Depending on your mentality, a population reduced to just 100 million could either be your idea of personal hell or heaven. But, it could be a possibility according to one doom-spreading computer scientist.
They believe that due to AI, human necessity will drop so far that people will stop breeding, and the world will become empty. You can tell that this guy is a computer scientist because he thinks people only recreate to fulfill a quota. Nerd probably doesn’t even know how babies are made.
According to his numbers, there will be so little for human beings left to do, parents won’t want to bring children into a jobless world. He believes that AI will replace so many jobs, there won’t be anything left for us to do.
“There are demographers who are suggesting that as a consequence, the world population will collapse, and it could go down to as low as just 100 million people on the entire planet Earth in 2300 or 2380,” he claims.
Subhash Kak believes people won’t have kids if they don’t have careers. The population will drop right down, and the Earth will be a barren wasteland. He’s got all the numbers right there in his book.
Jobless Doesn’t Mean Hopeless
If all the tasks AI can do are taken from humans, and those humans aren’t taken care of with some kind of universal income, then I agree. People will be left to starve, and the rich few will be left with everything. This, sadly, is the way it seems to be going.
We are not, as a race, benefiting from the removal of menial AI jobs. A few billionaires are, while the rest of us are left scrambling. But, in a perfect eutopia where all those boring jobs are done by AI, I can only smell roses.
Let’s say we all have a universal income to stay fed, housed, and healthy. Menial tasks are taken care of by AI, and we are free to no longer work. That sounds ideal. All of a sudden, humans are free to explore, create, and dream. Nobody has to worry about making enough money to live. That would create a golden age of population and creativity.
Sadly, that isn’t the situation. The population is declining in many developed countries because the disparity between rich and poor is creating a world so abhorrent, nobody wants to curse a child to grow up in it. The problem isn’t AI, it’s the anti-human people running them.