This is the wrong place for that brand of myopic nonsense, if ai is good enough to replace girlfriends then every calculation and comparison in your sky falling theory about reproduction rates is turned to junk.
That same automation is already removing the need for people from loads of jobs, especially service industry ones - you don’t need ever more people when we don’t need so many humans to look after elderly people.
The other stuff about society collapsing is just typical tech fear we’ve seen from certain portions of society every single time anything gets invented - most of it is just the classic issue of awareness, of course it seemed people were happier and better connected when you didn’t know anything about their lives, of course more people are open about their mental health struggles now they’re a recognised thing.
Sure some people will be weird about ai and fall in love, people have been marrying horses and obsessing over ladies shoes or whatever else for centuries - society is going to be just fine.
All I’m doing here is extrapolating based on current trends. I’m not saying the future has to be this way, but likely will be unless we take action. Social media didn’t have to ruin our social lives, but for many it did and still does and the awareness isn’t enough.
Same will be true of AI. Our AI ethics development hasn’t been enough to stop what will at least be short term damage. Thats how it is already impacting our schools and media and will continue to for years before we have proper tools.
So since I have a decent base for saying that it will harm our socialization and reproduction rate, the second part is why do we need more people?
We don’t. I agree. Less people is probably better and fine, especially if AI can do a lot of the work. The problem is that we aren’t set up for that and we won’t be in the near future. So yes I hope the world transitions to rely less on having more people, but the problem will likely arrive long before the solution.