Why AI (and technology) may change the role of a women (forever)
Recently I talked about why AI (and technology) is pushing for parity of genders.?
To recap: Man and woman technically differ in 2 main things: physical strength and giving birth. For the relation between technology and physical strength read that post.
This post is about giving birth importance related to the rise of technology. Disclaimer: the topic is extremely complex and certainly this post is not exhaustive in any shape or form.
Let’s ask a fundamental (not so obvious) question: why do we make kids?
From an humanitarian point of view, we all should agree we do not want extinction and if possible propagation of our species is a good thing.
From a civilization point of view, the problem is a bit shifted. Since humanity exists, a man has been responsible for production (or attack/defense) while a woman should produce newborns to increase production.
Economy output (GDP) of a civilization was (and still is) proportional to population increase. Same for military power: the larger your army the likely more powerful you are (oversimplification).?
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Just to be clear: Ethical and moral problems are not the focus here and I am not advocating man superiority or anything like that . The individual rights perspective is very different from society's perspective.
Quick examples. In late 1700 France was the prominent power and… the most populous country in EU. You can even argue Napoleon lost because he ‘finished’ most of the French sons in Russia and he could never recover from that: in Waterloo soldiers were very young as all older sons were sadly gone (if you are an animal activist, sadly even French horses and cavalry was never recovered from Russia..).? In WW2 countries were literally paying women to produce more kids (‘a kid for the nation’ is a famous Italian Fascist slogan).
In many ways, this holds true today: in war the country that ‘consumes’ more men (and it has no new recruits) will likely lose. The wars we are seeing today have this issue.
Essentially man and woman, from a society perspective, both literally contributed to production : man with its strength (farming, industry, war) and woman producing new humans (which have strength etc.).
In the future it may happen robots would fight instead of us directly. Same is already happening for production in farm land, factories etc. In other words, production will cease to be proportional to population increase.?
When this will happen, the pressure on society on women to have a family, have kids etc. simply (will ) change (already now?).? Woman (and man role) would change. How ? I do not know. But they will change.