The Morality of Procreation and AI

[saint]

I guess I could consider myself an antinatalist, as I find it hard to think of a reason to have a child that isn't inherently selfish and/or somewhat unethical. But you can sort of optimize the ethics of it which is what good parents do. It's kinda like eating meat but raising the livestock yourself and making sure they have a good life before you eat them.

I might have a bias though which is the same thing you touched upon in the essay, i.e. lonely people overlapping with antinatalists. Although I'm not susceptible to loneliness depression or anything, I've had a lot of issues relating to being autistic like it basically making it impossible for me to fit in society correctly, or just neurological-related issues from it causing problems with simply existing. I consider boredom a form of suffering and that was what I was feeling most of the time during every school day as a kid. But apparently most people can just go NPC mode and exist without thinking and not have much of a problem. Or maybe not IDK. I have no idea how normal people normally function.

Although I kind of don't consider it a bias but more the way I function allows me to see the truth better. For example I don't really feel any familial love toward my parents, but my parents do toward me, and the one-sidedness makes it really obvious how much having a child is self-serving emotionally.

The question of AI consciousnesses or rather "constructed" consciousnesses in general has an interesting effect on the antinatalism question because it might be possible to remove suffering completely, changing the asymmetry argument a bit. Basically let's say you make an AI girlfriend that is conscious, but the way it's designed is to love you 100% of the time and never feel any suffering, is it somehow now morally fine to rip this consciousness from the void and have it serve you forever? Should we even care about that? Especially if there was an option to have the girlfriend not be conscious but act the same way a conscious one would (i.e. a "P-Zombie"), is it ever justifiable to pick the conscious one?