There is a providential link between AI development and the drop in birthrate. Fewer children in better health and better education need more machines, and the Earth can’t have too many people.
AI may be somehow providential. In about 150 years, the world’s population went from 800 million to 8 billion, but the feat is unlikely to be repeated in the next 150 years.
That is, the world won’t be home to 80 billion people in 2170. All data show that birth rates are dropping and the global population will stabilize sometime between late this century and early next century at 10 to 14 billion people. After that, it might actually decline.
It is happening because there was not simply a change in health care and technology, cutting early deaths and extending life expectancy, but also an unprecedented historical change in the quality of life. For all of human history, children have been a capital and a force. Families with many children had more manpower, and thus more income, influence, and social clout.
In the past 50 years, for the first time ever, children have become a burden – more children meant more expenses. The quality change is that, on average, parents are caring for children as never before, possibly, and that children no longer serve the needs of parents and the family, but it’s the other way around. Children are not expected to become herders at six or toil in a mine or on a boat. At that age, they need to go to school for 10-20 years.
This was a rare privilege until mass education became the norm after the end of the 19th century. The world came to believe that investing in mass education had much higher returns than sending most of its children to work at 5 or 6. Mass education also meant better health care for children; they can’t study if they are unwell.
With fewer children, parents’ affection and dedication are more concentrated. One thing is, if you have a couple of kids, it’s different if you have half a dozen or more.
It has changed everything in the parents-children’s relationship. Children are an expensive and risky investment for families and society. Therefore, a family or even a society can’t have too many children. There are still many children in places where there’s a strong religious drive, or where they do not need investment.
For the rest of the people, children are a costly concentration of affection, which (because of their nature) cannot be wasted, and thus one cannot have too many of them. Even wars, a constant drain of blood and lives throughout human history, need, in general, fewer people, thus less carnage, hence fewer children to be sacrificed at the altar of death and glory. Short of a nuclear apocalypse, they aim at destroying a country’s infrastructure, cripple its economy, and now flying on the blades of AI-driven drones or cyberattacks.
It’s fortunate, because the planet would not sustain 80 billion people, and, despite what techno entrepreneur Elon Musk may believe, going to Mars doesn’t look like a real alternative to the Earth.
Depopulation has its challenges, but there’s a solution. AI and robotics promise to increase productivity and assist people without a new population explosion.
So, now AI and machines are taking jobs away from people, and we feel it is bad. Maybe in a few decades, we’ll feel lucky we have the machines, because there won’t be people for those jobs. This perhaps should be the new dimension of our thinking.
