What Do the Rich Want This Time?

Pregnant Women. Part.1

‘Have more kids! Save the planet from collapse!’ These are words we’ve all heard from our mother. But these days the uber-rich are vocalising a mirrored sentiment. I should preface, these are Silicon Valley ‘tech bros’, because besides Simone Collins, being Pronatalist is a boy’s club. Pronatalism is all about increasing the family size, essentially just upping the numbers on kids. For some of these men saving the planet means investment in science, some decide to take the sociological path, others save the planet first hand and have secret children with models.

The list of Elites joining in on this rhetoric spans on, but the main names are, Elon Musk (father of 14), Sam Altman (father of 1 specially selected baby), and Jaan Tallinn (father of 6). The Core principles of these 3 men's ‘activism’, by my understanding, goes as such:

The replacement rate is lower than the death rate, if that doesn’t change soon there Will be population collapse, resulting in the collapse of infrastructure, economy and potentially more.
It is every woman’s duty to take on that responsibility, the more babies the better.
While you are at it, why not select your baby’s traits like a cyberpunk character creator.

That last tenant is in reference to the rise in this wave of the pronatalist movement: Genomic Prediction. The future is here and genetic selection IS a thing. It’s an obvious choice for the pronatalists, when you care so much about your children and your legacy, you want the best for them. What’s better than pre-determinism? It’s IVF on crack, it’s the next stage in a business that before helped women who otherwise needed assistance getting pregnant or perhaps wanted to wait later for pregnancy and froze some eggs. It’s now a way of ensuring the best baby is drafted.

Where before (just a few decades ago) we believed in fate, and humanity lying in the mistakes, we now have no excuse to not excel in our pre-selected fields.

How family oriented of us.

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Now that we know all the players, we should follow the story.

Elon’s very much a mouthpiece for pronatalism. His first tweet on this topic was in 2017 stating that “few seem to notice or care”.

Then repeated the sentiment at a World A.I conference(2019)

Then he donated 10 million ($10,000,000) to the University of Texas to form the ‘Population Wellbeing Institute’, which researches how to raise the population using scientific, social and ethical reasoning. He also got his “Civilisation will crumble” message published in Fortune Magazine the same year(2021)
Gaining traction on twitter with “A collapsing birthrate is the biggest danger to civilisation by far” even joking that his many children are his way of “doing [his] best to help”. All while commissioning XTR to make a documentary on population decline, using one of his researchers at the University of Texas as the prominent figure(2022)
And ever since, the message has snowballed, blaming hedonism and comfortable prosperity as the reason for non-traditional family values and less weight being given to the importance of growing the family name.

Sam Altman’s involvement is much more “money where his mouth is’. He first got stuck in by investing into ‘Conception’, a startup working towards the transference of a cell into an embryo. Striving to open up more doors for soon to be family’s, and allowing same-sex couples to have their own related children. Which, ‘Conception’ has previously stated, “could help population decline”(2023-2024).
Later he started preaching that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) was laid out to help foster families and allow for a happier healthier life together in the future. But they were all general terms with no real set idea as to what AGI would be doing, or even if AGI would be physical by then or not.
And finally Altman financially backed another biotech startup, ‘Preventive’, a Genetic editing company with the goal of genetically editing embryos to remove hereditary disease. Genetically editing embryos to have a baby is illegal in the UK, USA and Canada, as of now it is only legal for research purposes.

Jaan Tallinn was ahead of the curve, donating $200,000 to ‘the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk’, an organisation dedicated to doing just that at a global level, in order to foster a worldwide change of ethics and choices. An organisation he co-founded (2012).
He then helped the foundation of the ‘Future of Life Institute’ with a mission to steer large scale technologies away from the extreme and towards being the beneficiary of life (2014).
And he most recently donated $482,000 via the ‘Survival and Flourishing Fund’ to the ‘Pragmatist’s foundation’ which supported ‘Pronatalism.org’ (2022)

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It’s true that our population is rapidly aging. That doesn’t mean me and you are getting older quicker, more like the average age of our population is rising, the balance between old and young is tipping towards old. A product of a lower fertility rate. The smarty-pants millionaires say that we aren’t equipped to handle such a dip in working-aged people, infrastructurally, when it hits us in 30-40 years or so. Think of the dilemma as a water level. Our population is the water, and we rise and fall periodically like the tide. Our infrastructure, such as factories, mines, hospitals, police, government, even ‘pandemic-certified’ essential work at McDonalds all need employees. Workers. People to operate. Our infrastructure is like a well. It draws from our water level, and the lower it is the less people will be able to benefit from the well. The fear is that our well got built bigger and bigger as we grew, allowing for more and more water. But if that were to drop the big well would be spread thin and cease to function- well?.. Well.

This would undoubtedly result in the retirement age raising and raising, allowing for less and less reprieve from a life of servitude to the system. It is also feared that this decline could result in collapse and that our rapid growth didn’t factor in our eventual stagnation. A common outcome from prosperous empires. Being fed allows for thought, being comfortable allows for choice. It happened to the Holy Roman Empire. It happened to the Han Dynasty. It happened to the Byzantine Empire. To the Italian Renaissance. And the Qing Dynasty. And it’s happening to us, only we don’t see our modern era as an empire despite its near global takeover of ideals and operation, because it's not ruled over by one name… usually its three. Three companies that monopolise everything, crafting global synergy in order to maximise profit. Because in this Empire, money creates kingdoms not bloodlines. It’s not a throne, but chairs on the board.

So those were the fears these men have, I’m now going to explore the possibility of these very smart men not having these fears at all. Purely hypothetical, ‘Why would these men push Pronatalism if they didn’t fear population collapse?’ because we, the people, have a right to a healthy amount of suspicion. If not only to put these thoughts to rest.

What would benefit a person from peddling such a belief? A fear. Well these are three different men who have invested themselves in three different ways.

Obviously money comes to mind during a thought experiment like this, all 3 of these men are investors, with Altman being the most prominent to capitalise. With his ventures into ‘Conception’ and ‘Preventive’ it’s obvious a fear-led marketing strategy would go a long way. Let alone the constant media cycle keeping it fresh in the mind. However, I’ve nosey’d around all their investments. Tallinn and Musk don’t have anything that would see a return with a boost in fertility or at least the need for it. Tallinn’s interest is highly philanthropic, a fat wallet with a big heart, perhaps. He’s also not exclusively on the baby-train, his concern lies in existential threats to humanity, he looks at them all promoting change with his organisations. I believe his biggest worry lies with the misuse of future A.I property. All this section entails is a hypothetical chopping block. A logic based inspection of ‘what if’ based morality. That being said, Musk under the suspicious eye becomes way more farcical. Musk is a billionaire which automatically would jump his motivations to the stratosphere, instead of money, I assume he would choose power. Just like how he tried his hand at politics in the States and yelled at ours in the UK. Once you're at the table to make the decisions you can better serve yourself. What would a population scare do for Elon Musk? the man who has a lot. A lot of a lot. 671,500,000,000 lots of a lot. My only suspicion, in this thought experiment, would be a relation to population sizes and his growing development of his ‘factory towns’. Obviously industry has a long history of having communities centralised around them. However this is a man with big dreams of steering our future. A.I, Neuralink computing, Androids, Self driving cars, space travel, etc. With such a Star Wars/iRobot-like imagination why wouldn’t he want to level up capitalism?

- This theory does reach drastic heights but then again so does a stack of 671,500,000,000 1 dollar notes (That’s 45,560 miles by the way, if that stack falls over it could go around the earth almost twice) -

By ‘level up capitalism’ I am obviously making up a world in which money crafts kingdoms, in which royalty is replaced by company. Where countries can be bought and sold like anything else, and with them come people, from subjects to employees. I’m dreaming up a future where company policy becomes law, immigration is ‘silent quitting’ and the smog heralds progress. I wonder if Elon Musk dreams up a similar world, a world in which he’s going to need more people.

Then again, Elon’s twitter history points more at reactionary conspiracy’s designed to rage-bait the modern man back into ‘traditional’ values that come sandwiched between two thick slices of misogyny and patriarchy. Whether Elon is behind the scenes or just another man falling for the bait is another question, but again, just a reminder, my answer is purely hypothetical as I could not possibly read the motivations of an incredibly public figure.

If it wasn’t obvious, I am simply displaying both sides of the coin. One based on facts we know, one based on a wise amount of suspicion. Neither are right, but neither should be ruled out until we know more. These are powerful men, we should trust them with our planet… we should, we want to, but I’ve been scorned before.

Follow for Part 2.

Overpopulation