Why world needs robots for continued economic growth, as populations age and women have fewer children
With population and productivity growth slowing, the labour force shrinking in countries including China, and opposition to immigration, robots are not a threat but a necessity for all but the poorest nations
The United Nations forecasts that the world’s population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, who fear that population growth will outstrip the food supply, leaving a hungry planet. Others appear in the tirades of anti-immigrant populists, invoking the spectre of a rising tide of humanity as cause to slam borders shut.
Still others inspire a chorus of neo-Luddites, who fear that the “rise of the robots” is rapidly making human workers obsolete, a threat all the more alarming if the human population is exploding.
An increase of 2.5 billion people may sound catastrophic. But what matters for economic growth is not the number of people but the rate of population growth. Since its peak in the 1960s, that rate has slumped by almost half to just 1 per cent, and the UN forecast assumes that this slowdown will continue.
Women are having fewer children, so fewer people are reaching the working ages between 15 and 64, and labour force growth is poised to decline from Chile to China. At the same time, owing to rapid advances in health care and medicine, people are living longer, and most of the coming global population increase will be among the retirement crowd. These trends are toxic for economic growth, and boosting the number of robots may be the easiest answer for many countries.