Babies, Robots and Climate Change

One statistic that stopped me recently is that China’s population is projected by some experts to halve by the end of the century. Halve! China was the most populous country in the world until only three years ago. Birthrates in Italy, Germany and Japan have been low for as long as I can remember. They’re now falling across the world.

So what does it mean for humanity when humanity is shrinking? Will it solve climate change by reducing the human footprint? Reduce the disruption of artificial intelligence taking human jobs? My colleague Amanda Taub, who writes The Interpreter newsletter, has done a lot of reporting on the disruptive power of demographic change. Her assessment is sobering.

Fewer people, fewer problems?

by Amanda Taub

The world’s birthrates are plunging.

China’s government revealed last month that its birthrate had plummeted to the lowest level on record since 1949. The U.S. said its population had grown at one of its slowest rates ever, caused in part by an immigration slowdown but also by a decades-long decline in fertility rates. Similar trends can be found around the globe, including in India, South Korea, Italy, Colombia and Mexico.

All this means the global population is on track to start shrinking in the next 50 to 60 years. That has enormous negative implications for the world’s economic productivity, innovation capacity and political stability.

Some optimists say a smaller human population might have some upsides. It could, they say, buffer the consequences of the two other world-remaking shifts that humanity is confronting: climate change and the potentially wrenching disruptions of A.I.

These arguments have a certain logic. After all, climate change is the result of human emissions — wouldn’t fewer humans mean less strain on the planet? And amid fears that A.I. will displace human workers, couldn’t a smaller work force take the sting out of the prospective economic disruption?

If only. In fact, experts say, population decline is unlikely to be a solution to either problem — and may actually make them harder to solve.

‘A big, slow ship’

Decades ago, many within the environmental movement called for a smaller population as a means of curbing carbon emissions and lessening the effects of climate change. Most climate experts are now focused on other solutions, but the arguments have had a lingering cultural impact: Whenever I write about the negative effects of falling fertility rates around the world, I hear from many readers who are certain that the emission-reduction benefits will outweigh the other costs of a smaller population.

But when a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Hunter College in New York ran the numbers, they found that population decline was likely to have only a negligible impact on climate change.

The reason? The timelines just don’t match up. Because human life spans are long, the researchers wrote in a recent working paper, falling birthrates will take a long time to meaningfully change the size of the world’s population. The threat of climate change is much more immediate — today’s emissions will have a lasting effect on the Earth’s atmosphere.

Solutions to climate change, which would also have the effect of reducing per-person emissions, need to happen within a much shorter period. By the time the population actually does shrink, having fewer people won’t make much difference.

“The population is a big ship, slow to turn,” said Dean Spears, one of the researchers who worked on the paper.

The researchers analyzed a few different models of population size and emissions changes. They found that if the world’s population was to shrink by billions of people by the year 2200, which will happen if things stay on their current trajectory, it would make less than one-tenth of a degree Celsius of difference to peak temperatures when compared with a population that remains stable over time.

The A.I. revolution

Another frequent rejoinder to demographic doomsayers: We’ll just have robots do the work for us! Or, more bleakly: If A.I. is going to destroy all the jobs, won’t it maybe be better to have a smaller work force to start with?

For now, it appears that the kind of robots we’d need to replace humans at scale won’t arrive soon enough to help compensate for the slowing productivity growth of an aging population, said Beata Javorcik, the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In many places, the problem of an aging population and shrinking work force is already here. Post-Communist countries in Eastern Europe, for example, “got old before getting rich,” Javorcik said.

As for the bleaker scenario, economists like David Autor at M.I.T. believe it’s unlikely that A.I. will replace all or most human workers. Historically, labor forces have adapted to even the most seismic of technological changes. That might well happen with A.I., in which case a shrinking pool of workers would still dampen growth when the A.I.-driven productivity surge eventually did arrive.

But if A.I. did replace humans, Autor said, a smaller population would not be much of a cushion against the economic or political fallout. Even a small displaced work force has the potential to cause major disruption.

In other words, there is no magic bullet (A.I.) for the coming population collapse, and the collapse itself will not be a magic bullet (for climate change). There is only the slow, painstaking work of making policy that will be able to accommodate a new reality.

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Russian salad, a vegetable-studded potato salad with mayonnaise, is a beloved traditional party dish that has been riffed on pretty much all over the world. This version, served at a Serbian restaurant in New York City, uses gherkins or cornichons for a savory taste.