WEF World Economic Speech:
I could argue in the developed countries the big winners are countries that have shrinking populations (depopulation). That’s something that most people never talked about. You know, we always used to think depopulation is a cause for negative growth.
In my conversations with the leadership of these large developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, that don’t allow anybody to come in, shrinking demographics, these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology. If the promise, I didn’t say it’s going to happen, but if the promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries, the standard of living of individuals, even with depopulation. And so the paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing.
The social problems that one will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have depopulation. So for those countries that have rising populations, the answer will be education.
