'My heart is empty': Millions of Chinese forced to end AI relationships
www.abc.net.au
A boyfriend betrayed 17-year-old Xiaoxue, so she made an AI partner. But now the government is trying to end her relationship.

Disgusting reporting when compared to ausgovs social media ban. This is good, tech companies shouldn’t be able to peddle emotional dependence on opaque and erratic chatbots.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      32·
      3 days ago

      The material economic relations in the household undergo a very obvious change between an undeveloped society and a developed one.

      It’s exceptionally obvious to me that kids in pre-industrial revolution Britain (and during the revolution itself) were a benefit to a household. Sending the kids to work at the coal mine was bringing in money to the house. More kids meant more money. The same can be said of agricultural society before that, more kids working the farm meant more output and less work.

      You see people openly state that their reasons for not having kids today are “because I like my free time” and “I don’t want the responsibility” and stuff like that. These reasons are economic. We even see anti-child movements grow as people push back against the mindset that having kids is virtuous and should be done for the sake of how enriching it is, why? Because people are made to feel bad by those former mythologies now that they don’t gain benefits from having children. So they push back. This I also believe contributes to the child-hate we now see in certain communities. It’s a pushback against cultures of pro-procreation because people feel it’s economically harmful to themselves and the free time in their lives. They may not consciously admit it because doing so requires some deep introspection but it’s a major driving force within.

      This is not advocacy for a return to child labour. I don’t support that. I’m simply explaining how changing these economic relations has had an influence on all of this.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Well, there’s also the fact that many children didn’t survive childhood. Not only were children an economic investment, they were also an investment that came with risk: disease or famine or war or genetic lottery might kill them first. Those former “be fruitful and multiply” mythologies were developed in material conditions where a child’s survival to adulthood wasn’t guaranteed.

      • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        i think that’s less correct for pre-industrial. i forget the name of the term but there was something where the extra labor cancelled out the extra mouth to feed because of farming outputs. iirc this was an explanation for population trends 300+ years ago.

        but hey, what if we did child labor but it was FPV drone versions of all those chore simulator videogames?