This is exactly backwards – if the only way to get an essential job done is to build a robot to do it, then building the robot is the “busy just surviving”.
Maybe. What happens when there aren’t loads of 16 year olds to detassle corn? (Not that I really know anything about that, just that it’s apparently a job that a LOT of adolescent kids in corn-growing areas undertake for a year or so as they pass through the relevant age.) But there have to be a whole lot of similar jobs, things that require long, boring, not especially enjoyable labor that is now done because those workers had no better options. When ALL businesses start screaming over needing bodies to flip burgers/mow lawns/bag groceries/pick apples…what then?
On the flip side, what happens when the demand for something falls drastically? Yeah, your Nintendo stock may not be worth very much, too bad if your retirement income depended on that. Ditto that nice four bedroom house that you needed for your kids who are grown and out, but which you cannot sell for for anything like the amount of money you were counting on?
Some supplies can adjust pretty easily. No where near as many cans of infant formula needed? Well, shut down some lines. Maybe change your work week to Tuesday thru Thursday only.
Housing? That stuff lingers for decades or even centuries. For a short time it might have good effects. If Machine_Elf’s figures are close to correct, an American population that is 60M people smaller in twenty years damn well ought to have enough apartments and houses for everyone to have shelter.
I hadn’t thought of how the 90% drop would happen on the individual level, but that could have greatly different effects based on how it happens.
Are 90% of women ‘in their fertile years’ suddenly completely sterile? Testably? Like, they run some blood test or what ever and can tell 90 out of 100 women, Nope, you won’t ever have a child? At the very least, that’s 90% of the demand for birth control pills and condoms and such gone.
OTOH, I can see a huge demand for procedures that eliminate the menstrual cycle in such women. Why the hell should you go through the mess/cost/inconvenience of having periods for 40+ years if your are NEVER going to end up with a baby?
Would this result in two classes of women? The 10% elite, treated as madonnas, eagerly sought after by every man (and their mothers?) who greatly want to have their own children? The other 90% devalued for being 'barren."
Or conversely, the 10% fertile women are a critical resource, controlled and protected by the government in the name of national security? Will they be birds in a golden cages, cherished but basically forced to have child after child as fast as possible? While the 90% experience a level of freedom and autonomy women have never had? There’s no longer the worry about unwanted pregnancy. No driving need to find ‘a good man’ who will take care of your children. Employers will no longer discriminate against hiring and promoting women due to ‘they’ll just get pregnant and turn into SAHMs anyway,’
Maybe some mix of all of the above?
Of course, it’s equally likely that no one knows who will/won’t be the ones who fall pregnant. Like the couples who haven’t gotten pregnant after X months/years and who go to a doctor and there’s no apparent reason. “Just keep trying,” the doctor says. Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones after five years of trying. Or ten.
How can you make life plans in that case?
It would mean that the population of the world would drop by a factor of 10 every generation. It’s necessary to have a fertility rate of around 2.1 everywhere in the world to keep up the population of the world at the same level. The current average fertility rate is 2.4. That’s been dropping for quite a while slowly but with some ups and downs. The fertility rate will eventually have to average 2.1. It doesn’t matter if it’s a little below that for the next few centuries. That would just mean that the world population would slowly decrease for a few centuries, and it might be better for the world if there were somewhat less people. However, that can’t continue forever, and eventually the world would have to go back to a fertility rate of 2.1. If the fertility rate actually declined by a factor of 10, here’s what the world population would be (assuming arbitrarily that a generation is 50 years):
2022 7.9 billion
2072 790 million
2122 79 million
2172 7.9 million
2222 790 thousand
2272 79 thousand
2322 7,900
2372 790
2422 79
2472 8
2522 0
I predict the 51st state won’t be Puerto Rico but Elbonia.
Maybe, but that’s sort of fighting the hypothetical.
Though if IVF turns out to be a workaround, I can imagine interest in inducing embryos to split. You know those campaigns about ‘Share your spare’ about kidneys? Well, how about ‘free’ IVF if you agree to having your embryo encouraged to split? You get the child you want, and anything up to 7 other would-be mothers get to raise its ‘twin.’
As pointed out abovethread, we could expect a drastic worsening of kids’ behavior. Think China has it bad enough with the “Little Emperor/Empress Syndrome” with their former one-child policy? We’d see kids’ attitudes worsen much more so under such a lessened-fertility scenario.
One aspect in which education would change is that there would be so few K-12 pupils that instead of teachers teaching classrooms, every kid might be able to get his/her own tutor in every subject.
A 90% global birthrate drop would certainly cause economies to collapse and various social structures to falter in the short-term, but the long-term effect on the planet’s biosphere would be hugely positive. Our species has a proven track record of being poor caretakers of life on Earth.
I’m in favor of a significant human population drop, but it would be much better for the decline to be gradual and more easily adjusted for. Anything that puts less idiots on the roadways is OK in my book.
If “humans started having only 10% as many children” (the OP) but the women who could have children were forced “to have child after child as fast as possible” (your statement) you don’t need 10% of the current fertile women. One or two percent, suitably oppressed, would suffice. But could you keep this up? I see a Women Liberation Army arising that would promise the women in question a much better fate and a say in the number of children to have and the way to rise them.
Just to clarify, does this mean that we have 10% of the number of fertilizations, or that 90% of pregnancies result in miscarriage, like the krogan genophage in Mass Effect? Because the latter is objectively much, much worse.
Might childhood be significantly extended? We’ve already seen this over the last 50 years with more adult children living at home and education extending well past the mid-twenties for many. With a low likelihood of having multiple children or grandchildren, parents might be incentivized to keep their children infantilized and dependent as long as possible until the population is entirely made up of people incapable of any adult responsibilities.
Isn’t that like double the normal definition of a generation? If the 50 years stood, people born in 1945 and 1995 would belong in the same generation. By and large etc., people start reproducing in their 20’s, and women are forced to stop reproducing around 40 to 50, so roughly 25 years.
The point is you won’t be able to build robots. A population 1/10 the size of the one we have now will not be able to maintain the complex global supply chains requjired to make large useful robots.
Today, 28% of the population work in agriculture in the world. That’s over a billion people. You can’t just scale that down with the population, as much of our agriculture benefits from huge economies of scale. As does global shipping and other transportation networks.
With a population 1/10 the size, many high-tech things today will become unfeasible. We won’t have enough scientists, engineers, technicians, miners, or other people in a supply chain of hundreds of thousands of products that would go into the manufacture of robots.
It will take quite a while for the population to decline to 10% of its current size. If the decline in birthrates is identified as permanent quickly and if people respond to it quickly and efficiently (two really big “if’s”, I’ll admit), then there is a chance that technical replacements for a lot of things can be implemented.
But since the math shows we go extinct after X (10 or so from an earlier post) generations, I’m not sure if anyone bothers.
Phillip Jose Farmer wrote the story. https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/content/seventy-years-decpop
BTW, are the 10% born with the same issue or are they as fertile as humans are now?
Only my second sentence. IVF is one of the things couples turn to when they can’t get pregnant. The hypothetical says that lots more couples are going to have that trouble, so there will be lots more turning to IVF. I suppose the hypothetical implies that IVF will work only 10% as often as it currently does, but that doesn’t mean people will not turn to it.
Therefore paving the way for another Trump presidency.
Though I expect billions in research will go into things like IVF or even something like cloning.
In that scenario it seems unlikely that fertile woman would be allowed to marry and/or raise the children they give birth to. Basically it’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but without the religious prohibitions against artificial insemination or IVF (still forced pregnancy, just without ritual rape). The “Holy” Russian Empire ended up going with that approach in Word War Z. In theory sterile women could still face employment discrimination on the grounds that they’ll adopt a child and become SAHMs (maybe it’s a requirement to adopt), but in practice this would be balanced out by chronic labor shortages.
Now what happens if it’s 90% of men who become sterile? On one hand that’s a much less severe problem for humanity since men can sire hundreds or even thousands of offspring in the the time it takes for a woman to have a child. On the other hand many (if not most?) sterile men would feel profoundly emasculated and even act out violently. I think fertile men would be much more likely end up despised by other men, tolerated only by necessity, and end up compulsory sperm donors that have any kind of elevated status.
Don Johnson’s nightmare…
