The population implosion

The human race is facing a population implosion, faster and sooner than we previously understood. What does this mean for us?Every year, the UN updates its forecasts for the global population. In 2019, the median prediction saw us hitting a peak of around 11 billion humans at the end of this century before our numbers start to decline.11 billion is a lot of humans. The planet could easily support that many, if we all adopted certain lifestyles and policies. But not if everyone wants to live like people do in Britain or America. And there's a good argument that says "Why shouldn't they?" After all, we have spent decades squandering the planet's resources to feed ourselves and our economies. So 11 billion people on the planet was going to be tough. Not only would it accelerate climate change, feeding that many people would be made harder by the effects of climate change. But at least we could see the population peaking. And we could begin to plan for its decline.

Shrink to save the planet

The problem with a declining population is that global disasters aside, it generally means a fall in the birth rate. That means that the population is ageing as it shrinks. Which in turn means fewer young and working age people are available to support the older members of the population, either through taxes or through direct support.Nonetheless, given the pressures of climate change, and the reasons *why* the population was peaking - rising global wealth and the emancipation and education of women - it was clearly a good thing. And while some countries where the birth rate is already low were already starting to struggle with an ageing population, at a global scale it was something we had decades to learn how to deal with.Then came a new report.

Population implosion

The report from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows the global population peaking lower and sooner. Instead of 2100 it will peak in 2064. And instead of 11 billion it will peak at 9.7 billion. The global fertility rate will be down to 1.7 by the end of the century.What does this mean? Let's start with the good news. It means women around the world have more power and control over reproduction. And while this is probably too little, too late to have any real impact on catastrophic climate change, it will reduce the scale of the mitigation challenge - a rather euphemistic way of talking about the feeding and rehousing of millions of people.Bad news? This population implosion is happening much faster than we thought at a global scale. Here in the UK, the effects aren't predicted to be that dramatic in terms of total population but some countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal, are predicted to see their populations halve by 2100. This will see a collapse in the tax base and workforce while the cost of caring for an ageing population rises and rises. And it starts now.

Policy response

So what do we do? The first response to this population implosion must be to shore up programmes that support women's education, work, and reproductive rights. As the economic consequences of this population decline become clear, there are bound to be those whose solution is to drive women back to a role as mother and home maker. Setting the policy tone now by addressing the remaining imbalances will make the coming battles much easier.Then we need to look at relatively short term measures to our ageing population. Immigration is the most obvious solution, politically unpopular as it is in many places right now. Populations in India and Nigeria are going to continue to grow through the end of the century. Rather than closing our doors we should be opening them and inviting people in. Based on this report it seems many countries are likely to incentivise immigration within a few decades.Technology will play a huge role. There is a lot of squeamishness about robots and automation in care and health contexts, as I have written about before. But technology can alleviate the burden of some routine and unskilled tasks from care workers, giving them more time to offer personal contact and companionship.Public health campaigns will also be critical. If we can help people to look after their own health, and extend people's healthy, productive years by one, two, or even five on average, then we can drastically reduce costs to the state.This is likely to be married to an extension to the working age. Don't expecting your pension before 70 or even 75, so staying healthy as long as possible will be critical.

The turnaround

The longer term question becomes one of species survival. With a birth rate at 1.7, the population will continue to shrink. Will we see it return to more sustainable levels, around 2.1? I think we will.There is an element of techno-optimism in this view, but I do believe that perhaps in the next century we will reach a level of global health and wealth where most of us are living much longer, healthier lives, with average lifespans rising over 100. If you think that is overly optimistic, just look at the changes in the last century.Investments in women's medicine should see the trauma and risk of childbirth reduced over this period. Greater political equalisation at home and in the workplace, should make it easier for women to have children without damaging their careers. And with better medicine and extended lifespans, having children later in life will be more common.The population is likely to decline a long way before any of this happens. We may find we settle in the 5-6 billion range before it does. And post-climate change, the world will look very different then.

Extended adolescence

I first published this post in February 2020 but I have updated it to accompany the first episode of Season 5 of my podcast, Talk About Tomorrow. In this season we are focusing on some of the big ideas that keep recurring in my work, starting with this one.##"Children grow up too fast these days.”You hear this said a lot, but is it true? I don’t think it is. I think some aspects of childhood have been compressed and others extended. Extended so far in fact that a lot of the traditional markers of adulthood are now things we don’t consider until well into our thirties. In the future, they might even be into our forties. In the meantime, we experience an extended adolescence.

Childhood compressed

What aspects of childhood have been compressed? Well perhaps inevitably with the advent of digital mass media, our children are exposed to more of the world, earlier. It is hard to completely shield them from some aspects of life without isolating yourself from the world in some form of religious retro commune. It is true of ideas about sex, politics, religion, celebrity, beauty, violence, crime, and more.The good news is that it is mostly just ideas they are exposed to, rather than the real thing. Rates of violence and sexual crime are down a long way from the peak in the 1990s. Crime against children aged 10-15 has fallen 30% over the last decade. Teen pregnancy rates are down around 60% since the late 90s . Kids are drinking less, and anecdotally, are much less likely to go to nightclubs when they are underage than my peers and I were in the 90s.

Markers of adulthood

On the other side of childhood, lots of things happen much later. Learning to drive (average now 26 (2016) - up from 22.8 in 2004). House buying (average age 33, rising to 37 in London ). Getting married (skewed by second marriages, but nonetheless, 37.9 for men, and 35.5 for women in heterosexual couples, rising to 40.8 for men and 37.4 for women in same sex couples). Having kids (30.6 for women and 33.6 for men).The net result is a kind of extended adolescence, where you are aware of adult things early, but don’t reach many of the traditional markers of adulthood until later. Do we need to re-write the social rules for what marks out adulthood? Or do we accept that our lengthening lives mean that we need to think differently about different periods in our lives now?

Extended life, extended adolescence

I lean towards the latter. ‘Adulthood’ now covers an average period of 62.96 years, from being allowed to vote, to being buried. There is a lot of stuff that happens in between. While we still need the general term of ‘adult’ for people legally permitted to do certain things, there is no harm in starting to think differently about different periods of our lives. Not least because it might alleviate some of the pressure I hear about from younger adults.Society’s pressures change faster than society’s expectations. I speak to people in their teens who are concerned about their lack of life plan. People in their twenties who are worried about the incoherence of their career path so far, or having not yet found a partner. I speak to people who feel like they’re doing something wrong because they don’t have a house as they approach thirty.What they need to know is that that is just normal now. We should allow people an extended period of experimentation and adaptation throughout their twenties. And arguably, into their thirties. There is simply more time now than there has been in the past. Time to do, in all but the most tragic cases, many of the things we traditionally saw as markers of early adulthood.There’s no rush to grow up.

Will a robot hold your hand? Technology in the future of care

This week I gave a short address at a panel debate on the future of care, hosted by frequent client, the rather forward-thinking Freeths solicitors. Here’s what I said. Or at least, what I intended to say when I wrote my script.When you’re looking to the future, you need to understand two factors. Firstly, what are the pressure points that the sector you are examining is facing today? In my experience, these are always the points of failure or opportunity where change happens first. Secondly, you need to understand what is causing that change. What are the major trends?For me, the best way to understand those trends is to look at technology. Technology is the means by which we enact change. Described in the broadest terms, technology the application of our understanding of the world. From the first rock a caveman or woman sharpened, through language, to the modern smartphone.

Pressure Points

You’re all familiar with the pressure points facing the care sector today. Rising demand, declining budgets, and a catastrophic lack of skilled permanent staff. The demographic changes we’re facing mean the areas with the most demand often have the least access to staff.Throughout history, technology has been deployed to address issues like this. If you can mechanise a process, you can repeat it at lower cost and higher frequency with fewer staff. It doesn’t matter if it’s a steam powered loom or a computerised call centre. But can we really apply technology to replace skilled people in care? For me, the answer is a very strongly qualified ‘yes’.First of all, let me tell you what we won’t see, which is some form of robot nurse, capable of all the things a person can do. Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable, both physically and mentally, and this flexibility is enormously challenging — and expensive — to try to replicate.Rather, what we will see is a much more distributed and pervasive suite of technologies designed to help people support themselves better, for longer. To smooth their entry into more formal care settings. And to assist them in overcoming their challenges throughout.

Monitoring

I’ll start with the first category — what we might loosely term remote monitoring.Have all heard the buzzphrase, the internet of things? How about Moore’s Law? What this really means is that the price of adding computing power and connectivity to just about anything has collapsed over the last fifty years — even the last decade. And at the same time, the accessibility of the devices and the knowledge to do this has dramatically increased. You can now, with really only a junior school education, programme a machine to monitor basic environmental factors such as temperature and humidity, and send that information off over the Internet. That device might cost you five pounds.Scale this up and add some grown-up intelligence, and you can start to monitor more things: activity, energy consumption, carbon dioxide levels, doors opening and closing. You can know if someone is active and what sort of conditions they’re living in.None of this is new, you might say. We’ve been able to get this information over a phone line for years. Sure. But two things have changed. Firstly, the cost: it now costs less than £5 a month to monitor basic environment factors and activity in someone’s home. The hardware is so cheap that there is no up-front cost. And it’s all battery powered so you don’t even need a specialist installer. It can just be stuck to a wall or ceiling, just like the fire brigade installs smoke alarms.Secondly, intelligence. Computing power is so cheap now that we can throw enormous amounts at monitoring and interpreting this data for very little money. To find the exceptions, the behaviour changes. To identify the risk factors and intervene early — and cheaply — rather than later when the issue is acute.Over the next few years I think we will see a massive expansion in the application of home monitoring technologies, not just by concerned children but by the state in a bid to manage the costs of care.

Robots

The second class of technology I want to talk about is robots. This is perhaps the area that has caused most consternation when its application in the care sector is discussed. People don’t like the idea of a warm nurse being replaced by a cold machine. And I understand that, but we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that all automata in a care setting are bad.I have a sideline reviewing gadgets for the BBC, and before Christmas I got sent a Cozmo to play with. Did anyone’s kids get one of these for Christmas? Lucky kids. This is a tiny toy that looks a little bit like a cross between Wall-E and a forklift truck. It borrows the incredible processing power of your smartphone to approximate an artificial intelligence. It can recognise your face and play a series of games with you, using some special cubes that come with it.The most interesting thing about this toy for me was not the level of tech packed into its tiny shell, but the way that my children projected an identity onto it. This shouldn’t have surprised me. It’s a very human trait: we anthropomorphise everything. Just look how much intelligence and personality we ascribe to our pets, or kids do to totally inanimate dolls.In a very short space of time my kids created a connection to Cozmo and clearly felt a real sense of reward from interactions with it. The same behaviour has been witnessed in adults interacting with automata in a care setting.Machines can’t care. But they can provide mental support and stimulation. They can answer questions, guide people, control the environment and entertainment, and increasingly, chat. We can even project a level of love and companionship onto them — even when we know deep down that they are not capable of reciprocating. Because this is clearly what the human brain does. We shouldn’t reject that possibility out of hand.

Augmentation: Physical and mental

What these robots can also do is collect information, store it, and replay it. This is something that we all struggle with, particularly as we age or if our mental faculties are starting to decline. There’s a serious opportunity for us to start to augment our minds with technology. In fact I’ve been arguing for a few years that the process has already started: we are all bionic now.How many people used a smartphone to get here, looking up the time or location, using GPS and maps? I was born with a terrible memory and basically without a sense of direction, so the advent of such technology has been an absolute boon for me.Imagine if you could make the interface to this information even more natural. So low friction that you barely notice where you end, and the machine begins. Take these inserts for the sole of your shoe, for example, which vibrate to tell you when to turn left or right. Imagine a verbal prompt through a bone-conducting earpiece. Imagine a digital overlay on your vision.All of these things are real today or within a few years. They are still both expensive and a little rough around the edges, but that Moore’s Law I talked about will make them widely accessible. I’m betting that this technology is what ultimately replaces the smartphone.This doesn’t help those with physical frailty of course, but here again, Moore’s Law is our friend. Just ten years ago, strength augmenting suits were the stuff of science-fiction and military fantasies. Now they are commercially available, both in commercial contexts and to help the paralysed to walk again. In another decade or two, as battery and motor technology continues to improve, it’s easy to see articulated walking frames helping people to recover mobility. We’ve already seen such a revolution happen: how many mobility scooters do you remember seeing 20 years ago?

Summary

Technology is not the answer to our care crisis. That requires political intervention to raise funding and wages, improve conditions, overcome the looming threat that Brexit presents, and to address the threat to employment and employment quality that technology also so clearly presents. But whether or not these interventions are made, technology represents an opportunity to improve care. To give people more self-sufficient lives for longer, to ensure earlier interventions when they are needed, and even to provide a level of companionship to those who need it. I’d argue that we need to overcome our squeamishness and embrace it.

Robots are companions, not carers

I trust that the TV and radio producers I deal with are adept at gauging public interest in the stories on which they ask me to comment. So I’m sure there must be great interest in the concept of the care robot, a topic on which I was asked to comment three times yesterday, ending with a debate with The Guardian’s Michele Hanson on BBC Ulster.Michele and I were positioned slightly apart in our opinions, though perhaps not as far as it may have seemed to the listener. For while I think robots most definitely have a role to play in the care sector, I’m loathe to accept that they are in any way a suitable replacement for a human being.

Love technology, respect people

Any reader of this blog will know that I love technology. It has been my obsession from near-birth. But I also feel we are too appreciative of our own brilliance when compared to the spectacular complexity of our own bodies. We can’t yet understand nearly half of what we our bodies and minds can do, let alone replicate it. Rarely are those uniquely human characteristics more important than in a caring environment.For this reason we are a long way from having a robot that can ‘care’, however rapid the rate of technological progress. The revolution we require is not one of technology but of economics and social policy, properly valuing care work and creating a system to reward it appropriately. It’s hard to see how this will be achieved without radical political intervention in the economic system, something that might be decades away.What fits today’s system is an answer based on capital investment in technologies that can — if only in part — offset the lack of proper investment in humans in a care setting.This is where Michele and I differ. We agree that robots can’t care. But we disagree about whether robots can be useful companions.

Plug-in pets

I am not a pet person. Animals make me sneeze. Dogs scare me. And frankly it’s hard enough tidying up after myself and my kids, let alone adding an even less self-controlled creature into the mix.But I get it. I understand the appeal. I’ve seen the joy that animal companions bring to others. A joy that has been quantified by research. As the US Center for Disease Control, an organisation not prone to woo, puts it:“Pets can decrease your: Blood pressure, Cholesterol levels, Triglyceride levels, feelings of loneliness…”Now, what proportion of each of these benefits do you think is down to the innate capabilities of the animal? And what proportion is down to what happens in our heads through our interactions? The studies, though small so far, suggest that robot companions can offer the same benefits as living companions.Robots may not yet be even as smart as our pets. But they can be much better adapted to the needs of those they are designed to interact with. For a start, they can speak, tell stories, show films, control lights and heating, and clean floors rather than dirty them.Between these enhanced capabilities and our own propensity to anthropomorphise everything around us, it seems obvious to me that robot companions can be a useful supplement to human interaction.

Companionship is not care

This though, is the limit of their capabilities with today’s technology. Robots cannot replace humans in a care setting and nor should we accept that as a proposition. We have a major under-employment problem amongst the young, an ageing population and historical undervaluation of care work: one solution could hit the trifecta.If and when these problems are solved though, robots will remain useful and valid additional companions.