Discouraging Prospects for Gen Z

 Various people have been pointing out how dismal the economic prospects Gen Z faces when compared with the generations immediately preceding them, and speculating that this is leading to discouragement and demoralization... such that one might wonder if working hard is worth it when life is going to suck anyway.  Why save for buying a house when the median age for first time homeowners is about to cross 40 years, and so on.

I would add something that I do not see being discussed.  One little project people must engage in if their culture, civilization and indeed species is to survive is the very non-technological act of starting and raising a family.  It's an economic adventure proportional to expectations; subsistence farming has fed countless families in our species and has succeeded in the absence of much of the "stuff" people have been taught to obsess over.  Despair over the prospects of starting a family need not follow from poor economic prospects.

However, forming a family is far more a matter of trust and faith in one another than it is a matter of dollars and cents.  A relatively recent innovation has had an effect on our culture in the US for most of the past 50 years.  This innovation is "no-fault divorce" and is further exacerbated by the common "guidelines" for child custody and support arrangements after such a divorce.  Anyone with enough functioning synapses to imagine the results of making a home in the caldera of an active volcano should be capable of grasping how utterly disillusioning and demoralizing it can be for a young man who is told his duty is to build and support a family when he learns how casually and callously his partner in that adventure can, and now all to often does, render his every effort futile and ultimately self-destructive.

Anyone who does not grasp this should learn how this system works and what its effects generally are.  In my opinion poor economic prospects are trumped by trust, but not when the law has made that trust abrogable at whim.  For this reason I suggest that no-fault divorce and its corollaries is a greater killer of civilization than is any amount of economic stress, and that this policy should be reversed immediately.

What AI has demonstrated in design

Much can be said about people's experiences in putting AIs to work at design in various disciplines including materials.  The successes have in general been achieved by automating trial and error, enabling far more trials per unit time than humans are capable of performing.  In the real world, this is called "butt work" and is suitable for delegation to relatively unimaginative underlings.  That is not to suggest that "trial and error" hasn't proven worth the trouble on occasions, but when an imaginative human engages in that practice he will generally be guided by intuition and inspiration, leading to more selective trials and more results, including trials not in the set that would be assigned to the above underlings.  This is of course because real cognition is a practice that employs the entire integrated mind of the cogitator, not just artificial subdivisions like "left" and "right".

Observe that the above exercise in butt work as a class suggests the familiar postulate that a sufficient number of monkeys with keyboards over a sufficiently long time will reproduce a particular classic composition.  Granted that LLMs can simply plagiarize the said classic if they've been fed it, but this is nowhere near AGI.  The question, of course, is whether it is good for humanity to automate tasks that are normally assigned to students in order that they may make contributions while developing skill at their crafts.  As we have seen with elevating minimum wages to exclude kids from entry level jobs, this is no way to continue developing the legions of capable people required to sustain a culture or a civilization. Just as the kids are replaced by kiosks in fast food joints, young talent is being sedated with various nonproductive things while their relevance as upcoming talent is being devalued.  Good luck with this, humanity.