The worldwide inhabitants might fall from over 8 billion right this moment to simply 100 million by 2300.
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Robots don’t have to stand up and destroy humanity; we’d simply fade away on our personal.
That’s the message from Subhash Kak, a tech professor on the College of Oklahoma, who believes synthetic intelligence might play a serious function in a form of quiet collapse of human civilisation.
In an interview with The Solar, Kak talks a couple of future the place main cities are deserted, delivery charges shortly drop, and solely 100 million individuals are left on the planet. Not via battle or illness, however via a world determination to cease having youngsters.
“Robots won’t ever be acutely aware, however they are going to be doing actually all that we do as a result of most of what we do in our lives may be changed,” Kak says.
Delivery charges around the globe are falling
In accordance with Kak, we’re already seeing the early warning indicators. Confronted with financial instability and a tech-dominated job market, many individuals — particularly in developed international locations — are deciding that having youngsters simply doesn’t make sense anymore.
That’s already seen in the actual world, says Kak:
- The EU hit its lowest fertility charge of the century in 2023.
- Japan recorded its lowest delivery charge in 125 years.
- China’s inhabitants is shrinking for the third yr in a row.
- South Korea has the bottom delivery charge on the earth.
These aren’t short-term issues, Kak argues: they’re a part of a deeper, probably irreversible development.
Collapse of our world by the yr 2300?
If the decline continues at its present tempo, Kak predicts that by the yr 2300 — or possibly 2380 — the worldwide inhabitants might fall from over 8 billion right this moment to simply 100 million.
That’s lower than the present inhabitants of Mexico, Russia or Vietnam, and barely double Spain’s 2025 estimate.
“Cities like New York and London will develop into abandoned ghost cities,” the professor informed The Solar. “The world might be devastated. I feel folks actually don’t have a clue.”
And in contrast to these dystopian tales the place machines overthrow us with violence, Kak believes the actual risk is way more silent: a type of voluntary extinction, powered by consolation.
The danger within the AI period
In his e-book known as The Age of Synthetic Intelligence, Kak explores this imaginative and prescient deeply. He doesn’t deny AI’s advantages, corresponding to comfort, automation, and productiveness beneficial properties.
However he warns of some existential dilemmas we haven’t even begun to handle.
With AI already all over the place, Kak believes our society might transfer away from nature and even from one another. And, in response to him, that would imply fewer households, weakened communities and collapsing establishments.
So, if we agree with Kak, the AI age is just not about killer robots, however extra about shedding our will to hold on.
And people of us nonetheless round in 2300? We’ll see.