The antinatalist view is that it would be better if humans did not procreate. This opinion could be based on either or both of two ideas: one, the current human condition involves suffering and therefore a new human will likely experience more suffering than happiness; two, bringing another person into existence cannot make any existing individual happier (including the new person).
I think there are many strong arguments for antinatalism. First of all, people often suffer greatly in this world. We can easily see this by looking at what happens to people who do not have access to food or clean water, medical care, education etc., but even those lucky enough to live in developed nations also have much suffering.
There is a significant amount of suffering that seems to be present in life, and bringing another person into this world will likely result in them experiencing much suffering. For example suppose a child was born with an incurable disease which caused constant pain and suffering throughout his or her short life. Or perhaps the child's parents were killed during delivery by complications from childbirth (in some parts of the world this actually happens). Even if we consider people who are lucky enough to live relatively healthy lives, they often have mental health problems.
For example, depression is very common. One in five Americans are on antidepressants to treat major depressive disorder. Depression is a mental illness which involves intense suffering, as well as negative effects on the person's ability to function and enjoy life.
Many people also suffer in other ways. For example, rape and assault are extremely common around the world, including in developed countries like the USA.
In my view, these and other forms of suffering are extremely serious problems. I think that most people will agree with me in this respect. Therefore it is rational to conclude that life is usually not worth living.
Second, we can also argue that bringing another human into existence will not make any existing individual happier. To see why this is true, imagine that you are an adult woman considering whether to have children. Now think about what child-rearing would be like for you. You would probably experience a lot of stress and worry about your children's wellbeing throughout their childhoods.
Log in:
You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.
This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.
Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.
Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.
Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.