Summary: Human populations will start to decrease globally in a few more decades. Thereafter fewer and fewer humans will be alive to contribute labor and to consume what is made. However at the same historical moment as this decrease, we are creating millions of AIs and robots and agents, who could potentially not only generate new and old things, but also consume them as well, and to continue to grow the economy in a new and different way. This is an Economic Handoff, from those who are born to those who are made.
It has been nearly a thousand years since we last saw the total number of humans on this planet decrease year by year. For nearly a millennium we have lived with growing populations, and faster rates of growth. But in the coming decades, for the first time in a thousand years, the number of deaths on the planet each year will exceed the number of births. This seems hard to believe at first because superficially there is no evidence for that change in direction. As this chart shows, the line wants to go up.
While the fertility of humans has been declining for decades, it was mainly in the developed world, while the rest of the world kept breeding prolifically. But starting a decade ago, even the developing parts of the globe have experienced declines in fertility as they developed. Presently we have evidence that fertility rates are declining everywhere on the planet. And the rate of that fertility decline is starting to plunge much faster than anyone alive expected. The line of fertility wants to go down.
The key metric of fertility is the replacement level. If the total fertility rate is below replacement, then over time, the population decreases, because the current humans don’t replace themselves in numbers. Right now in 2025 every developed country except one (Israel) is below replacement and getting lower each year. Some countries in East Asia are so far below replacement that they are already losing population. Nearly every other country in the world is following this pattern of rapidly modernizing, reducing their birth rate in a one-way direction downward. Not a single country anywhere has been able to raise their birth rate above replacement once it dips below that threshold. It’s like a black hole.
Since the year 2000, the official forecasts of what the world population would be in the near future have been incorrectly too high each year, because it has been hard to believe fertility rates could fall so fast and not bounce back. Year after year the UN and others keep expecting fertility to bounce back, but it doesn’t. In fact, year after year it collapses even more, and yet the official projections expect fertility to recover above replacement world-wide.
The official date of world population decline is expected in some four decades but I suspect it will happen in only two decades. Perhaps even as early as 2040.
Many smart people welcome this depopulation without realizing that we don’t have a recovery or brake function. They believe that once the world population shrinks to a more “sustainable” size, it will level out. This is the same fantasy that the UN has had that population has to bounce back by itself. But so far no fertility remedy any region has tried has been successful in turning the rate around. Neither housing, child-care, child credits or even payments of $75,000 per newborn has made a difference. It may be that all such benefits have to be enlarged, maybe 10 times, a hundred times, before they can reverse the decline. Because the population will not level off, will keep decreasing to zero, unless something reverses it. What will it be?
Even if we can slow down the decline of the average total fertility rate, we are headed into a brand new territory humans have never been in before. In the ancient past, there was little progress in living standards. In the last 900 years, all our progress in longevity, safety, well-being have all been accompanied – if not fueled by – rising populations. The curves of progress and the curves of population increase are highly correlated. And of course, they are mutually reinforcing. More progress enables more children to live, and older people to live longer, which gives everyone more chances to improve the world. So increased populations increase progress which increases population which increases progress.
That was before. Now suddenly, in the coming decades of this century we are entering a new regime of humanity. We want increasing living standards and progress while we decrease population. Every year we want better standards while we have fewer people. Every year we want more options, more choices, better things, more innovation, with fewer workers, smaller audiences, and smaller markets. Every year the pool of potential customers you have gets smaller. Every year, your potential audience shrinks. Every year the labor pool contracts. The population of countries halve. The population of little towns dry up.
The capitalist system we have built around the globe thrives on growth. Progress has been keyed to growth of markets, growth of labor, growth of capital, growth of everything. However in the second half of this century, there will be no growth in humans. So to continue a rise in living standards for those who are born, we will have to devise an economy that does not rely on the growth of humans. We have no idea what that kind of economic system might look like. Most likely it has to redefine growth as a type of maturity, of gaining betterment, instead of just gaining mass. Maybe it entails UBIs and other economic innovations.
I think it is no coincidence that at the historical moment that humans progress themselves to the point of not breeding because it is inconvenient, that they invent a million virtual beings, a billion artificial minds, trillions of robots and a zillion working agents. Think of this as a handoff – a shift from one regime based on the biologically born to another based on the manufactured made. We are in transition from the world of the Born handing off to the world of the Made.
The economy of the Born is powered by human attention, human desires, human biases, human labor, human attitudes, human consumption. The economy of the Made, a synthetic economy, is powered by artificial minds, machine attention, synthetic labor, virtual needs, and manufactured desires. Most of the materials produced in this economy will be consumed not by humans, but by other machines. Most of the communications will be sent between machines; most of the materials manufactured will be used by robots for the benefit of other robots. Most of the thinking done, will be done by AI agents for other AI agents. Most media content will be generated by avatars for other avatars. Eventually some of these agents may accrue degrees of autonomy; the economist Robin Hanson calls these autonomous virtual beings who consume, ems. My ems, or my agents, may watch a million times more TV or video than I watch so that the quality of what I actually watch with their help is a million times better.
Ultimately, humans are the main beneficiary of this system. We create this synthetic economy of machines in order to continue the progress of our own lives. In a sense, we invite the trillions of synthetic agents into our realm so that our realm can continue. We might at first be bothered by the fact that every year a great proportion of the economic activity is consumed by synthetics, but after a while we’ll understand that this vast economic foundation is needed to serve the relatively few humans that remain.
Our role in the economy is to do all the kinds of things that would not count as productive. Make art, make music, create crazy things because we can, explore the frontiers of reality, and discover new ideas (with the help of genius machines), try stuff, invent new desires we did not know we had, be creative in a different way than machines are. Also, sit with each other when we are sick, have meals with friends –you know, the most important things in the universe to do.
The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.
Therefore our task right now – as humans – is to make sure that in the following decades as our biological numbers start to shrink on this planet, that we can repopulate it with a sufficient number of synthetic agents, bots, and robots with sufficient intelligence, grit, perseverance, and moral training to take over the economy in time to keep our living standards rising.
We are not replacing existing humans with bots, nor are we replacing unborn humans with bots. Rather we are replacing never-to-be-born humans with bots, and the relationship that we have with those synthetic agents and ems, will be highly mutual. We build an economy around their needs, and propelled by their labor, and rewarding their work, but all of this is in service of our own definition of progress and human success.
One hope I've had, and not seen discussed, is that as population declines, hopefully there will be increasing opportunity in places where that's currently stifled by poverty. There may be fewer people, but a much larger percentage of them will be in a position to contribute to our well being.
I get that if the decline continues on the current plummeting line, that would be a temporary thing--but a good one.
Wild thoughts! I appreciate it. Thinking about how money would work in a system like this is completely boggling my mind, even though it feels beside the point here. Will our diminishing human numbers all pool together to pay via taxes for these helpful ems? How would the humans make a living to afford to build this while we're all spending time having fun with relationships, games, hobbies and health? Maybe it's not all that expensive as it builds itself?