The contemporary Western fascination with artificial intelligence is often framed as a triumph of innovation or a natural culmination of scientific progress. Yet beneath this celebratory narrative lies a quieter demographic anxiety.
Much of the West now confronts a civilizational predicament not of excess population, as earlier theorists feared, but of absence—of too few young people to sustain the ordinary, unglamorous work on which societies depend. AI, in this context, is less a technological choice than a demographic compensation. It is being summoned to fill the spaces left empty by collapsing birth rates.
Factories without workers, hospitals without nurses, cities without sufficient technicians to maintain water, power, and transport systems—these are not speculative futures but emerging realities in large parts of Europe and North America. When societies age rapidly and reproduce slowly, they must either import labor at scale or mechanize intelligence itself. AI becomes attractive not because it is wise, but because it is available.
“When a civilisation runs short of children, it begins to dream of machines.”
This pattern is no longer confined to the West. Several Asian societies that embraced Western economic and social models—marked by intense urbanisation, atomised family structures, and the prioritisation of individual consumption over generational continuity—are now confronting similar demographic decline. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and increasingly China, illustrate how prosperity coupled with a Malthusian imagination can produce societies that unconsciously choose extinction by arithmetic.
The idea that population growth is a problem to be solved rather than a responsibility to be sustained has consequences that compound silently over decades.
India is often invoked as the demographic counterpoint, a youthful nation destined to supply the labour and energy the world lacks. Yet this confidence dissolves under closer scrutiny. While India’s aggregate population continues to grow, fertility rates are declining across most regions and communities.
Among urban, educated, and economically secure Hindus, the birth rate is falling sharply, mirroring patterns seen earlier in the West and East Asia. Exposure to Western lifestyles—delayed marriage, dual-income households, career primacy, and the quiet devaluation of parenthood—has reshaped reproductive behaviour. The decline is not abrupt enough to alarm policy planners yet, but it is steady enough to matter.
“Demography moves slowly, but it moves with the force of destiny.”
In societies experiencing such decline, AI begins to acquire an almost metaphysical allure. It is imagined as a neutral, tireless substitute for human presence—an invisible workforce that neither ages nor demands meaning. Governments, corporations, and even intellectual elites begin to speak of AI not merely as a tool but as an infrastructure for continuity. The implicit assumption is that a society can outsource not only labour, but judgment, care, and responsibility to code. This is where the myth takes shape.
AI can optimise processes, but it cannot reproduce society. It can simulate intelligence, but it cannot generate moral accountability, cultural transmission, or the instinctive solidarities that bind generations. A civilisation sustained primarily by machines risks becoming operationally efficient and existentially hollow. The belief that AI can replace human abundance with computational cleverness confuses functionality with fertility, and speed with succession.
Ultimately, the turn to AI as a demographic solution reflects a deeper refusal to confront the cultural choices that led to population decline in the first place. It is easier to fund algorithms than to rebuild social norms around family, continuity, and intergenerational duty. Yet no society has ever survived on intelligence alone—artificial or otherwise.
“A future without children is not a future delayed by technology; it is a future denied by choice.”
No comments:
Post a Comment