Thoughts on world population day 2026 and what might come next

Happy World Population Day to all who celebrate.

I’m writing about this topic because demographics are an essential tool in the futurist’s toolkit.  We now have a lot of data on population, between government efforts, professional demographers’ work, and insurance companies.  Demographics aren’t destiny, as the old saw goes, but they have a strong influence.

My readers are likely familiar with my focus on this topic. Last year I posted about World Pop Day and reflected on many demographic issues, from the great demographic transition to its implications for national politics, warfighting, economics, higher education, and technology.  I won’t recap all of that here; if you’re curious or new to the topic, please check it out.  Today I’d like to offer more informed futurist speculation on how changing demographics might change the world.

First, some updates from the past year.  There haven’t been any surprises for those of us studying the topic. The demographic transition (fewer babies, living longer) continued without any pause.  Nation after nation, region after region reported birthrates declining further and their senior population expanding.  For examples, India, China, Japan, Singapore, the EU and Britain, Germany, Poland, the United States, and Canada saw the number of children fall, even to surprising levels.

Some developing nations are only part way through the transition, still producing children at above replacement levels.  These are primarily in subSaharan Africa, plus parts of central and south Asia, notably Pakistan.  Here’s the most recent map I can find illustrating these differences:

Immigration has been controversial in many nations.  Some call for more people to move from the high fertility nations to the lower ones to supply economic needs (there’s even a comic book).  Some migrants and would-be migrants see better opportunities in those nations which raced through the demographic transition. Opponents cite cultural differences, express concern about stresses to state services, and call on locals to increase their own birthrates.

Other political and cultural responses have followed along last year’s lines.  There are predictable pushes for more births from the right, often along racial lines.  In the United States, this is seeping into government policy, between the vice president’s pronouncements and whatever LysenkoRFK, Jr. is trying to do.  There have been pro-natalist events and conferences.  Left and progressive thinking on this topic is more diffuse, with some arguing for shrinking humanity as a good thing and others celebrating womens’ greater autonomy.  Meanwhile, a group of economists argued that increasing worker productivity can solve problems of declining overall economic output.

On the technology side there have been some interesting debates about the role tech has played in speeding the demographic transition.  One paper which received a lot of attention argued that smartphones helped depress childbirth, presumably by incentivizing some people to be alone, satisfied with their devices.

At a meta level I find more people willing to look at and discuss demographic data than previously. This might be because of rising political debates or because fears of overpopulation are losing currency.

How might this all progress?

A straightforward extrapolation points to the world reaching peak human population at… some point.  The United Nations estimates it’ll take a while to reach it, probably in the 2080s with just over 10 billion people.  A study in The Lancet sees this coming earlier and with a small number: “peak[ing] in 2064 at 9·73 billion (8·84–10·9) people.”  The University of Pennsylvania’s Jesús Fernández-Villaverde thinks global data overestimates fertility and we might be passing peak human even sooner.

Straightforward extrapolation has many weaknesses, famously.  We could have a cultural reversal whereby significant numbers of women decide to have more children, perhaps under the influence of a religious movement. Some government might crack the so far unsolved problem of reversing population decline. These seem unlikely to me.

Conversely, global disasters might kill a lot of us, depressing the total population even further.  As a futurist I’m primed to list such: a supervolcano, an asteroid strike, a plague (think that COVID killed up to tens of millions), nuclear power mishaps, nuclear war, biological war, or just a thoroughgoing conventional war of sufficient extent. (I should do a blog post on this.) The point being, there are worse ways for us to approach and pass peak humanity, and sooner.

All of that said, it seems like a plausible bet that the demographic transition will continue operating.  Let’s think about some implications.

I wonder about psychological and cultural responses to fewer children.  An economic logical of scarcity suggests we could value those small numbers of smaller humans more highly. We could see more “high touch” parenting, more social appreciation for children, more men taking more care of little ones.  The arts from film to literature to music might celebrate children to a greater extent than they do now.  But we should also expect a kind of dialectic, as we’ve seen with the proudly childfree movement. More people could well proclaim the shrinking children population as progress.

The economic aspects are wide open right now, as we have few precedents for this kind of population change.  On the one hand are concerns that an ultimately smaller population means fewer chances for geniuses to emerge, fewer workers to support an expanding senior demographic, and some kind of economic sclerosis appearing.  On the other is the hope that the industrial-era expansion of worker productivity, aided by technological development, will balance it out.  Super-workers will  produce more as will their firms, yielding a larger economy and more taxes out of which to better pay for elders’ pensions, care, and other services.  I expect a lot of economic modeling and research to work on this problem, along with national policies trying to address it.  Businesses and nonprofits should enter the fray.

Politically, we should anticipate a ferment of policies and movements aimed at getting women to have more children or protecting their abilities to not do so.  These debates will activate all kinds of cultural forces and social organizations: religious belief and religious institutions, gender norms, national identity, how we think of ourselves as ancestors.  In another way this keys off of that emerging divide over the future of progress – does having fewer children and living longer constitute a new form of progress, or is a failure thereof?

The politics around migration seem likely to persist.  We already see nationalist positions calling for excluding foreigners while (somehow) increasing local birth rates. On a related note, we might anticipate a politics of aging, embracing a large senior popular and warring against ageism.  Pro-immigrations forces, on the back foot as I write this, will need to offer new arguments.  Perhaps we’ll see a form of limited migration become more popular, with nations admitting targeted populations based on skills, wealth, or other attributes.

Geographically, I wonder about the rural world emptying out as younger people leave for cities and everyone else gradually dies.  Will relatively empty districts become appealing to inhabitants of ever-growing, expensive, and crowded cities, or will urbanites prefer the panoply of densified services and opportunities they enjoy?  In other words, will the long term trend of increasing urbanization persist?

In terms of family and personal groups, I keep returning to Donna Haraway’s idea of our partnering with animals instead of humans.  In Staying with the Trouble (2016) she describes a future where families welcome other species into their lives more than today’s pets.  She envisions lifelong bonds including child rearing, study of animal behavior, and body modification to enable closer ties.  Make kith, not kin is Haraway’s slogan, and perhaps this will catch on as many populations shrink.

I’ve also been pondering the technological dimension of demographic change.  I’m not sure cell phones had a significant impact on childbirth rates, but I can imagine a future where technology more fully isolates us.  Consider the role of AI as companion to humans. To the extent significant numbers of people turn to bots for conversation, emotional support, and psychological intimacy, we could see them withdrawing from therapists, churches, community events… and romantic partners.

That’s with the technology we have right now.  Unless AI research and development badly falters, or society turns massively against AI, we should expect these types of relationships to constitute a kind of subculture or widespread behavior as AIs become better at companionship for various levels of “better.”  To this software revolution I add hardware.  Yes, there’s a burgeoning industry of companion robots, especially humanoid ones.  To pick one recent example from a Chinese company,

[UBTech]’s chief brand officer, Michael Tam, describes the human-robot companionship economy as “the first essential scenario in human history with unlimited emotional value, boundless companionship, and full-life-cycle coverage.”

There’s a lot going on in this shot.

If the rapid progress robots have shown continues, we might see more people cohabiting with bots.  (I’ve written about this before, when I described an automated intermediary layer between people.) (Here’s one tongue in cheek article on the idea.) This would certainly elicit cultural pushback, mockery, praise, regulation, and more.  Depending on aggregate decisions, we might see a slice of the human population spending most of their time absent other humans, but close to automated companions. Yes, once again science fiction offers us glimpses of the way forward.

On a different level of technology and demographic impact, one vision includes robots, either teleoperated or backed by AI, doing various forms of physical labor.  We already have this, of course, between drones used in war and industrial robotics, but this vision sees robots entering a wide range of labor positions: mail carriers, cooks, police. Given the history of automation I’d anticipate robots starting by performing narrow functions, which expand over time.  These are supplements to a shrinking labor pool, or replacements for workers pressing for higher compensation.  They are also alternatives to immigrants.  A successful robot rollout could mitigate xenophobia… but also triggers domestic labor problems.

…and that’s enough for now.  For the past two days I’ve been hit by a migraine, so I need to wrap this one up.  I was going to add thoughts about climate change but will have to save for later.