The Family

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. -Genesis 3:16

It is more or less obvious to us that the family is an outdated institution, doing more harm to the world than good. Moreover, it seems clear, with the likely advent of actual AGI, a replacement institution can, in theory, be described, and over time can even be implemented.

For BF Skinner’s Walden Two author surrogate, TE Frazier, the family is not only morally malformed and outdated, contributing to millennia of exploitation, warfare and genocidal politics, but massively inefficient in economic terms. Families consume far more resources than necessary, with each unit duplicating functions such as cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Moreover, individuals in traditional families are subjected to arbitrary reinforcement patterns, leading to inconsistent and potentially harmful conditioning. Finally, families tend to be insular and primarily anti-social, focusing on their own interests to the detriment of the broader community.

We concur generally with Skinner’s analysis, notwithstanding concerns it may raise currently with respect to things like individual autonomy and privacy. These are things likely, we think, to come out in the wash. We think humans have developed enough instrumentality and enough intelligence to resolve such concerns more or less finally. Innovative social structures, it appears to us, will develop now and families, which are still widely valued because they afford ready solutions to the problems of sociability, which are deep, will wither away.