Philip Ball: prediction

Transcript context

…That’s the call for it, right? We need more people in the future at some point. [laughs] If we need more people in future, I think this is one of those problems like many problems: There is a social and economic problem that is not going to be solved by technology. The idea that if — and it’s questionable if this really is the case — if there is the case of declining fertility, it’s not at all obvious that what we therefore need is more children made by artificial means. Not only because we have no means of doing that at the moment, not only because we don’t understand all of the ethical and safety issues associated with a potential technology like that, but also because, if there is a decline in fertility, in fertility rates, in the number of children being born in some countries, that isn’t because it’s impossible. That is because of social changes that are the things that we need to be looking at if we’re concerned about a problem like that. It’s not clear to me that it actually is a problem at the moment. The problem of population growth is the problem that we still face. I’m not sure that we are going to see artificial wombs developed in the near future for human reproduction because I don’t think that there’s a clear need for them. But isn’t that a case of scientists, maybe yourself included, being too cautious? You understand asymptotes. A smaller population would be fine five years from now, but if we just keep on shrinking — it seems virtually every country except Israel and parts of Africa have gone below replacement rates, often considerably below. South Korea is at 0.7. We can’t just have things shrink, shrink, shrink. The ethical and danger implications of that are quite extreme, especially for countries with debt or a lot of retirees.…

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