Who will make future humans?

And how?

Before humans knew how to make fire or break stones to form cutting tools, they knew how to make babies. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing a species could forget how to do. We know the biology of sex, conception, gestation and birth. We know the sociology of family formation and social reproduction. Even so, we humans seem to be losing the knack for making more of ourselves.

Human fertility is falling just about everywhere. Of the 237 sovereign states and dependent territories listed in the 2024 UN “World Population Prospects” report, 102 of them remain above 2.1 births per woman; the fertility rate needed for a stable population. The top five are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Central African Republic and Niger with total fertility rates between 5.94 and 5.79 births per woman.

Indonesia, the only country with a TFR of exactly 2.1, comes in at number 103. The remaining 134 countries on the list have fallen below replacement rate and face population contraction. In all likelihood, you are reading these words from inside a country where people have lost the knack of making more of themselves. The US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Australia, all of Europe, Japan, South Korea, China and India are all below replacement rate.

The three most populous nations on Earth are India, China and the United States with fertility rates of 1.94, 1.02, and 1.62 respectively. The TFR for the world is 2.24. Still above replacement rate, but just barely.

Boomers grew up on thrilling Population Bomb takes from Paul Ehrlich who appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson around 20 times. Many of them still love to fret about humans breeding like rabbits and ravaging the landscape like locusts despite the fact that once Africa completes its demographic transition, the global population will be on a downward trajectory.

My point here is not to beat up on the Boomers. When the Boomers are too far gone to respond to insults, the younger generations might shift their aim to Generation X as the cause of all the world’s problems. Or not. They’ll probably stick with the decades-long tradition of ignoring Gen X entirely and shift the blame burden onto the Millennials. In any case, blame is pointless. I’m here to look ahead.

Genes and Memes

Biological reproduction is one thing, but when we’re talking about the fertility rate of nations, we’re talking about more than just maintaining biomass. Nations consist of folk and their ways. Biology and culture.

Not all progressives are anti-natalists, but environmental anti-natalism and progressive ideology go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Lots of people choose to live child free for personal, self-interested reasons. It isn’t just ideology that keeps men and women from making babies these days, but the ideological connection is pretty hard to miss. Imagine showing a “be fruitful and multiply” sign to a progressive and a conservative. Which one is likely to endorse the sentiment with a smile and a thumbs up gesture and which one is likely to seethe and grumble?

It seems like a belief system that discourages making babies would burn itself out. That would be true if children always and only acquired their cultural programming from their parents.

When a class or ideology reproduces poorly biologically, it can still reproduce culturally by controlling institutions that shape other people’s children.

ChatGPT suggested that phrasing as a less provocative and partisan alternative to my formulation, which went like, “Progressives, who are often the most strident moralizers about not having children, have infiltrated public education in order to indoctrinate other people’s children with their beliefs.”

ChatGPT warned that my phrasing could drag the post down into “talk radio sludge.” He’s probably right.

KMO: What’s the technical term for pointing out that you’re not saying a thing, and in so doing, saying it?

Perplexity: The technical term is apophasis; it’s also commonly called paralipsis or praeteritio.

It refers to the rhetorical move of bringing up something by saying you won’t mention it, which ends up mentioning it anyway.

The point being that pro-natalist parents have to do more than just make children to keep their nation from slipping into contraction and decrepitude. They also have to pass their values and priorities along to their children. In the United States, parents rely on public schooling as a form of free daycare in precarious economic circumstances. They might know or suspect that public schools are hostile to their values but lack the conviction to take charge of the situation through homeschooling or alternatives to public education. I live in a glass house on this one. Both of my sons endured the full 13 years of public education. I wasn’t happy about it, but there it is.

It might sound like I’m proposing some sort of purge or drastic reform of the public school system. I’m not. That’s a low leverage point for effecting pronatalist outcomes.

After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso documents the sustained efforts by governments to restore flagging fertility. Singapore and Hungary are emblematic of countries that pursued aggressive policies to encourage their citizens to have children. In both cases and in all of the other attempts by national governments to boost fertility, parents took advantage of the tax rebates, childcare subsidies, housing priority, Baby Bonus payments, and other incentives offered by the state, but those incentives produced only modest TFR boosts. The point that Spears and Geruso hammer home in the book is that no country that has fallen below 2.1 TFR has ever recovered to equilibrium, much less growth no matter what policies they implemented.

I have explanatory notions about the causes of flagging fertility rates, but that’s neither here nor there. Knowing the cause doesn’t reverse the trend. My enterprise here is to lay the groundwork for speculation that will annoy, repulse, and amuse readers and hopefully, in a handful of cases, encourage them to expand the bounds of the conceivable. Pun intended.

I need to mention Elon Musk so I can justify using his incendiary likeness in the cover art for this post. When it comes to Musk, I’m a fan. I’m all about space, AI, robots, and building resilient infrastructure, and Musk’s companies are focused on all of those things. I’d be a Stan for Musk if I weren’t a cynical and detached Gen Xer and thus too aloof for expressions of unbridled enthusiasm.

Elon Musk has at least 14 confirmed children with four different women: Justine Wilson, Grimes, Shivon Zilis, and Ashley St. Clair. More than half of them are the products of In Vitro Fertilization. He wants a greater genetic legacy than he has the time and possibly the libidinous potency to achieve the old fashioned way like Genghis Khan did.

There are Chinese elites who look at Musk’s 14 children and dismiss him as a dilettante when it comes to lineage-maximization. Game company founder Xu Bo has used a variety of means, including surrogates in the US, to father around 100 children. He’s candid about his dynastic ambitions, saying that he wants “50 high-quality sons” to inherit his fortune and carry on his work.

Musk with 14 children, is outside the standard distribution, but Xu Bo makes him look artisanal. Still, Xu Bo may have more points on the board than Elon Musk, but both men are playing basically the same game reproducing via familiar methods that don’t scale well enough to alter the larger population trend.

If even the hyperscalers can’t make enough babies to reverse humanity’s demographic slide, then where, as a species, are we going?

I see three distinct paths:

1. Humans were the biological bootloader for our post-biological successors. Our part is just about done. We might linger on the scene for a while yet, but we won’t be behind the civilizational wheel.

2. We suffer a dramatic setback and return to survival instincts. Low fertility is the path of risk aversion enabled by comfort, safety and stability. If the Doomers have their way and technological civilization crashes and burns, humans will remember how to get together and make more of themselves.

3. The cadre of vociferous pro-natalist billionaires will transform themselves into biological hyperscalers, producing children on an industrial scale and maintaining tight control over their spawn’s developmental environment to protect them from the deracinating effects of progressive ideology.

The obvious (to me anyway) path is to build fortified, park-like compounds where human embryos are conceived by IVF, screened, and gestated in artificial wombs. When decanted, the children will be raised and educated by a mix of hired human caretakers and, increasingly, by both embodied and disembodied AI, i.e. Robo-mommies. Possibly with doppelganger stand-ins for the uber-patriarch himself so that his thousands of children feel like they know their father, even though most of them will never spend more than a few moments in his actual presence.

Even grandiose schemes like this won’t change the human decline in numerical terms, but they could create pockets of high-agency, Upwing humanity amidst a species and civilization in decline.

One of the most reprehensible positions that accelerationist prophet Nick Land articulates is that the majority of humans are irrelevant to the developmental trajectory of the human civilizational project. He’s often quoted as saying, “I have no interest in human liberation, or liberation of the human species. I’m interested in [the] liberation of the means of production.”

By that, he means that an elite human faction, amplified by technology, will transcend human limitations and achieve what familiar human forms and social organizations cannot.

It is an ugly thought. It offends every democratic and egalitarian conviction. It turns most of humanity into background conditions for a smaller, more technologically amplified lineage project.

Reprehensible by normie lights, but is he wrong?

I doubt it.