Zones of Transit

 I'm generally not a believer in the more apocalyptic projections for what our modern technology might do to us. The vision of generative AI gobbling up all jobs and slashing the value of human labor to zero strikes me as implausible, if we in any way accept the thesis that past is prologue. After all, every prior development in technology and automation has coincided with a long-term growth in employment—even if it caused temporary displacement to certain sectors along the way. 

Still less am I a believer in any neo-Malthusian alarmism about resource depletion and overpopulation. Just as with automation, history suggests that such concerns are always misguided. Economies tend to grow, the more they increase in population. Nations operate on an economy of abundance, not of scarcity. Population growth does not lead to a scenario in which there is "not enough to go around": to the contrary, the more people are contributing to the economy, the more there is to go around for everyone. 

I believe all of this, as I say. But still, when I saw a report in the Wall Street Journal this morning about how the global population may not only have stabilized recently in growth—but actually started to shrink—a creepy thought wormed into my brain. I have not been able to dislodge it since, and it continues to haunt me. Suppose—the thought went—that people on some unconscious level know that now is not the time to reproduce. Suppose people are already making way for the age of post-human labor. 

Ridiculous, I know. But still, I can't shake it. After all, governments constantly try to scaremonger about demographic trends—and the governments have always been wrong. These trends reflect a deeper practical wisdom on the part of the crowd. When the global economy demanded an enormous surplus of labor in the age of mid-twentieth century expansion, humanity obliged—even as governments and think tank gurus decried the development as a "population bomb" that would lead to famine and bread riots. 

Suppose what we are seeing now, then, is simply the same trend in reverse. Once again, governments and gurus are spreading alarm and panic. The People's Republic of China, after forcing women to limit births for decades, is now pivoting to the opposite extreme, and trying to cajole them into becoming baby assembly lines. Right-wing culture warriors in the U.S. too, and in Western Europe, are spreading a panic about declining birth rates, pinning the blame for it on feminism, "wokeness," and other cultural trends. 

But meanwhile the human population goes along its way with its typical unconscious wisdom. They are adapting their reproductive habits to the new world they are entering, long before policymakers and think tank theorists and the other shapers of conscious opinion have understood what is happening. Like a snake that begins to rub itself against a branch to dislodge its molting skin, perhaps the great global public has already realized the truth: that they will need to make way for the age of AI. 

This wouldn't make any sense, as I said at the outset, if future economic trends will continue to mirror those of the past. If the current technological transition is anything like those of history, it will only increase the productivity of the average human worker and thereby increase demand for a larger population. This is one of many obvious perversities of the current U.S. political class's fear of immigration, after all—in an age of declining birth rates, we need all the workers we can get. 

But suppose that AI is not like the technological revolutions of the past. Suppose, as so many of the Silicon Valley tech bros tell us, "this time is different." Could it not be the case, then, that humanity has the right idea? If the future holds far fewer jobs in store for human workers, then reproducing at sub-replacement levels would be economically rational—and once again, ordinary people had sensed unconsciously what was right for them, even as policymakers tried to force them in the opposite direction. 

I admit that this probably only occurred to me because I've been reading J.G. Ballard—and this is exactly the kind of disturbing thought he would implant in one's brain. His 1962 post-apocalyptic sci-fi classic, The Drowned World, describes a future warming Earth overrun with Triassic reptiles and long-extinct foliage. Far more even than a prophecy about the risks of climate change, the novel serves as a melancholy existential reflection on the possibility that humankind might retreat into non-existence. 

The novel's fundamental idea, after all, is that as the geological character of the Earth moved backward through time—coming, through increased warming, to resemble the hothouse Earth of the prehistoric eras, when cold-blooded reptiles became the planet's dominant lifeforms—then so too, humankind would evolve backward—our history and progress as a species unraveling like a film strip run in reverse. In Ballard's apocalyptic vision, after all, the human population is shrinking through a lack of fertility: 

"The birth of a child had become a comparative rarity," he writes, of his future hothouse Earth. "[O]nly one marriage in ten yielded any offspring. [... T]he genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a New Eden." And by the end of the novel, indeed, the book's protagonist has recapitulated that entire reverse history, becoming himself the new Adam. 

And, seeing that eerie Wall Street Journal article about the human population already starting to shrink—when just a few years ago, we were still worried that it would grow indefinitely, beyond the planet's ability to sustain it—I couldn't help but wonder if we were living to fulfill Ballard's prophecy. Are we unraveling the progress of human societies? Are we thinning the herd, on some subconscious level, because we sense a future coming that will have much less need of our presence? 

In Ballard's vision of the next century, the human population dwindled because the reptiles were taking over. But perhaps in our near-future, it will be because the robots are taking over. Robots vs. dinosaurs.

Now I'm just being ridiculous. But still, I am haunted by the knowledge, as I noted above, that governments and thinkers have always gotten these demographic transitions wrong in the past. So why would they be right this time around?

In the mid-19th century, cultural critics like Matthew Arnold were railing against the excess population growth of the working class (this is one theme of his essays in Culture and Anarchy), even though the industrial expansion of the era actually needed their labor. The working class reproduced because it made economic sense. They were the ones who were being rational economic actors, and who actually created the prosperity that sustained the cultural critics—even as the latter kicked and protested. 

In the early twentieth century, the French government embarked on a great PR campaign to encourage more women to have babies. Even the artists got in on the act. Guillaume Apollinaire's proto-surrealist play, The Breasts of Tiresias, partakes of this cultural moment, and pushes a lot of the same pro-natalist propaganda. Yet, the French government had itself just engaged in a great culling of its young men through the brutalities of the First World War—which must have sent a decidedly mixed message. 

Generations of governments since have likewise alternately tried to incentivize reproduction or halt it, based on their "expert" judgement as to whether more humans were needed. Yet time and again, their efforts to control natural processes failed—and they were usually wrong on the economics too. People reproduced when it was economically rational to do so, and they didn't when it wasn't—and what governments said in public relations campaigns generally made little difference either way. 

And if one accepts the lessons of this history, then one has to wonder what it is that the people who are choosing not to have babies—and who are making this choice now all over the world (this is no longer, as the WSJ article notes, merely a phenomenon of the developed world)—one has to wonder, I say, what it is they know that the governments and the thinkers do not. And that creepy thought comes back to me again—maybe they are sensing that the world we are entering will not have a place for their children. 

That's a dark conclusion, I know. That's why I say it goes against all my beliefs, and I am still intent on rejecting it. Yet, it haunts me. One wonders whether the global population is preparing for a coming transition that they sense, but cannot articulate. Ballard speaks, in this regard, of the idea that people enter certain "zones of transit" in their minds, in which they ready themselves for great changes in their environments, "where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance." 

This is one of several reasons why I am skeptical of the cultural critics bemoaning today's declining birth rates—just as I am skeptical of the kindred cultural critics of yesteryear who were denouncing birth rates for being too high. In both cases, the governments and the theorists doing the criticizing refuse to accept the unconscious wisdom that may be guiding people's decisions—they refuse to acknowledge that people may actually know what is best for them. 

Governments will keep trying to fight it, of course. Expect more campaigns to try to coax, wheedle, and—should these efforts fail—ultimately coerce people into reproducing. Expect more right-wing backlash against feminism and women's empowerment, as these will once again be blamed for declining birth rates, just as they have been in the past. Expect more hand-wringing denunciations from cultural critics and podcast hosts alike about the "crisis of masculinity" and the decline in human numbers. 

Expect, too, more mixed messages from those in power. Expect governments to welcome the enormous productivity and profit-making potential that may be unleashed from the new machines, and thus to allow people's jobs to be replaced, and yet at the same time to perversely try to incentivize people to bring more children into a world where their skills and labor will not be needed or compensated. 

Perhaps even the governments will do what the French government did in the early twentieth century: force a great culling of the population, even as they pay lip-service to the idea of pro-natalism. Perhaps they will condemn people for not bringing more babies into the world, even as they sit by and let the already-existing babies die from preventable wars and diseases. 

Did we not see this happen already, in the recent past? Certainly, during the COVID-19 crisis, governments around the world showed an eery complacency toward the mass die-off of their own populations. The international community failed to rush vaccine development to the impoverished world and overcome the intellectual property barriers that would have been needed to quickly vaccinate the whole globe, before the virus had thoroughly ravaged it multiple times over, causing millions of deaths. 

I am reminded of another creepy, haunting thought on this subject, from another work of literary sci-fi I recently read: William S. Burroughs's late-career opus, Cities of the Red Night. As a character remarks, in a chilling passage: "[T]here are those who think a selective pestilence is the most humane solution [....] A plague that kills the old and leaves the young, minus a reasonable percentage... one might be tempted to let such an epidemic run its course even if one had the power to stop it." 

I don't mean to endorse any bogus conspiracy theories about the pandemic being "planned" or otherwise deliberate. But Burroughs's prophecy of a future mass die-off from a virus is certainly prescient, given that the pandemic matched his description at least this far: it mostly attacked the elderly, and it mostly spared the young—"minus," of course, in the character's chilling phrase, "a reasonable percentage." And even though governments did not start the pandemic, many of them did, in a sense, "let [it] run its course."

With regard to the pandemic, then, the best we can say of many governments' responses, was that they approximated the morality of Arthur Hugh Clough's mordant poem, the "Latest Decalogue"—they did not "kill," that is—they did not deliberately plan to unleash the pandemic, contrary to the claims of the conspiracy theorists and the hints of Burroughs's dark future projections—but they also did "not strive/ Officiously to keep alive." 

Perhaps it is events like these—the increasing instability and uncertainty of the twenty-first century global order, of which the pandemic and governments' lackadaisical response to it is only one manifestation; transformative new technological innovations and the untold havoc they may bring to labor markets being another—that is making people think twice about having children. And who can tell them they are wrong? 

Of course, some people will still insist on telling them they are wrong anyways. Governments and the right-wing culture critics will go on blaming women and gay people for it—even as they, the governments and the right-wingers, are the ones allowing viruses to depopulate the Earth and encouraging unfettered capitalist development to render whole job categories otiose. 

Perhaps we should stop, then, with the mixed messages. If we believe that more children and more humans in general are a global good—and I do—then perhaps our governments and thought leaders should stop blaming people who are just responding to a realistic assessment of the world they appear to be entering—and instead they should start doing their part to ensure that new world will be a place people would actually want to raise kids in...