Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
Dunno, I really hate relying on technology that doesn't actually yet exist. I agree that it seems likely enough, but fusion or hydrogen or ... also seemed likely to revolutionize society at different time points. Computers and the internet, for example, were one of the revolutions that DID pan out, but I'm still undecided whether that revolution was really so net-positive. Any gain in efficiency seems to have been more than swallowed by cheaper and more accessible distracting entertainment. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if for one reason or another AI-guided robots in particular just stubbornly refuse to become economically efficient for many tasks. I'd also not be surprised if LLMs turn out to be extremely good at entertainment-related activities - it arguably already is - while its helpfulness for practical purposes is good enough to be widely used, but never reaches a point where it can outright take over critical productive jobs.
Even worse, assuming it should eventually pan out, we still need to get through the intermediate time. Germany doesn't have asian levels of terrible birth rates and also has a decent level of "good" immigration from eastern europe and other places that can paper over some difficulties, but the crunch as the boomers are retiring is quite noticeable. Though admittedly I think some of this is self-inflicted - the lack of teachers, for example, would be almost trivial to solve by better conditions for "Quereinsteiger".
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Notes -
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
Dunno, I really hate relying on technology that doesn't actually yet exist. I agree that it seems likely enough, but fusion or hydrogen or ... also seemed likely to revolutionize society at different time points. Computers and the internet, for example, were one of the revolutions that DID pan out, but I'm still undecided whether that revolution was really so net-positive. Any gain in efficiency seems to have been more than swallowed by cheaper and more accessible distracting entertainment. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if for one reason or another AI-guided robots in particular just stubbornly refuse to become economically efficient for many tasks. I'd also not be surprised if LLMs turn out to be extremely good at entertainment-related activities - it arguably already is - while its helpfulness for practical purposes is good enough to be widely used, but never reaches a point where it can outright take over critical productive jobs.
Even worse, assuming it should eventually pan out, we still need to get through the intermediate time. Germany doesn't have asian levels of terrible birth rates and also has a decent level of "good" immigration from eastern europe and other places that can paper over some difficulties, but the crunch as the boomers are retiring is quite noticeable. Though admittedly I think some of this is self-inflicted - the lack of teachers, for example, would be almost trivial to solve by better conditions for "Quereinsteiger".
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