Cities have always been demographic sinks. Always, from prehistory to today. Cities have never been able to sustain their own population organically; they always relied on migration from rural areas.
China demographics thread.
- Thread starter gadgetcool5
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There shouldn't be an obsession with keeping up population, with automation and AI the job market will only continue to shrink. A graceful downward trend would be better than mass unemployment.
The main problem is "graceful". Demographics are like an unstable system whose behavior is extremely hard to fine tune. The question then becomes which is better, an excess of young people or old people ? I think it's the first, simply because young people are more daring, embracing of the future and able to generate wealth/value in general.
If you want high birth rates, revert society by a century and ban women from working, obviously it's not a conversation anyone is willing to have.
I don't advocate for banning women from working. There could be other solutions. But societies that are unwilling to seriously consider solving their birth rate issues will eventually get Darwined out of existence. As for things like artificial wombs and robots that can actually replace humans. They can only be factored in once we started seeing a clear path to their eventual invention, the foundational tech isnt there yet and we don't know if it will ever be, so it is unwise to rely on them.
There's two scenarios.
In the first, the technological singularity happens and everything, as we know it, changes so fundamentally that it no longer makes sense to talk about nations, cultures, or demographics. After all, what does being "Chinese" or "European" matter in a post-human world?
In the second, the technological singularity does not happen; and AI & robotics mostly enriches human civilization, enabling it to ascend to greater heights. In this scenario, demographics very much matters, and the nation that most effectively makes use of AI & robotics to augment demographic influence (via increasing fertility, colonizing space, etc.) will inherit the future.
I don't think anyone can guess which one of these scenarios will play out.
But I'm pretty sure the rational course of action is to bet on the second, since in the first scenario, what countries do literally does not matter.