Is it too early to start a media panic about the shrinking humanity?<p>In all seriousness, I've always looked at birth control and education and affluence as a virus which drastically reduces fertility. But obviously some people, besides their sex drive, have another not so common drive. Despite money, education and condoms they really, really want, not sex, but kids. And over time this trait will become more widespread in the population. We better have colonized space by then.
This is pure speculation, and I have no facts to back this up, but I suspect that if humanity begins to shrink, it will become an age of robotics. I think the biggest boost to robotics will happen when the number of people available for hard/simple labor drops off.<p>But that's just speculation.
There is a lot wrong with this article, but I don't have the patience to go through all of the unstated assumptions; so I will just use one point as an example:<p>"And everywhere, it is changing traditional family life by enabling women to work and children to be educated."<p>How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working inside the home? There is an unstated assumption that working outside is better; an assertion unsupported by any data.<p>Concerning children's education, one need only point to US literacy rates from 1850 to the present to see that the two (women working, children educated) are not connected.<p>As a secondary point I will point out that demographics are not mentioned in this article, apparently the author has never viewed the movie "Idiocracy" ...