Surely you’ve noticed that many countries are subsidizing births – and others are banning abortions – even as tech lords lament the number of “useless people” in the world. You’ve noted the contradiction, and you’ve asked yourself, “What’s going on here?” Cool Hand Luke might say, “What we have here is a failure (of the two factions) to communicate.”

Money magazine reports, “Several governments subsidize births through cash payments, allowances, and other incentives… including China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Finland.”^[1] These countries want a future workforce that will continue to produce economic growth. It’s not out of the question that they also want a native workforce sufficient to minimize the need for immigration, and in that way preserve their current demographic make-up and keep their cultures stable.

The United States repudiated Roe vs. Wade, resulting in a hodgepodge of state-level restrictions on abortion. These stem from voters’ religious convictions about the sanctity of life, but also from voters’ racism: Many are aware that “according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 26.6 deaths per 100,000 live births for White women.”[2] In other words, conveniently for U.S. White supremacists, more Black women than White women die in childbirth – whether they wanted to bear a child or not.

An internet meme claims Karl Marx wrote, "The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people." He did not in fact say that word for word: He did allude to “how the capitalist system regards those who no longer serve its profit-driven mechanisms. This [sic] includes: the unemployed who have been replaced by automation; the elderly and disabled who are viewed as ‘non-productive’; and the working poor, whose labor is devalued even as they continue to produce.”[3]

Modern commentators, most prominently Yuval Harari, blockheadedly speak of “useless people” or “worthless people,” oblivious of the phrases’ vicious implication that individuals lack inherent value. Even worse, in these days of the Trump administration hewing to the German Nazi playbook, such words bring to mind the mass killing of the ‘useless’ under Nazism.[4] That Harari intends merely the unkind capitalist use of the words, is no excuse for not engaging his brain before putting his mouth in gear.

The reason for bringing all this up now – apologies for taking so long to come to the crux of the matter – is that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to wipe out a lot of jobs. By 2030, 30% of current U.S. jobs could be automated, one McKinsey report projects, and that unbalanced pundit Elon Musk claims that eventually all jobs will be obsoleted. Quartz magazine does a good job of debating whether a Universal Basic Income – the obvious remedy to tech-based mass unemployment – will be practicable.[5] The magazine under-emphasizes the difficulty of financing UBI by taxing the uber-rich, because the latter own the government and could defeat any taxation initiative.

Every industrial revolution has left people out in the unemployed cold. I’m not the first to note the AI revolution is different: It hits not just muscle-laborers, but the white-collar and policy-making classes. Closer to home! On the All Things Learning wordpress site, we find the phrase “highly educated useless people,” reportedly uttered by “the Minister of Education of a certain high-profile country.”^[6] As the world’s dictatorial regimes continue to diss education, and as AI takes jobs away from the educated classes, well, it all ties in.

But back to the matter of incentivizing fecundity: Why should we encourage the birth of people who inevitably will be unemployed?

One answer, of course, is that they will not be useless: Many of those babies will grow to be creative and innovative individuals who will invent stuff that benefits all of us.

The Pew research center says world population “is expected to peak at 10.3 billion in 2084 and then decline to 10.2 billion through the end of the century.”[7] We have reached peak population growth. What with climate change, authoritarian regimes, wars and pandemics, over-population is now the least of our problems. Here is a good pro and con discussion of the impact of a shrinking population.

Additionally, we must ask, “Is culture change due to immigration better or worse than the inevitable culture change due to AI? Where should policy priorities lay in this regard?”

In any case, the tension between pro-natalists on the one hand and, on the other, tech titans who don’t give a hoot about unemployment, remains unresolved. This essay lays out a variety of the considerations, but falls well short of an answer.

I’ll close by quoting a religious writer: “One important thing that struck me from reviewing the [scriptural] words translated as ‘worthless’ is that the use of these words tends to describe moral or spiritual worth rather than practical worth. Those described as ‘worthless’ are those who have fallen away from righteousness or those who destroy rather than create.”[8]

His implication: We might consider who is really “worthless” in the coming world of ubiquitous AI. And it may not be the unemployed.