MUCH is made of intergenerational conflicts, with boomers pitted against millennials or Gen Zers. But however these competing needs are resolved today, in the future, younger people will become an increasingly prized resource, because there will be fewer of them.
Populations are slowly being skewed older than ever before by two seemingly unstoppable demographic forces. One is that, as countries become more prosperous, there is a decline in the number of children that people have. When that figure drops below the population replacement level of 2.1 children per woman 鈥� unless offset by immigration 鈥� the head count shrinks, as well as becoming more senior-heavy. If this trend continues, 97 per cent of countries are forecast to have birth rates below the replacement level by the year 2100 (see 鈥淲hy falling birth rates will be a bigger problem than overpopulation鈥�).
Advertisement
The other key factor is that people are living longer in nearly every country in the world, a trend that has continued for decades. This has been driven by multiple factors, including improvements in sanitation, the spread of vaccines and antibiotics, and, later on, by better treatments for heart disease and the decline of smoking. The next reshaping of life expectancy curves could come from the widespread use of weight-reducing drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, or indeed medicines already in wide use today (see 鈥淭hese four common medicines could help prolong your life鈥�).
These ageing populations present many challenges, forcing countries to rethink their systems of pensions, healthcare and so on. The risk is that there will be too few people of working age to help provide and care for those who are older.
But we shouldn鈥檛 necessarily be too pessimistic. Just like in medicine, advances in artificial intelligence (see 鈥淎rtists who use AI are more productive but less original鈥�) and robotics (see 鈥淲hy giving AI a robot body could make its 鈥榖rain鈥� more human-like鈥�) are continuing apace. Could the potential demographic crisis be averted by a workforce of intelligent machines? If so, rather than having to be worried about robots taking our jobs, we might one day welcome them with open arms.
