Something that has been getting an annoyingly large amount of attention recently is human population decline. While this is old news for some rich countries like Japan and Italy, whose populations started decreasing around 2010, the same phenomenon has struck even middle-income countries like China and Brazil many years sooner than demographers projected. This is causing alarm as people ponder the ill economic consequences of having fewer working-age people but more elderly, and the changes in demography and the global balance of power as African and Muslim countries become the most numerous.
Rather than tread the same ground that the mainstream media has on this topic, I’m going to consider how future technologies and the cultural changes that go hand-in-hand with them will mitigate the effects of population decline. Below, I’ve listed each of the main depressors of birthrates along with how they will be counteracted.
Women
Female empowerment is probably the biggest reason why birthrates have dropped. Women across the world want more for themselves than being housebound mothers who are dependent on their husbands for money; they want education, careers, and the option to prosper independently. To a modern woman, the opportunity cost of having children, in terms of delayed or abandoned matriculation and forfeited lifetime salary, is massive. As a result, women delay starting families until they’ve finished their degrees and gotten good jobs, often pushing the start of motherhood to 30 (as is the average age for a first-time American mother). Because their fertility windows close around 40, it’s common for mothers to not have as many children as they wanted.
This ties into ANOTHER topic that has been getting an annoyingly large amount of attention recently: job automation. The last four years of rapid advances in LLMs have inflamed worries that machines will soon get smart enough to take all of our jobs. I think this will happen eventually, though the length of time it takes (30 years? 100 years?), the order in which jobs are automated (White-collar managers before blue-collar laborers or the reverse? Artistic jobs or scientific jobs first?), and how societies respond to the transition are totally uncertain. Regardless, if every human loses their job, then by implication every woman loses her job, which eliminates a major impediment to having children: With no possibility of having a gainful career, there will be much less of an opportunity cost for women to have children. Without jobs to worry about, men will also have more time for fatherhood.
In the far future, it’s also unclear if higher education will continue impeding parenthood. Aside from the pure pursuit of knowledge for one’s own gratification, there will be no point in getting a college degree at some point because machines will be much smarter than even the smartest human. Even if you had a PhD from the best university, you would not be able to contribute anything useful in your field since machines would be so much more advanced and faster than you. The value of a college education would plummet, and more women (and men) would rightfully find it a better use of their time to have children during early adulthood.
Therapies that delay or even eliminate menopause will be particularly popular because they will not only extend female fertility, but they also promote youthfulness, beauty, and other aspects of personal health. The added luxury of more time and youthful energy to have children will of course raise birthrates.
These therapies could eventually be subsumed by more advanced treatments that slow, halt, and reverse the aging process as a whole. The benefits would accrue to men just as much as to women, and would further raise birthrates by granting everyone the strength and stamina to bear and raise children well into what we’d today consider old age. Medical immortality is the ultimate cure for population decline. If everyone lives forever, even if the average person has one child a century, it’s only a matter of time before Earth is literally clogged with human bodies. If you believe in the feasibility of medical immortality–and there’s no reason not to–and that biological humans won’t go extinct for some reason in the relatively near future, then you should acknowledge overpopulation as a likely long-term prospect.
Infertility
Aside from menopause, there are many kinds of health problems that can render both sexes infertile. Additionally, same-sex couples and single males who want to be fathers face obvious roadblocks to biological reproduction. Again, science will offer solutions. In the future, we can expect cures for most diseases, including infertility. This will include better ways to surgically repair or replace damaged or malformed sex organs, or replace defective DNA inside of some tissues through CRISPR. Genetic engineering and greater use of IVF screening will also ensure that fewer people are born with fertility problems to begin with.
In the shorter run, techniques that allow sterile people to create eggs and sperm of their own by inserting their DNA into empty donor gametes will be developed and help raise the birthrate. In the very long run, artificial wombs will be created and will let anyone have a biological child, probably at much lower cost and risk to the fetus than the “traditional” method. The logical place for artificial wombs is in medical labs, but there’s no technological barrier to eventually putting them into female androids, allowing for true robotic surrogacy.
Time and Money
A second cause of reduced fertility is the high cost and time commitment of raising children. Bigger housing, babysitters, healthcare, tutoring, clothing, and a slew of other expenses accompany a child, and typically run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in rich countries. These costs dissuade many young and middle-aged adults who already feel stretched, or who don’t want to give up the modest financial cushions they have, from having as many children as they want, or from having any at all. Additionally, cultural norms have shifted so that adults accept children will be monumental time commitments whose emotional and intellectual development and personal interests will have to be nurtured. Long gone are the old days when children were largely ignored and most households were authoritarian.
Our old friend mass job automation again offers solutions. Though it would, at first glance, seem likely to depress birthrates since people would no longer have jobs and hence money to pay for child expenses, machine labor would make every good and service cheaper, allowing humans with a modest universal basic income (UBI) to afford things that only the rich can today. Importantly, this would include babysitting, tutoring, house servant services, and autonomous transportation, which would greatly ease the parenting workload and make it more enticing to have children. Having a house robot that was infinitely patient, fair, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of parenting skills and communication styles would be very beneficial to any family, and at scale would create social benefits.
Going a step further, it’s just a matter of time before robotics and AI get advanced enough to allow for the creation of androids who could function as spouses and foster parents. This would entice even more humans to have children by reducing the parenting workload substantially. With almost no exceptions, marriage rates dropped and divorce rates rose across rich countries from 1990 – 2021, and unsurprisingly, this has contributed to the birthrate decline since fewer people are interested in shouldering the burdens of parenthood alone. Robot spouses will fill the gap, in what might, counterintuitively, be a positive development for the human race.
Conclusion
While the decline in birthrates across upper- and middle-income countries will hurt the economy for decades, there’s no reason to think the negative trends will continue beyond this century, let alone reach the logical endpoint of human extinction. Future technologies and their attendant cultural changes will raise birthrates, reviving older fears of overpopulation and overcrowding.