Rieder's argument against having children seems incredibly egocentric to me. Our children will inherit a hellhole, and he doesn't want to subject them to it. Might as well kill yourself while you're at it.
The issue is that without children, there will be no experience of the hellhole. As terrible as humans have been for the rest of the life on this planet, we are becoming more conscious of it, and I think intelligence is a worthwhile trait to preserve. Since immortality is a fiction, children are the way to do it.
Children are very adaptable. It's us old people who will suffer through change. I mean, in the US, college freshmen have grown up in a world where you can be jailed for discussing encryption and kicked out of the airport for sharing a name with a suspected terrorist and police use military gear, and they're doing fine. For the most part.
We see how the world is changing, and we're horrified. For our children, that will just be the way things are. I am optimistic that some aspects will even be better. Our great-grandparents would say the same about our world now, and we're only around to experience it because they chose to have children.
The issue is that without children, there will be no experience of the hellhole. As terrible as humans have been for the rest of the life on this planet, we are becoming more conscious of it, and I think intelligence is a worthwhile trait to preserve. Since immortality is a fiction, children are the way to do it.
Children are very adaptable. It's us old people who will suffer through change. I mean, in the US, college freshmen have grown up in a world where you can be jailed for discussing encryption and kicked out of the airport for sharing a name with a suspected terrorist and police use military gear, and they're doing fine. For the most part.
We see how the world is changing, and we're horrified. For our children, that will just be the way things are. I am optimistic that some aspects will even be better. Our great-grandparents would say the same about our world now, and we're only around to experience it because they chose to have children.