just have to do for ourselves.” It’s not something that the government can do. I think the government can remove active impediments that are created to building relationships and having friends, but this is more something that we have to decide to change in our lives ourselves, rather than something that can be dictated by a national government, because it’s just so hard for them to influence.

And I don’t really see any signs that the trend is shifting here. I think the trends are all against it. It’s all towards spending more time on your own, towards less extroversion, towards less interest in having deep relationships.

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you think anywhere could get really dystopic, like bans on abortion or child requirement policies or something? Or does that seem pretty unlikely?

Rob Wiblin: I mean, this isn’t my area. And again, to some extent I don’t think any of this will play out. But let’s imagine that AI was not advancing particularly anytime soon. I suspect that that wouldn’t happen in many places. I think that this problem won’t be solved, isn’t on track to be solved. There isn’t enough will to solve it. A country can just tolerate having its population crash, and any solutions that you put in place now don’t pay off for 20 to 30 to 40 years — so there’s not that much urgency to, let’s really crack this and then we’ll be in a better situation. It’s so far in the future that anything that you do now…

And the cost would be massive. There isn’t the political will to spend that kind of money. Already today, the group that is most active and successful in pursuing redistribution is not students getting redistribution to support their studies or young people getting extra funding for childcare: it’s basically older people who are the most active politically, have the most at stake in redistribution to older retirees.

So a larger and larger fraction of government spending is going towards healthcare and social security transfers for people who are retired. I think that will probably only escalate. And I think that group is not going to be interested in surrendering the 10% of GDP. Just in general, all interest groups are not going to be interested in giving up the 10% to 15% of GDP that might be required to solve this on a sustainable basis.

And these other things are even less attractive than that; they’ll be even more invasive and horrifying to people. You know, if you’re North Korea or you’re some sort of authoritarian country… Famously, I think Romania, in order to boost its population when it was a dictatorship, got rid of contraception — which did briefly increase the number of children people were having. It’s obviously horrific. It’s basically just regarded as a historical atrocity in a way. But I don’t think there’s going to be appetite outside of quite authoritarian countries to pursue anything like that. Fortunately.

Returning to work with kids

Rob Wiblin: I think the ideal of a mother who stays home and takes care of their child, who’s like doing 90%+ of the work of raising a child, is a complete historical aberration. I don’t even know whether that is kind of the dominant vision that people have today anymore. But there’s not been any time when this was actually the way that people typically lived, and it absolutely is not necessary for good child development.

In fact, I was looking into this a bit this week, and probably, if anything, the evidence counts the other way: that it’s somewhat detrimental; you want children to be having multiple caregivers and learning to navigate multiple different relationships. It’s actually better for their social development. It’s very important to have an engaged parent who pays attention to them and responds to them a significant fraction of the time, maybe about half of the time is actually enough to consistently get secure attachment and not really any developmental issues. Potentially even less, maybe even being attentive a third of the time, some studies suggest it’s actually quite sufficient to have a very positive relationship between the child and the parents.

Because it was not the case that, historically, when we were hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers, that parents would be able to pay attention to their children all the time. They had stuff to do. They were very busy cooking, doing all kinds of different work. The child would not always immediately get a response. If humans evolved to just fall to pieces as soon as their father was trying to collect food or was cooking or whatever else, that would be a horrible design for human beings. And we are not built that way. We are not nearly so fragile as that, that we require 100% of the time someone always has to be responding.

And furthermore, because of the nature of the work that people had to do, we had to have cooperative parenting arrangements or cooperative caretaking arrangements. So I think in almost all historical time periods, except in some cases in the modern world, it was normal that children would be handed between many different caregivers — including other family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, and sometimes friends and other parents with children, who you would do this in exchange with them as a reciprocal thing.

Almost all children historically have had multiple different caregivers. It wasn’t the mother doing it overwhelmingly or either parent doing it overwhelmingly. And the evidence is very clear that children develop completely fine like that, as long as they do have an attentive, concerned parent who is taking care of them. It seems like that can even compensate for bad quality childcare. So if you put kids in a modest amount of low engagement, low-quality childcare, basically as long as the parents are the rest of the time pretty engaged with them, attentive much of the time, then there’s not apparent psychological problems.

So I think we have this image, and it’s completely a modern thing. It’s basically I think exclusively in the postwar world in the West. The idea that children will fall apart, go to pieces, not be attached, not be psychologically functional if it’s not one specific person all the time paying attention to them, and anyone ever leaves them to cry. I think it’s just incorrect. I think it flatly contradicts the scientific literature on this topic.

AI and parenting

Luisa Rodriguez: Assuming AI goes well, how much do you think your kid’s life is going to differ from your life at the same age? So like your childhood and their childhood?

Rob Wiblin: I think in the long run, radically. Radically. Hopefully, because the world will be much better. I think it’s unclear when AI is going to become a big deal in education and change school, unless we get a very hard takeoff. I suppose that’s where you might expect it to happen first, is that now they’re getting one-on-one tutoring from an AI that they talk to all the time that is kind of a substitute parent or a substitute one-on-one tutor.

I’m pretty keen for that to happen, although of course another part of being a flourishing human is learning to deal with other human beings, and how to negotiate those boundaries with other toddlers and other young children. So even on a world where they’re getting an excellent upbringing, it’s not going to eat up all of their time. Maybe it would even be quite a minority of school hours, perhaps.

In the longer term, it’s quite hard for me to imagine that a child of mine born today is going to be working an office job when they finish university in 2044. You’d have to have very long AI timelines to believe that it’s going to take so long to get AIs that are able to replicate what humans do at a computer, or even potentially what humans do physically over that kind of timeline.

So I think it’s like a real long shot, the idea that we’re training up our kid to have a normal job the way that my wife and I do. I guess never say never. You don’t want to put zero weight on it. But I would bet pretty strongly against. So at the point that he is going to school, I think I will place more importance on general development and whether he’s having a good time, and is becoming a flourishing person who would use recreation time well, and would have the ability to not get drawn in by things that are enjoyable in the short term but harmful in the long run — that sort of thing over their ability to kind of grind and be conscientious and do drudge work in any kind of work at all. Because I just think it’s unlikely to happen.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, this is basically my view too. But I find it surprisingly hard. I don’t have a kid yet, but it’s been so deeply ingrained in me that doing well in school and just kind of learning to do hard things for the sake of doing hard things are important things for your kid. And I think I’m going to find it really hard to let go of, like, my kid doesn’t have to do well in school to have a good, happy, successful life.

Like there’s a version of doing well that probably contributes to flourishing, like finding things you’re interested in and stuff. But abandoning this hope that they are successful feels hard to me. How does it feel to you?

Rob Wiblin: I don’t have a kind of success-focused philosophy or a sense of what is a good life or is fulfilling. To be honest, I think my take is I would be perfectly happy to just spend my time having recreation, contributing nothing — except that unfortunately the world is really messed up, so regrettably, I have to go and do something in order to try to help with that. And of course you have to make money in order to live. But if the world were good, if the world was solved, I would have had no interest in accomplishing stuff. Like, why would you want to do that? You work in order to solve a problem. You don’t invent problems in order to have work to do.

Anyway, if he takes after me, then I don’t think you have such an issue with feeling pointlessness or why do I exist? How do I justify my existence if I’m not working for money? And hopefully, if many people are just not working anymore, then that will become a more common culture, and fewer people will identify with work as the reason that they justify their existence to themselves and regard themselves as worthy.

So certainly if I ever see him beginning to trend towards thinking, “The reason that I’m OK is that I did well at school,” I’ll try to push against that to a point. But I’m not sure that doing well at school and flourishing as a person and becoming the kind of person who could enjoy a good world and enjoy a good life when there is no longer work for humans to do is that different, at least at early ages.

You still want to learn to use language well, you still want to learn to make good decisions — because you will still have to choose who to trust, you’ll still have to make some decisions in this world. You still want to learn enough math so you can actually think through problems and make decisions in your own life, like decide whether the AI advisor is giving you good advice or not. And also, presumably you want to be having some relationships with some other people, or AIs at least. So you want to develop some social skills, you want to be somewhat healthy.

So to some extent, for humans, I guess because of how we evolved, being a flourishing being and being able to do stuff are quite intertwined. They don’t completely come apart. Maybe at some future time they could come apart, technology could drive them apart. But for a primary school student right now, I think, while you don’t necessarily want them to be building the personality where they will just grind out doing extremely unpleasant things for long periods of time in order to get acceptance and approval, other things — like are they having good relationships, are they able to accomplish tasks, are they able to focus on anything at all — is probably still a valuable life skill.