This is an interesting report from NPR about the birth rates in the US and all over the world. Women and families are having fewer babies than they were decades ago, with more and more families making the conscious decision to not have babies. This is beginning to create significant changes in global population projections, but more immediately this is affecting economies and national planning around the world. Most significantly, here in the US, as well as China, many European countries, and elsewhere, there are not enough young workers to help the rapidly increasing number of elderly people. The big question is, is this sustainable? More and more countries and states are now below the replacement rate for sustaining a stable and growing economy, which will cause disruptions in nations. Another question is how will this affect future climate models and change the predicted global demographics, which then affect the future course of the human race?
These are important questions, and mix in with the questions being faced with the advent of AI, advanced robotics, and climate change. This is an inflection point in human history, with an unknown pathway ahead of us.
Questions that come to mind include:
- here and in other countries with aging populations and declining work forces, what is the future in quality of life for the elderly? We already know that program like Social Security and Medicare are financially unsustainable with the present funding model and reality. Fewer young workers will accelerate the financial pressures on retirement, how to deal with more and more elderly, the health care system, and other sectors of the economy.
- Combining AI and robotics into the mix, since all of these big issues are obviously connected and inter-related: AI and robotics are disrupting the job marketplace in most sectors of the economy already, and soon these will have an effect on all aspects of jobs, daily life, and the economy. With more and more human jobs being taken over by AI and robots, the prospects, and, possibly, the quality of life for many young people, could be in decline. What jobs will young people have available to them? With even more uncertainty for young people, will this be a feedback loop that causes even further declines in birth rates? With uncertainty of jobs, how and why would we expect young people to be able to have and afford kids, even if they want to have children? And will this likely be a new pressure and discouragement to having babies? If this were to happen, it feeds into a worsening of the elderly situation.
- Will the rapid and continuous improvements and advancements of AI and robotics (and soon to be quantum computing networks) provide the solution to the job markets' stresses, but at the same time only increase our reliance and need for more and more AI and robotics, which puts more pressure on what is available for humans to do? This is another likely (negative) feedback loop with unintended consequences for young people.
- For today's teenagers and pre-teens who are seeing all of this in front of them, what will this do in terms of having hope? We have what may be a perfect storm of an aging society, climate change, AI and robotics changing economies and causing disruptions and vast uncertainties in job markets, nationalistic politics and possible authoritarianism in the US and other western countries, a 'war' on immigration that is creating further pressures on declining numbers of workers within the US economy, drastic and rapid increases in the wealth gaps between the uber-wealthy and average citizen, and questioning about what purpose humans can find within all these changes happening at once. Does anyone have good models for understanding all these massive changes at once? How can we deal with this when today's leaders are not even talking about and recognizing the complexity of all this change, let alone any possible solutions?
There is MUCH TO PONDER and digest here, and all of this is progressing faster than humans have been capable of keeping up with in terms of predictions, policy, planning, and processing to keep up with the changes.
No comments:
Post a Comment