"Hundred years ago, if you attended school until you were 18, you were considered highly educated. Today, you are considered too stupid to be allowed working at half of the jobs unless you have some kind of university."
You just made me realize how big of an impact university expectations are on fertility twofold. It's obvious that if people are supposed to be 22 now before starting "real adult life", instead of 18, that will affect fertility rates by virtue of being less time to get situated and a shorter fertility window. However, there's a not so obvious double whammy, in that your children will also now be dependents for 4 years longer too! So instead of 18-40 year olds thinking, "i have 22 years to have kids that will just need to make it to 18", we now have to think "i have 18 years to have kids that will need to make it to 22." Timeframe shortened ~20%, dependency burden also increased ~20%.
There's a couple problems that even though Sam is surrounded by people like Ilya and Jan warning him of the consequences, he's currently unwilling to change course.
Ultimately, I think Sama sees the coin flip (but believing utopia AGI is higher chance) and being the ever-optimist, is willing to flip it for the good things because it's too scary to believe that the abyss side would happen.