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Cyberpunk Demonstrates Pro-Natalists are Right
Malcolm and Simone have a fun, meandering discussion about how science fiction narratives can reveal deeper truths about the future when they engage seriously with topics like demographics and AI. They analyze the problematic ways overpopulation and AI are portrayed in much sci-fi. The hosts share imaginative fictional world concepts they've conceived, including a mythology based on online entities, a post-Yellowstone America, and more.
Malcolm: [00:00:00] this reminds us of a so there was a book that we were thinking of writing. We never got around to writing it, but we can talk about it here. Because I, I thought it was very interesting. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to write a modern version of mythology.
Would you like to know more?
Simone: So Malcolm, when the Cyberpunk game came out, you were super excited. Like you had a blast with it. And then we watched the anime at the same time. Great anime,
Malcolm: by the way, really good. Love Rebecca. Great character.
Simone: Yeah. I mean, well, Rebecca is the only one who like thrives in the world. She's the only one who's really likable.
But she's the only one who gets it. Everyone else is so whiny. It's
Malcolm: horrible. But something was really clear in this and it made me reflect on a lot of other sci fi, which it shows that when people are writing sci fi from a mainstream perspective, particularly a progressive one, and I think cyberpunk as a genre is inherently progressive, which is to say that It assumes that like corporations are going to become like these big evil things that ruin everyone's life and that capitalism goes wrong [00:01:00] and makes everything worse for everyone and dehumanizes the individual and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But that they show that these individuals have... so blinded themselves to fertility rates that they do not consider them in how their worlds are structured or how humanity changes, which I think goes to, in a way, discredit their worldviews. But. Through discrediting their worldviews, it can help us better predict what the future will actually be like.
So, let's describe what I mean by this. So if you look at the show Cyberpunk or the game Cyberpunk, one really interesting thing is who's having kids in this world. You know, it starts with a kid who's a single kid of a mom, right? Okay, so I'm thinking of the anime here. But in this world, it seems almost impossible for there to be motivations for many people to have more than two kids.
And yet, you know, as I always say, if you have a population where a third of the [00:02:00] population, which is like, obviously true in the cyberpunk world is having no kids. I actually think the cyberpunk world is probably half the people are having no kids. If you look at the motivations in this world, if it was certain people are having no kids.
Another third of people are having two kids, if you assume that which, again, I see very few people motivated to do that in the cyberpunk world. Well, then the final third of people have to be having over four kids for the population to stay stable. Yeah. No one in the cyberpunk world is having over four kids.
I mean,
Simone: maybe Yeah, unless there's just some, like, off camera colony of, like, you know, traditional Amish people producing
Malcolm: all the humans. Well, yeah, so you could argue that they're all coming from, like, these like Human farms. Nomadic. Well, so there's two potentialities in this world. It could be that the nomadic sort of car people of the wasteland just have tons and tons and tons of kids.
I mean, you don't see this in the show or the game, but it could be that they're just like Amish and like their settlements are just kids running everywhere. Or it could be, like you said. The kids are actually created by the
Published on 2 years, 2 months ago