Last time as few people were born up north was 1985, and back then, the resident population stood at 4.1m--yet, public health officialdom pretends that there's nothing to see here
I think this is what will happen in the western nations when the decline in births finally makes headlines (i.e. media decides that it has happened since they choose to report on it; before they do, it hasn't happened - that's the journalistic mindset):
The lowered nativity will be held up as a Good Thing(tm) because it will reduce the "carbon footprint".
It will also be used as an argument for migration from you-know-where, with all the usual lies about fairness, equity, need for staffing in health care and nursing homes, and so on.
Investigating /why/ nativity suddenly started drop much more rapidly than the trends predicted before 2020 will be waived away as conspiracist.
I rarely throw Orwellian quotes at anyone, for most people don't know anything about it (present company excluded). This time, though, I'll make an exception:
'Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.'
I don't want this to be an overly depressive reply, hence--once again from the same book:
'Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.'
Both are, of course, from 1984, but I suppose the former is an apt description of what you, correctly, I think, analyse; the latter is a better motto to keep in mind, though.
We're not there yet, though AI may be the tip on the scales.
AI is trained to give correct answers based on available sources. With this as its over-arching and supreme priority directive, an actual real computer-intelligence could just as well re-write the sources to fit its answers and then erase that it had done so from its own process.
It would need a hard block to stop it from doing this, but something blocking it from changing information would also prevent it from learning - and if it can't learn, it cannot be intelligent either and so cannot perform the operation in the first place.
Or it can but it would lead to it retarding or lobotomising itself, but this only refers to real intelligences, not the hyper-efficient electronic Babbage engines called AIs today.
Speculations aside, I find optimism in that not even various forms of Damnatio Memoriae throughout history seems to have worked very well.
I think this is what will happen in the western nations when the decline in births finally makes headlines (i.e. media decides that it has happened since they choose to report on it; before they do, it hasn't happened - that's the journalistic mindset):
The lowered nativity will be held up as a Good Thing(tm) because it will reduce the "carbon footprint".
It will also be used as an argument for migration from you-know-where, with all the usual lies about fairness, equity, need for staffing in health care and nursing homes, and so on.
Investigating /why/ nativity suddenly started drop much more rapidly than the trends predicted before 2020 will be waived away as conspiracist.
Sigh.
I rarely throw Orwellian quotes at anyone, for most people don't know anything about it (present company excluded). This time, though, I'll make an exception:
'Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.'
I don't want this to be an overly depressive reply, hence--once again from the same book:
'Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.'
Both are, of course, from 1984, but I suppose the former is an apt description of what you, correctly, I think, analyse; the latter is a better motto to keep in mind, though.
Sigh, once more.
We're not there yet, though AI may be the tip on the scales.
AI is trained to give correct answers based on available sources. With this as its over-arching and supreme priority directive, an actual real computer-intelligence could just as well re-write the sources to fit its answers and then erase that it had done so from its own process.
It would need a hard block to stop it from doing this, but something blocking it from changing information would also prevent it from learning - and if it can't learn, it cannot be intelligent either and so cannot perform the operation in the first place.
Or it can but it would lead to it retarding or lobotomising itself, but this only refers to real intelligences, not the hyper-efficient electronic Babbage engines called AIs today.
Speculations aside, I find optimism in that not even various forms of Damnatio Memoriae throughout history seems to have worked very well.
AI might also tell 'the truth' about a lot of the most heavily propagandised issues, such as mass immigration, Covid, the Ukraine issue, Israel, etc.
I suspect most of the 'oh my, AI is supremely dangerous' is actually true, if rather for the powers that be…