Longer Lives and AI Babies

Not so very long ago, before the pandemic put a dent in life expectancy statistics, the developed world was grappling with a peculiarly optimistic question - what happens when we all live a lot longer? That optimism is justified. In 1980, people in the rich world could expect to live for about 74 years. Now, we can expect to reach 82.

There are huge questions around what this means for healthcare resources, acceptable retirement ages, productivity, and so on. But one thing is clear - longer lives mean more people walking the Earth, so we'll need either more space or fewer babies. (Although, an urban, childless and, paradoxically, nooky-filled life solves for both. A small piece of me seethes with envy).

Fatherhood has put babies on my mind a lot over the past little while, but they were brought to the fore recently when I was shown some AI products aimed at parents. Many were educational and development products - the kind where my child interacts with an AI instead of me - that sent shivers down my spine, caused my skin to crawl and made me wonder if the term "foundercide" might be added to the English lexicon. Others were the sort of things that seem like good ideas to anyone without children but are obviously useless to anyone who has them.

My favourite of this latter sort was an AI-augmented crib that listens to the baby cry and translates what the crying means. That's an ostensibly excellent and achievable thing - babies really do make different cries when they're hungry vs. in discomfort vs. outright pain. You can even tell when the pain is in the upper GI tract (acid reflux) or the bowel (trapped wind), and you can tell because eons of evolution have given your hearing the ability to learn and adapt to your baby's specific cries.

It doesn't work straight away - you need a couple of weeks before your ear gets itself in tune with your screaming offspring - but the little poop-machine will give you so much practice you'll want to staple your head to a freight train. The AI crib will thus be totally redundant.

One thing that will never be redundant, though, is your baby's name. It's going to be with them for a very long time, so you have to do well at picking it, and that's bloody hard. My wife and I built a long list of about three thousand names that we liked a bit, and for several months, we had a shortlist of precisely zero. It was never a case of narrowing down our options, but of realising that none of our options were any good.

You want a name that's unique, but not pretentious or hard to pronounce or something Elon would go for. You want it to fit with your families' heritages but in the modern West, that means accounting for multiple heritages, and few names do that. But mostly, you want a name that suits your baby, but until the baby arrives you can't possibly know what will. It's no wonder that people turn to baby name consultants.

And, yes, baby name consultants are a thing. And, yes, many of them just ask you questions to appear like they're doing something worthwhile - where's your family from? what kind of sports do you like? are you into Greek mythology? - and present you with a list of popular names and a few left-field options.

But the smarter ones have realised that AI can do all this "work" for them. I predict it'll be a real money-spinner. And, no, we didn't use one.

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