Japan, the land of the Samurai herb is now trying to use robots to encourage people to have babies. Why not bypass humans and go straight for the robot workforce? I mean come on, the solution to the aging population is right there. Eternal Golem Army workforce and everything is fixed?
Until they realize that my approach is the most workable, they are just using robots to try and encourage breeding. They’re already offering financial incentives to encourage people to procreate, to little or no avail.
None of it is going to work, however.
People may not be entirely rational, they may have limited information, but they can do cost benefit analysis and the incentives for having a child are considerably less than the costs, especially in Japan, but anywhere in the west.
The cost of housing alone is prohibitive.
The hit to the standard of living is considerable for the middle class.
The amount of money sucked up for social programs inhibits the middle class from having children. That’s right, all the money used to support the prole whelps is lessening the number of kids the middle class produce.
One of the side effects of having almost all women enter the workforce isn’t just that wages dropped significantly with supply and demand, but there is the other side effect.
Before having a kid was a financial burden, but when one income was enough it was just an added cost. With a two income family its an added cost as either revenues drop or you hire someone to watch the kid.
Either way the costs of having a child has effectively doubled in the last 40 years.
If you want people to have kids you have to fix and equation that is High Cost with small pay off and our society is not geared that way.
Still, I envision a future where people will no longer speak of cat ladies, they will refer to them as robot baby ladies.
