Can Robots Replace Children?

Good news, everyone. We may not need children after all.

That’s the comforting conclusion one could draw from a growing body of economic research on declining birthrates. Yes, fertility is falling. Yes, populations are aging. Yes, workforces are shrinking. But don’t worry. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation will make each remaining worker so much more productive that the economy will keep humming along just fine.

In fact, a recent paper by Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues concludes that shrinking populations have historically increased output per worker enough to offset the economic drag of having fewer workers. Productivity rises. GDP survives. Crisis averted.

It’s an important finding. It may even be right. But it answers only the smallest of the questions before us.

Economists have asked whether we can continue producing enough with fewer people. They should also ask what happens when there are fewer people to buy, build, dream, invent, marry, raise families, volunteer in churches, coach Little League, start companies, and imagine tomorrow.

They may have solved the supply equation. The harder question is whether they’ve forgotten the demand side. And the human side.

Henry Ford did not build the American middle class by finding ways to manufacture automobiles with the fewest possible workers. He built it by producing cars that millions of ordinary Americans could afford to buy, and by paying his workers enough so they could buy the products they were making. His genius was not merely industrial efficiency. It was democratizing prosperity.

An economy is not simply a factory. It is also a marketplace. Artificial intelligence can manufacture products. It cannot manufacture customers. Nor can it create families, neighborhoods, or churches that lift their eyes toward God.

Every generation smaller than the last means fewer first homes purchased, fewer refrigerators sold, fewer restaurants opened, fewer startups launched, fewer schools filled, and fewer neighborhoods built around young families. Productivity can compensate for fewer workers. It cannot indefinitely compensate for fewer consumers.

Economists assume that productivity can replace people because they think of people primarily as workers. But people are also customers, neighbors, parents, inventors, volunteers, taxpayers, soldiers, worshippers, and citizens. A child is not merely another future employee. He or she is another participant in the life of a nation.

But even that misses the larger point. The greatest cost of depopulation is not economic. It is civilizational. A society is more than its GDP. Growth creates more than wealth. It creates optimism.

Every child born is a vote of confidence in the future, a choice to sacrifice for another, and a desire to leave a legacy. Every empty cradle is, in its own quiet way, a vote of declining confidence.

We are increasingly living in the selfish, secular, materialistic, hedonistic future imagined by liberal elites. Walk through too many American cities today, and you notice something missing. Schools struggle to stay open while luxury apartment towers multiply. Dog parks overflow while playgrounds grow quiet. Marriage becomes one lifestyle choice among many, rather than the institution around which communities once organized themselves. Family formation is postponed, then reconsidered, then quietly abandoned.

None of this shows up in quarterly GDP reports, but all of it matters.

The irony is that our technological success may be making this transformation easier to ignore. If robots can build our products, AI can perform our cognitive work, and automation can compensate for labor shortages, perhaps we really can continue growing richer with fewer people.

But for what exactly are we becoming richer?

Increasingly, we seem to be constructing a society optimized for affluent, highly educated professionals living comfortably in a digitized service economy. We automate what can be automated. We import enough workers to perform the jobs that we cannot. Care for the elderly. Care for the children. Walk the dogs. Though increasingly, we seem to prefer euthanizing the first, having fewer of the second, and treating the third as substitutes for the children we never had.

That may sound harsh. Reality often does.

For generations, America’s greatest achievement was not creating billionaires. It was creating millions of middle-class families. American companies grew rich by serving an expanding nation of ordinary people who married, had children, bought homes, joined churches, coached baseball, and expected their children to live better than they did. Scale mattered because people mattered.

Today, much of our economy seems increasingly comfortable pursuing extraordinary wealth by serving smaller numbers of affluent customers with remarkably few workers. From a spreadsheet’s perspective, that may be brilliant. From a civilization’s perspective, it is the path to decline.

The economists may well prove right. Artificial intelligence may sustain productivity. Robots may compensate for labor shortages. GDP may continue growing long after birthrates have fallen below replacement. But GDP is not the measure of a civilization. Hope is.

The first command in Genesis was not to optimize productivity. It was to “be fruitful and multiply.” Whether one reads those words as divine instruction or timeless wisdom, they capture something our economic models cannot. Human beings are not merely units of production or consumption. We are the authors of the future.

The question before us is not whether artificial intelligence can replace workers. It is whether anything can replace children.

We don’t believe anything can.

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Bobby Jindal is the former Governor of Louisiana and Chair of the Center for a Healthy America at America First Policy Institute.

Alex Castellanos is a co-founder of Purple Strategies, a bipartisan public affairs firm, and appears regularly on Fox News.