From Palladium Magazine, June 1:
The world’s most industrially productive society is South Korea. With 50 million people packed into a territory the size of tiny Iceland, South Korea is, of course, outproduced on an absolute scale by many far more populous countries like the United States or China. But, per person, no country produces as many automobiles, ships, and tons of steel as South Korea does. Per worker, it has more industrial robots installed in its factories than any other country, more than twice as many as second-ranked Germany and five times as many as the U.S. The only major countries that use more energy or electricity per capita than South Korea are the U.S., Canada, and Sweden. If Taiwan didn’t exist, South Korea would also be the world’s foremost per capita manufacturer of both advanced and everyday semiconductors, at least ten times more productive than the U.S. or Japan, who currently occupy distant third places. South Korea also exports electronics, medicines, tanks, aircraft parts, and nuclear reactors.
No matter the scale or complexity, it seems like there is nothing South Koreans cannot figure out how to produce at a rate that puts the rest of the world to shame—with the notable exception of human beings, of which South Korea currently manages to produce only about 0.75 per woman, one of the lowest, least productive rates in the world. At this rate, in three generations, the newest generation of South Koreans would be 96% smaller than the current one. A future South Korea of 5 million rather than 50 million people is highly unlikely to be as exceptionally industrially productive as it is today.
The systems of both material and social technology we rely on to deliver our modern standards of living explicitly and implicitly assume large and growing populations, including to make many crucial economies of scale viable. They were neither designed nor intended to function with rapidly aging and declining populations. South Korea isn’t as great an outlier as it might seem. The U.S. generation of three generations from now would be 47% smaller than the current one at current fertility rates, and China, Russia, Japan, and the European Union are all worse off than that.
Why global fertility rates have widely, structurally declined to below replacement since the 19th century is a question that, still, nobody has a decisively persuasive answer to. But it is difficult not to tie the trend, somehow, to the inner workings or consequences of the unprecedented industrial societies we have built in roughly the same period. A rising supply of energetic human labor, not just physical but also mental, clerical, and intellectual, has always been a key prerequisite to and driver of industrial and technological progress. Without industrial production, there is no technological capability to speak of, no abundance of wealth, and no mass prosperity.
Slipping Down Into a Dark Age
Even if birth rates in industrialized countries magically recovered overnight, a great degree of aging and population shrinkage is already baked in. Even if this baked-in amount proves not to be outright ruinous, even if some industrial societies manage to muddle along with roughly equivalent populations and standards of living, this outcome would negate the legitimizing narrative of continuous progress and probably foreclose on achieving ambitious dreams like colonizing the Solar System or achieving untold material abundance for the whole world this century. By default, it looks like industrial civilization is abolishing itself.
A common rebuttal is that advances in automation and artificial intelligence have made human labor obsolete, so there is no need to worry about a graying and shrinking humanity, since robots will inevitably take over where humans cannot and, even, do a better job. There are two problems with this argument. First, while automation is a replacement for human labor at the level of a single factory, at the level of a civilization it is not a replacement for human labor, but a force multiplier. A society with a billion workers and a high degree of automation is extremely likely to be far wealthier and more technologically capable than not just a society with a billion workers and a low degree of automation, but also a society of one hundred million and an equal degree of automation. If we conceive of artificial intelligence as a form of automation for mental, clerical, or intellectual labor, the exact same logic applies. The purpose of automation is not inherently to mitigate the negative effects of demographic decline; defining it that way is a cope. The greatest period of automation in history, the Industrial Revolution, also saw unprecedented demographic growth.
Second, insofar as artificial intelligence is not just another form of automation but the introduction of autonomous, generally-intelligent minds capable of matching or even outdoing human genius, agency, and ingenuity, the problem is not even that this remains totally speculative from a technological standpoint, but that, philosophically, it amounts to saying that it is so difficult to get human beings to reproduce under modern techno-industrial conditions that it would be easier to just get rid of them entirely and replace them with artificial human beings. If you care about humanity, then this is not a persuasive argument.
The social niche this argument occupies is not that of a self-confident vision justified earnestly on its clear and universally-recognized merits, but that of a furtive excuse and accounting trick whose assumptions and implications would be widely rejected if they were thoroughly appreciated. “Degrowth” environmentalism effectively proposes that the solution to industrial civilization’s problems is to simply abolish industry while keeping humanity; this is increasingly and accurately recognized as the actual proposition behind the school of thought, and rightly rejected due to the inevitable, self-imposed impoverishment that would follow. Along the same lines, some of the most committed believers in the potential of artificial intelligence are effectively proposing to solve industrial civilization by abolishing humanity while keeping industry.
Neither of these visions actually solve for the desirable outcome of not just maintaining but growing both humanity and industry. One must always ask what undesirable outcome a cope serves to obscure. If we imagine our industrial societies continue on their default trajectories for ten years, then fifty years, then one hundred years, then two hundred years—without inserting speculative total paradigm shifts from environmental collapse, artificial intelligence, or something else—we can imagine societies that, bit by bit, get older, smaller, poorer, more sclerotic, more ineffective, and more riven by more petty political conflict. These societies would slowly lose capabilities they previously had and, if not for the fact they now constitute all of the relevant societies on the planet, we might even say they would become more irrelevant over time....
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