If intelligent machines generate unprecedented wealth, who will own that wealth? If millions of jobs are transformed—or disappear altogether—how should societies adapt? Will AI deepen inequality, or will it free more people to pursue education, caregiving, creativity, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement?
Last month, Switzerland held a nationwide referendum that would have limited the country’s population to 10 million people. The proposal failed.
According to The New York Times, many voters worried that such limits would worsen labor shortages just as a large share of the Swiss workforce approaches retirement. A growing population, they argued, provides workers for factories, hospitals, farms, schools, and businesses. It also creates consumers who buy homes, cars, clothing, food, and entertainment. For generations, population growth has been closely linked to economic vitality. Yet, for the first time in history, sustained economic growth may depend less on the size of the workforce than on the capabilities of each worker. AI, robotics, and intelligent software are already writing computer code, assisting physicians in diagnosing disease, drafting legal documents, analyzing financial markets, translating languages, helping operate increasingly autonomous vehicles, and accelerating scientific research. A single worker equipped with advanced AI tools may soon accomplish what once required several people.
More than a decade ago, economist and sustainable development scholar Jeffrey Sachs revisited the long-running debate over population in Scientific American. He recalled Thomas Robert Malthus’s famous 1798 prediction that improvements in living standards would eventually be overwhelmed because population would grow geometrically while food production would increase only arithmetically.
Today, the world’s population has reached approximately 8.3 billion. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion remind us that the Earth’s capacity is not unlimited. Yet Malthus’s prediction did not come to pass. As Sachs explained, advances in seed breeding, fertilizers, irrigation, mechanization, and other agricultural innovations allowed food production to grow faster than population. More broadly, technological progress—in agriculture, energy, water management, manufacturing, medicine, transportation, communications, and information systems—has repeatedly expanded humanity’s productive capacity.
For decades, economists warned that shrinking workforces and aging populations would slow economic growth and strain pension and healthcare systems. That assumption is now being challenged—not because demographics no longer matter, but because artificial intelligence is dramatically increasing the productivity of individual workers.
If this trend continues, whatever the population figures are, creativity, innovation, and productivity—not simply population size—could become the principal drivers of economic prosperity.
None of this means that population no longer matters. Human beings do far more than produce goods and services. They raise families, build communities, create art, make scientific discoveries, care for one another, and sustain democratic institutions. AI can augment many of these activities, but it cannot replace the human relationships, ethical judgment, empathy, and values on which healthy societies depend.
Nor does AI eliminate difficult policy questions.
These questions may ultimately prove even more important than the size of the global population itself.
The future envisioned by artificial intelligence is profoundly different from the one Thomas Malthus imagined more than two centuries ago. It calls for an entirely new conversation about population, prosperity, and the role of human creativity in an age when intelligence itself is increasingly amplified by machines.
