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 state or by corporations in bats. Now that [00:03:00] would work for the world, yet it's clearly not something that's shown in the world.
And
Simone: it would be if the, of course, the, the authors had thought of it, because that's interesting and weird.
Malcolm: And it makes corporations look worse, so it works for a cyberpunk y world. Right. But you actually see this across sci fi, is so many sci fis are written with the assumption that humans exist in inexhaustible supply and always replicate, that they build things into the world that are just discordant with actual things.
Potential future realities. So a great example of this comes from Starship Troopers, where a person remarks Starship Troopers, the line that the first. Would you like to know more from these episodes? Comes from so in Starship Troopers, there's a line that, well, of course you need to become a citizen, like join the military to get this special status in society if you want to get a license to have kids.
So this is a world where to solve [00:04:00] overpopulation, which everyone used to thought was going to be an issue. The way that you did that was licensing people to have kids. Which, you know, would be a great thing if you have a lot of cultures that are actually able to motivate. Reproduction, but we don't right and I do think that eventually a license to have kids that may be useful if we live in a world where those cultures that motivate people or people who like genetically so desperately want to have kids because the ones who didn't were selected out of the population become the mainstream, right?
But we don't live in that world today. And so I was wondering, you read even more sci fi. Can you talk about how other sci fi that you read, like, the culture series or the what's that one that you really consider a utopia and everyone else considers a dystopia? No, Brave New World. Yeah. Talk about how kids are handled in those environments.
Simone: Yeah, well, in Brave New World, kids are, are grown in artificial wombs and also genetically modified to be perfect for their cast in society. And then conditioned, and like, raised by the state. So that, like, they've stalled Except you're in Likely World, Brave [00:05:00] New World. Yeah, they've, they've stalled, yeah, yeah, Huxley's actually A total visionary, like he, he gets so much, there's, there's so much in it that's already happened.
There's so much in it that is going to happen. So yeah, I would say Brave New World, probably the most accurate from a demographic collapse standpoint. And then, in the culture series, they don't really talk about child rearing that much. They do, like, in, in one series, someone goes on to having, like, seven kids, which is considered, like, quite a lot.
Like, well, kind of weird. Like, so it's, it's unusual to have a lot of children. Then the only other context in which people having children is discussed is that, is, is that humans within the culture, which is one civilization in this, in this far future world They can basically change gender whenever they want, like people typically in a lifetime, like the average person will just change their gender for like the hell of it, like, because you know, like, and so people will change their gender to be able to gestate a child and have a kid because they want to and then they'll switch back and, and you can do that fairly [00:06:00] easily and seamlessly.
And so. People aren't having a lot of kids, but they're still having kids and sometimes having kids for fun. But, you know, this is also a post scarcity world. Yeah.
Malcolm: Well, this is an interesting thing. Is the type of poverty in a world determines... whether or not having kids is realistic. So cyberpunk style poverty, which is like urban poverty, would make having kids very unlikely.
Because this is the world that's continued to urbanize. Yet I think if I look at something like the Starcraft world where it is a largely impoverished world, another great example, this would be the aliens universe. You know, the. You, you're familiar with the Aliens Universe? Movie
Simone: Aliens.
Aliens? Yeah. I am, but I, I don't like, there aren't families to pick. I mean, there's like a rogue girl who like hi…
