Latest from AllAfrica
AllAfrica
3 hours ago
- Business
- AllAfrica
Trump's Iran gamble brings respite, not resolution
Subscribe now with a one-month trial for only $1, then enjoy the first year at an exclusive rate of just $99. Israel-Iran war poised to reignite with little warning Nile Bowie analyzes the aftermath of the Israel-Iran war, arguing that the conflict has likely catalyzed Tehran to shift toward nuclear deterrence amid contradictory US intelligence assessments of the strikes' impact on Iran's nuclear infrastructure. Ukraine's bargaining power fades as NATO recalibrates James Davis assesses the deepening fatigue among Western nations toward Ukraine's war effort. The June NATO summit marked the first time since 2022 that Ukraine was not central to the communiqué, and Russia was not explicitly condemned. Germany sets record deficit in €850 billion debt push Diego Faßnacht unpacks Germany's record-breaking 2025–2029 federal budget, which signals a historic shift from fiscal orthodoxy toward aggressive deficit spending under new Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil. The long-term viability of Germany's fiscal pivot remains uncertain. Moore's Law with Chinese characteristics Scott Foster analyzes how China's forthcoming 15th Five-Year Plan is set to elevate the semiconductor industry as a national priority. Drawing on insights from Ye Tianchun, a leading industry figure, Foster outlines Beijing's comprehensive planning and strategic resilience.
AllAfrica
7 hours ago
- Business
- AllAfrica
Malaysia quietly flying Turkish drones over South China Sea
In June 2025, Malaysia took a decisive yet understated step in fortifying its maritime domain awareness by confirming the deployment of three Turkish-made Anka‑S unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) drones will operate from Labuan, with the first sorties expected to commence later this year over the South China Sea. Yet the symbolism of such deployments—especially in a region as fraught and strategically sensitive as the South China Sea—must be carefully interpreted. This is not about picking sides between the United States and China. Nor is it a belligerent signal to any one power. Instead, Malaysia's choice reflects a doctrine of quiet diplomacy: one that prioritizes sovereignty without provocation, and preparedness without escalation. Whenever the South China Sea is invoked in regional headlines, it is often painted as a zero-sum contest between China and Southeast Asia. That portrayal misses the nuance of Malaysia's approach. For decades, Malaysia has pursued a policy of principled engagement—asserting its maritime rights under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) while maintaining constructive, often warm, ties with China. Malaysia's procurement of surveillance drones does not undermine that tradition. Rather, it reinforces our commitment to defend our interests with clarity and calm—not capitulation, nor confrontation. The Anka‑S, designed by Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), was chosen through a transparent international tender that included bids from the United States' General Atomics (offering the MQ‑9 Reaper) and China's AVIC (offering the Wing Loong II). That Malaysia selected Turkey was not a rejection of the US or China per se—it was a choice based on strategic fit, affordability, reliability, and non-politicized defence procurement. The Anka‑S platform, with its 24–30 hours of endurance, encrypted satellite communications, synthetic aperture radar, EO/IR cameras, ground-moving target indicators (GMTI), and Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems, provides a vital capability in monitoring activity across Malaysia's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) without compromising our diplomatic equilibrium. It is also essential to note that these drones are unarmed. They are surveillance platforms, not strike systems. Malaysia is not militarizing its maritime space; it is strengthening maritime situational awareness in a region with complex and overlapping claims, illegal fishing, piracy, and growing commercial activity. The message is straightforward: Malaysia is watching—not menacing. Malaysia is asserting its rights, not staking new claims. More than a defense acquisition, the Anka‑S symbolizes a maturing partnership between Malaysia and Turkey. As a Sectoral Dialogue Partner of ASEAN and NATO's second-largest military force, Turkey stands at a unique intersection of East and West. It maintains a robust relationship with both the United States and China and has earned a reputation for pursuing independent diplomacy. Turkey's strategic balance, reflected in its engagement with Russia, Europe, and the Muslim world, resonates with ASEAN's own non-aligned but active diplomacy. In many ways, Türkiye is a mirror of Malaysia's geopolitical posture: firm in its sovereignty, flexible in its partnerships. Turkey's defense industry also offers something often missing in dealings with traditional great powers—mutual respect and shared technological growth. The Anka‑S is a product of indigenous Turkish development, allowing greater room for customization, training, and potential co-production. In Malaysia's case, the infrastructure and training for the drones are being carried out in collaboration with local firm G7 Aerospace, enabling knowledge transfer and economic spillover benefits. Future upgrades, including weaponization (if Malaysia ever chooses that path), can be managed with full transparency and independence. So why Turkey and why now? The answer lies in both regional and global dynamics. ASEAN member states are becoming increasingly cautious in navigating the intensifying US-China rivalry. On one hand, the United States has urged allies and partners in Asia to increase defense spending and adopt its Indo-Pacific strategy, often with veiled suggestions of containment. On the other, China has expanded its military and coast guard presence in regional waters, testing the boundaries of maritime diplomacy. Yet Malaysia remains steadfastly neutral committed to peace, but not pacifism. The selection of Turkey is a clear signal that Malaysia can strengthen its defence posture without falling into the orbit of either superpower. The Anka‑S is not part of any military bloc or encirclement agenda. It is a tool of sovereign surveillance, rooted in international law and national interest. Türkiye also offers strategic reliability without overreach. It has forged strong defence ties with both NATO and non-NATO countries, including Pakistan, Qatar, and Indonesia. Its drones, including the Anka‑S and the famed Bayraktar TB2, have been combat-proven in multiple theatres—from Syria and Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine. While Malaysia is not adopting these UAVs for combat, the reliability and endurance of the Anka‑S speaks volumes about its maturity as a platform. Moreover, Türkiye is not just a defence provider—it is a geopolitical partner. Its increasing engagement with Southeast Asia through trade, cultural exchange, and religious diplomacy—particularly as a Muslim-majority nation—makes it a natural fit for deeper strategic relations with Malaysia and ASEAN. Its presence offers a third way for countries seeking alternatives to the binary of Washington and Beijing. In this context, Malaysia's decision to field the Anka‑S is not merely a technical or tactical decision. It is a quiet yet profound statement of national resolve. Malaysia seeks not to provoke, but to protect. Not to align blindly, but to cooperate wisely. We remain firm in our rights under UNCLOS, especially in defending our maritime zones—but we will continue to engage China, the United States, and all partners through dialogue and diplomacy. Let there be no misreading: Malaysia's vision of the South China Sea is not as a flashpoint of rival empires, but as a shared space requiring shared responsibility. With the Anka‑S circling above, Malaysia does not signal hostility—but capability. This is what sovereign agency looks like in the 21st century—eyes wide open, posture firm, diplomacy intact. Malaysia's approach to the South China Sea is neither naive nor aggressive. It is rooted in quiet strength, strategic foresight, and a refusal to be drawn into great power theatrics. By working with Turkey, a bridge between the Atlantic and Asia, Malaysia is building more than defense capacity—it is shaping a future where ASEAN nations assert their own narratives, on their own terms. Phar Kim Beng, PhD, is professor of ASEAN studies, International Islamic University Malaysia . Luthfy Hamzah is senior research fellow, Strategic Pan Indo Pacific Arena, Kuala Lumpur .
AllAfrica
7 hours ago
- Politics
- AllAfrica
Do most Iranians really hate their regime?
From 2015 to 2018, I spent 15 months doing research work in Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city. As an anthropologist, I was interested in everyday life in Iran outside the capital Tehran. I was also interested in understanding whether the ambitions of the 1979 Revolution lived on among 'ordinary' Iranians, not just political elites. I first lived on a university campus, where I learned Persian, and later with Iranian families. I conducted hundreds of interviews with people who had a broad spectrum of political, social and religious views. They included opponents of the Islamic Republic, supporters, and many who were in between. What these interviews revealed to me was both the diversity of opinion and experience in Iran, and the difficulty of making uniform statements about what Iranians believe. When Israel's strikes on Iran began on June 13, killing many top military commanders, many news outlets – both international and those run by the Iranian diaspora – featured images of Iranians cheering the deaths of these hated regime figures. Friends from my fieldwork also pointed to these celebrations, while not always agreeing with them. Many feared the impact of a larger conflict between Iran and Israel. Trying to put these sentiments in context, many analysts have pointed to a 2019 survey by the GAMAAN Institute, an independent organisation based in the Netherlands that tracks Iranian public opinion. This survey showed 79% of Iranians living in the country would vote against the Islamic Republic if a free referendum were held on its rule. Viewing these examples as an indicator of the lack of support for the Islamic Republic is not wrong. But when used as factoids in news reports, they become detached from the complexities of life in Iran. This can discourage us from asking deeper questions about the relationships between ideology and pragmatism, support and opposition to the regime, and state and society. The news reporting on Iran has encouraged a tendency to see the Iranian state as homogeneous, highly ideological and radically separate from the population. But where do we draw the line between the state and the people? There is no easy answer to this. When I lived in Iran, many of the people who took part in my research were state employees – teachers at state institutions, university lecturers, administrative workers. Many of them had strong and diverse views about the legacy of the revolution and the future of the country. They sometimes pointed to state discourse they agreed with, for example Iran's right to national self-determination, free from foreign influence. They also disagreed with much, such as the slogans of 'death to America.' This ambivalence was evident in one of my Persian teachers. An employee of the state, she refused to attend the annual parades celebrating the anniversary of the revolution. 'We have warm feelings towards America,' she said. On the other hand, she happily attended protests, also organised by the government, in favour of Palestinian liberation. Or take the young government worker I met in Mashhad: 'We want to be independent of other countries, but not like this.' In a narrower sense, discussions about the 'state' may refer more to organisations like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij, the paramilitary force within the IRGC that has cracked down harshly on dissent in recent decades. Both are often understood as being deeply ideologically committed. Said Golkar, a US-based Iranian academic and author, for instance, calls Iran a 'captive society'. Rather than having a civil society, he believes Iranians are trapped by the feared Basij, who maintain control through their presence in many institutions like universities and schools. Again, this view is not wrong. But even among the Basij and Revolutionary Guard, it can be difficult to gauge just how ideological and homogeneous these organisations truly are. For a start, the IRGC relies on both ideologically selected supporters, as well as conscripts, to fill its ranks. They are also not always ideologically uniform, as the US-based anthropologist Narges Bajoghli, who worked with pro-state filmmakers in Tehran, has noted. As part of my research, I also interviewed members of the Basij, which, unlike the IRGC proper, is a wholly volunteer organization. Even though ideological commitment was certainly an important factor for some of the Basij members I met, there were also pragmatic reasons to join. These included access to better jobs, scholarships and social mobility. Sometimes, factors overlapped. But participation did not always equate to a singular or sustained commitment to revolutionary values. For example, Sāsān, a friend I made attending discussion groups in Mashhad, was quick to note that time spent in the Basij 'reduced your [compulsory] military service.' This isn't to suggest there are not ideologically committed people in Iran. They clearly exist, and many are ready to use violence. Some of those who join these institutions for pragmatic reasons use violence, too. In addition, Iran is an ethnically diverse country. It has a population of 92 million people, a bare majority of whom are Persians. Other minorities include Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baloch, Turkmen and others. It is also religiously diverse. While there is a sizeable, nominally Shi'a majority, there are also large Sunni communities (about 10-15% of the population) and smaller communities of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Baha'is and other religions. Often overlooked, there are also important differences in class and social strata in Iran, too. Iranian women mourn during the funeral ceremony of an Iranian soldier killed in Israeli airstrike in Tehran. Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA via The Conversation One of the things I noticed about state propaganda was that it flattened this diversity. James Barry, an Australian scholar of Iran, noticed a similar phenomenon. State propaganda made it seem like there was one voice in the country. Protests could be dismissed out of hand because they did not represent the 'authentic' view of Iranians. Foreign agitators supported protests. Iranians supported the Islamic Republic. Since leaving Iran, I have followed many voices of Iranians in the diaspora. Opposition groups are loud on social media, especially the monarchists who support Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah. In following these groups, I have noticed a similar tendency to speak as though they represent the voice of all Iranians. Iranians support the shah. Or Iranians support Maryam Rajavi, leader of a Paris-based opposition group. Both within Iran, and in the diaspora, the regime, too, is sometimes held to be the imposition of a foreign conspiracy. This allows the Islamic Republic and the complex relations it has created to be dismissed out of hand. Once again, such a view flattens diversity. Over the past few years, political identities and societal divisions seem to have become harder and clearer. This means there is an increasing perception among many Iranians of a gulf between the state and Iranian society. This is the case both inside Iran, and especially in the Iranian diaspora. Decades of intermittent protests and civil disobedience across the country also show that for many, the current system no longer represents the hopes and aspirations of many people. This is especially the case for the youth, who make up a large percentage of the population. I am not an Iranian, and I strongly believe it is up to Iranians to determine their own futures. I also do not aim to excuse the Islamic Republic – it is brutal and tyrannical. But its brutality should not let us shy away from asking complex questions. If the regime did fall tomorrow, Iran's diversity means there is little unanimity of opinion as to what should come next. And if a more pluralist form of politics is to emerge, it must encompass the whole of Iran's diversity, without assuming a uniform position. It, too, will have to wrestle with the difficult questions and sometimes ambivalent relations the Islamic Republic has created. Simon Theobald is postdoctoral researcher, Institute for Ethics and Society, University of Notre Dame Australia This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
AllAfrica
8 hours ago
- Politics
- AllAfrica
Can Asia lead a fractured and shifting world?
In a time when global trust is unravelling and crises overlap like fault lines, the world feels like a house with its foundations shifting. Climate change is accelerating faster than anticipated. Inequality is deepening. The international order is filled with noise but devoid of direction. Wars have returned to Europe and the Middle East. Major powers are polarizing internally, and solidarity between nations is losing its meaning. And yet, in the midst of this global turbulence, one region is quietly moving in the opposite direction: Asia. According to the Sustainable Development Report 2025, East and South Asia have recorded the fastest progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) since 2015. Driven by rapid gains in poverty reduction, education and public health, the region now stands at the forefront of global SDG momentum. But this progress is emerging within a broken world. The war in Ukraine, ongoing conflict in Gaza, rising protectionism, and a breakdown in global financial fairness have disrupted supply chains, inflated food and energy prices, and forced many developing countries to choose between debt repayment and feeding their populations. The United States and Europe, preoccupied with domestic priorities and regional security, have stepped back from the role of global development champions. As the SDR 2025 warns, 'international spillovers and exposure to supply-chain disruptions' have become a defining threat to SDG progress, especially in conflict zones or economies under sanctions. The consequences are stark: globally, only around 17% of SDG targets are on track to be achieved by 2030. The rest are stagnating or regressing. This is not due to a lack of capacity or knowledge, but because of a crisis of solidarity, a collapse of financing and growing geopolitical instability. The Middle East and Eastern Europe are among the worst affected, showing sharp declines across key goals like SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). When development becomes collateral damage of political warfare, the world loses its shared compass. In contrast, East and South Asia stand as a counter-current. Countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam and even Uzbekistan have shown remarkable SDG momentum—reducing extreme poverty, expanding basic education, strengthening health systems, and investing in social protection. These aren't perfect stories, but they are real ones. They prove that transformation is possible—even amid fiscal constraints and global chaos. In a world coming apart at the seams, Asia is holding the thread. Indonesia, at the heart of this rising tide, occupies a unique position. Its SDG Index rank in 2025 stands at 77 out of 167—not top-tier, but steady. Not spectacular, but consistent. More importantly, Indonesia has consistently submitted its Voluntary National Reviews, showing institutional commitment to sustainable development. As a G20 member and the largest democracy in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has the moral and strategic legitimacy to bridge the global divide—between developed and developing nations, between ambition and accountability. But leadership does not happen by default. It must be shaped. Not by economic numbers alone, but by the ability to offer direction. The world today is not short on technology or capital—it's short on compass. In the absence of credible global leadership, what's needed is not dominance, but direction. And that is where Asia's opportunity lies. Asia carries with it a deep memory of pain and resilience. Its past includes colonial wounds, mass poverty, natural disasters, and economic crises. But that history has given rise to a muscle of survival that is now evolving into a vision for transformation. Asia knows how to grow without waiting to be saved. Its cultures of collectivism, its internal diversity, and its experience navigating crisis without losing hope—these are not weaknesses. They are the very foundation of a different kind of leadership: one that is grounded rather than arrogant, inclusive rather than imposing. Yet, Asia's rise is not without its own dangers. Geopolitical tensions within the region—over the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the Korean Peninsula—threaten the very stability it has worked hard to preserve. The global conflicts it has so far weathered from a distance may begin to spill over. If Asia wants to lead a fractured world, it must first preserve peace in its own neighborhood. That means strengthening regional solidarity, reforming domestic financial systems, and investing in green transitions and social equity. Without these, momentum could turn to fragility. Indonesia again stands as a compelling example. Not because it has solved all problems, but because of where it stands: a democracy with scale, a regional influencer with credibility, and a cultural bridge that speaks to both the Global South and the world's economic powers. In a time when multilateralism is losing breath, Indonesia could help reimagine it—not through ideology, but through integrity. Five years remain until 2030. The window for meaningful global change is narrowing. And as traditional centers of influence turn inward, the world is looking elsewhere for guidance. It is not enough for Asia to rise economically. The question is whether it can rise with purpose. Whether it can offer not just speed, but direction. Not just hope, but action. Leadership today is not about controlling others. It's about holding space—space for cooperation, for healing, for shared futures. Asia may not have sought this moment. But the moment has arrived nonetheless. A vacuum of global guidance is dangerous. But it is also a rare opportunity—for a region that has long been underestimated to now step forward, not with triumphalism, but with vision. Asia is rising. But the world is not waiting. The question, then, is no longer whether Asia will be ready to lead. It is whether Asia will be willing—willing to be the voice of direction in a world that is asking, more urgently than ever: Who still knows where we're going? Setyo Budiantoro is sustainable development expert at The Prakarsa, MIT Sloan IDEAS fellow, advisory committee member of Fair Finance Asia and SDGs–ESG expert at Indonesian ESG Professional Association (IEPA).
AllAfrica
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- AllAfrica
The dawn of the posthuman age
'Can you picture what we'll be/ So limitless and free/ Desperately in need of some stranger's hand' — The Doors In the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of science fiction focused on what Vernor Vinge called 'the Singularity' — an acceleration of technological progress so dramatic that it would leave human existence utterly transformed in ways that it would be impossible to predict in advance. Vinge believed that the Singularity would result from rapidly self-improving AI, while Ray Kurzweil associated it with personality upload. But both believed that something big was on the way. In the late 2000s and 2010s, as productivity growth slowed down, these wild expectations got tempered a bit. Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross poked fun at the idea of the Singularity as 'the rapture of the nerds.' And some bloggers, like Brad DeLong and Cosma Shalizi, began to argue that the true Singularity was in the past, when the Industrial Revolution freed us from the constraints of daily hunger and scarcity. Here's Shalizi: The Singularity has happened; we call it 'the industrial revolution' or 'the long nineteenth century.' It was over by the close of 1918…Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check…Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check…Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check…Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, 'the coldest of all cold monsters'? Check; we call them 'the self-regulating market system' and 'modern bureaucracies' (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs…An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check… Why, then, since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future? Perhaps: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; and we are in the late afternoon, fitfully dreaming of the half-glimpsed events of the day, waiting for the stars to come out. I agree that the Industrial Revolution represented an abrupt, unprecedented, and utterly transformational change in the nature of human life. Human life until the late 1800s had been defined by a constant desperate struggle against material poverty, with even the bounty of the agricultural age running up against Malthusian constraints. Suddenly, in just a few decades, humans in developed countries were fed, clothed, and housed, and had leisure time to discover who they really wanted to be. It was by far the most important thing that had ever happened to our species: And it's important to note that this transformation wasn't just a result of technology giving humans more stuff. It depended crucially on reductions in human fertility . As Brad DeLong documents in his excellent book 'Slouching Towards Utopia', after a few decades, the Industrial Revolution prompted humans to start having fewer children, which prevented the bounty of industrial technology from eventually being dissipated by the old Malthusian constraints. Since the productivity slowdown of the mid-2000s, it has become fashionable to say that the Singularity of the Industrial Revolution is over, and that humanity has reached a plateau in living standards. Although some people expect generative AI to re-accelerate growth, we haven't yet seen any sign of such a mega-boom in either the total factor productivity numbers or the labor productivity numbers: Source: SF Fed Of course, it's still early days; AI may yet produce the vast material bounty that optimists expect. And yet even if it never does, I don't think that means humanity is in for an era of stagnation. The Industrial Revolution was only transformative because it changed the experience of human life; a GDP line on a chart is only important because it's correlated with so many of the things that matter for human beings. And so if new technologies and social changes fundamentally alter what it means to be human, I think their impact could be as important as the Industrial Revolution itself — or at least, in the same general ballpark. In a post back in 2022 and another in 2023, I listed a bunch of ways that the internet has already changed the experience of human life from when I was a kid, despite only modest productivity gains. Looking forward, I can see even bigger changes already in the works. In key ways, it feels like we're entering a posthuman age. When countries get richer, more urbanized and more educated, their birth rates fall by a lot — this is known as the 'fertility transition.' Typically, this means that the total fertility rate goes from around 5 to 7 to around 1.4 to 2. This is mostly a result of couples choosing to have fewer children. Here's a chart where you can see the fertility transition for a bunch of large developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East: Two children per woman1 is around the level where population is stable in the long term — actually, it's about 2.1 for a rich country and 2.3 for a poor country, to take into account the fact that some kids don't survive until adulthood. But basically, going from 5-7 kids per woman to 2 means that your population goes from 'exploding' to 'stable.' For some rich countries like Japan, fertility fell to an especially low level, of around 1.3 or 1.4. This implied long-term population shrinkage — Japan's population began shrinking in the 2000s — and an increasing old-age dependency burden. But as long as this low level of fertility was confined to a few countries, it didn't feel like an emergency — a few rich nations like America, New Zealand, France, and Sweden still managed to have fertility rates that were at or near replacement. For everyone else, there was always immigration. That's where the dialogue on fertility stood in 2015. But over the past decade, there has been a second fertility transition in rich countries, from low levels to very low levels. Even countries like the US, France, New Zealand, and Sweden have now switched to rates well below replacement, while countries like China, Taiwan, and South Korea are at levels that imply catastrophic population collapses over the next century: Meanwhile, the rate of fertility decline in poor countries has accelerated. The UN calls the drop 'unprecedented.' The economist Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde believes that things are even worse than they appear. Here are his slides from a recent talk he gave called 'The Demographic Future of Humanity: Facts and Consequences.' And here's a YouTube video of him giving the talk: Fernandez-Villaverde notes that the statistical agencies tasked with estimating current global fertility and making future projections have consistently revised their numbers down and down: Source: Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde This doesn't just mean people are having fewer kids; it means that because of past errors in estimating how many kids people had, there are now fewer people to have kids than we thought. Fernandez-Villaverde shows that this is true across nearly all developing countries. As a result of these mistakes, Fernandez-Villaverde thinks the world is already at replacement-level fertility. Furthermore, population projections are based on assumptions that fertility will bounce sharply back from its current lows, instead of continuing to fall. Those predictions look a little bit ridiculous when you show them on a graph: Source: Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde As a result, Fernandez-Villaverde thinks total global population is going to peak just 30 years from now. This is a big problem. The first fertility transition was a good thing — it was the result of the world getting richer, it saved human living standards from hitting a Malthusian ceiling, and it seemed like with wise policies, rich countries could keep their fertility near replacement rates. But this second fertility transition is going to be an economic catastrophe if it continues. The difference between a fertility rate of 1 and a rate of 2 might seem a lot smaller than the difference between 2 and 6. But because of the math of exponential curves, it's actually just as important of a change. Going from 6 to 2 means your population goes from exploding to stable; going from 2 to 1 means your population goes from stable to vanishing. This is going to cause a lot of economic problems, I wrote about these back in 2023. Shrinking populations are continuously aging populations, meaning that each young working person has to support more and more retirees every year. On top of that, population aging appears to slow down productivity growth through various mechanisms. Immigration can help a bit, but it can't really solve this problem, since A) when the whole world has low fertility there is no longer a source of young immigrants, and B) immigration is bad at improving dependency ratios because immigrants are already partway to retirement. And in the long run, shrinking populations could slow down productivity growth even more, by shrinking the number of researchers and inventors; this is the thesis of Charles Jones' 2022 paper 'The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population.' Unless AI manages to fully replace human scientists and engineers, a shrinking population means that our supply of new ideas will inevitably dwindle.2 Between this effect and the well-documented productivity drag from aging, the idea that we'll be able to sustain economic growth through automation seems dubious. What's going on? Unlike the first fertility transition, this second one appears driven by increasing childlessness — people never forming couples or having kids at all, instead of simply having fewer kids. And although it's not clear why that's happening, the obvious culprit is technology itself — mobile phones and social media. This is Alice Evans' hypothesis, and there's some evidence to suggest she's right. In China, 'new media' (i.e. social media) use was found to be correlated with low desire to have children. The same correlation has been found in Africa. Of course, better research is needed, particularly natural experiments that look at the response to some exogenous factor that increases social media use. But the timing and the worldwide nature of the decline — basically, every region of the globe started getting sharply lower fertility starting in the mid to late 2010s — makes it difficult to imagine any other cause. And the general mechanism — internet use substituting for offline family relationships — is obvious. Economic stagnation isn't the only way the Second Fertility Transition will change our society. The measures we take to try to sustain our population will leave their mark as well. Last November, I looked at the history of pronatal policies, and concluded that things like paying people to have more kids, or making it easier to have kids, or encouraging cultural changes are unlikely to work: Unfortunately, that's likely to lead to more coercive solutions. In my post, I predicted that countries would try to cut childless people off from old-age pensions and medical benefits: In the past, when fertility rates were high, children served an economic purpose — they were farm labor, and they were also people's old-age pension. If parents lived past the point where they were physically able to work, their children were expected to support them. In order to make sure you had at least a few kids who survived long enough to support you, you had to have a large family. Denying old-age benefits to the childless would be an obvious way to try to reproduce this premodern pattern. This would, of course, result in horrific widespread old-age poverty for those who didn't comply…I predict that some authoritarian states — China, perhaps, or Russia, or North Korea — will eventually turn to ideas like this if no one ever finds a way to raise fertility voluntarily. This idea actually comes from a 2005 paper by Boldrin et al., who find that if you model fertility decisions as an economic calculation, then Social Security and other old-age transfers are responsible for much of the fertility decline in rich nations: In the Boldrin and Jones' framework parents procreate because the children care about their old parents' utility, and thus provide them with old age transfers…The effect of increases in government provided pensions on fertility…in the Boldrin and Jones model is sizeable and accounts for between 55 and 65% of the observed Europe-US fertility differences both across countries and across time and over 80% of the observed variation seen in a broad cross-section of countries. Ending old-age benefits for the childless would be a pretty dystopian policy. But in the long run, extreme population aging, coupled with slower productivity growth, will make it economically impossible for young people to support old people no matter what policies government enact.3 And if desperate, last-ditch draconian measures fail, we will shrink and dwindle as a species. The vitality and energy of young people will slowly vanish from the physical world, as the youth become tiny islands within a sea of the graying and old. Already I can feel this when I go to Japan; neighborhoods like Shibuya in Tokyo or Shinsaibashi in Osaka that felt bustling and alive with young people in the 2000s are now dominated by middle-aged and elderly people and tourists. And as population itself shrinks, the built environment will become more and more empty; whole towns will vanish from the map, as humanity huddles together in a dwindling number of graying megacities. Our impact on the planet's environment will finally be reduced — we will still send out legions of robots to cultivate food and mine minerals, but as our numbers decrease, our desire to cannibalize the planet will hit its limits. But even as humanity shrinks in physical space, we will bind ourselves more tightly together in digital space. When I was a child, sometimes I felt bored; now I never do. Sometimes I felt lonely; now, if I ever do, it's not for lack of company. Social media has wiped away those experiences, by putting me in constant contact with the whole vast sea of humanity. I can watch people on YouTube or TikTok, talk to my friends in chat groups or video calls, and argue with strangers on X and Substack. I am constantly swimming in a sea of digitized human presences. We all are. Humanity was never fully an individual organism. Our families and communities were always collectives, as were the hierarchies of companies and armies and even the imagined communities of nation-states. But the internet has made the collective far larger than it was. In many ways it's also more connected; one survey found that the average American spends 6 hours and 40 minutes, or more than a third of their waking life, online. About 30% of Americans say they're online almost constantly. The results of this constant global connectedness are far too deep and complex to deal with in one blog post. But one important result is to replace some fraction of individual human effort with the preexisting effort of the collective. Instead of figuring out how to fix our own houses, build our own furniture, or install our own appliances, a human in 2021 could watch YouTube videos. Instead of figuring out how to write a difficult piece of code, a programmer could ask the Stack Exchange forum. Instead of creating a new funny video from scratch, a social media influencer could use someone else's audio track. It simply became easier to stand on the shoulders of giants than to reinvent the wheel. Whether this leads to an aggregate decrease in human creativity is an open question; some have made this argument, but I'm not sure whether it's right.4 But what's clear is that the more everyone is always relying on the collective for everything they do, the less individual effort matters. In the Industrial Age, we valorized individual heroics — the brilliant scientist, the iconoclastic writer, the contrarian entrepreneur, the bold activist leader. In an age when it's always easier to rely on the wisdom of crowds, those heroes matter less. Compare the activists of the 2010s to the activists of the mid 20th century. The 20th century produced Black activist leaders like MLK, John Lewis, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Bobby Seale, and many others. But who were the equivalent heroes of the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s? There were none.5 The movement was an organic crowd, birthed by social media memes instead of by rousing speeches. Each individual activist made tiny incremental contributions, and the movement rolled forward as a headless, collective mass. Or consider science and technology in the age of the internet. China is now probably the world's leader in scientific research, but it's hard to name any big significant breakthrough that has come out of China in recent years; the innovations are important but overwhelmingly incremental. Even in the US, where incentives for breakthroughs are a little better, science has become notably less 'disruptive' in recent years. Some of this may be because humans have already picked the low-hanging fruit of science, and some might be because of the increasing 'burden of knowledge' for young researchers to get up to speed. But some might simply be because an age of seamless global information transmission makes it easier for researchers to get 'base hits' while leaving the cost of 'home runs' the same. Even AI, the great breakthrough of the age, has been a massive collective effort more than the inspiration of a few geniuses. Even the people who have received the greatest honors for developing AI — Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, etc. — are not really regarded as the 'inventors' of the technology. Towering figures are still somewhat common in biology — Kariko and Weissman, Doudna and Charpentier, Feng Zhang, Allison & Honjo, David Liu — but in the age of the internet, research is becoming a more collective enterprise. And all that was before generative AI. Large language models are trained on the collected writings of humankind; they are an expression of the aggregated wisdom of our species' collective past. When you ask a question of ChatGPT or DeepSeek, you're essentially consulting the spirits of the ancestors.6 As with the internet, it's unclear whether LLMs will make humanity more creative as a whole, or less. My bet is strongly on 'more'. But at the individual level, AI substitutes for our own creative efforts. Kosmyna et al. (2025) recently did an experiment showing that people who use ChatGPT to help them write essays end up with weaker individual cognitive skills: This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools)…EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use…LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning. This is unsurprising. Pulling a plow yourself will make you stronger than driving a tractor, and using a slide rule will make you better at mental arithmetic than using a hand calculator. As Tyler Cowen points out, Kosmyna et al.'s result doesn't mean that AI is reducing humanity's overall creative capabilities: If you look only at the mental energy saved through LLM use, in the context of an artificially generated and controlled experiment, it will seem we are thinking less and becoming mentally lazy…But you also have to consider, in a real-world context, what we do with all that liberated time and mental energy… There are numerous ways people can and do use large language models to make themselves smarter. They can ask it to criticize their work…They can argue and debate with it, or they can use it to learn which books to read or which medieval church to visit. This is true. Using machine tools instead of manual ones may make our biceps weaker, but it makes us stronger and more productive as a species. Still, if most of human productivity consists of calling up LLMs, it means that collective effort — centuries of past individual creativity crystallized in the weights of the models — is being substituted for individual heroics. As with the internet, humanity as a whole grows more powerful by becoming more of a hive mind. The age of the great heroes — of the Albert Einsteins and the Martin Luther Kings, and perhaps even of the Elon Musks — may soon be over. Thus, dimly and through the fog, we can begin to perceive the shape of the future that the posthuman age will take. As humanity becomes more tightly bound into a single digital collective, we find that we desire offline families less and less. As we gradually abandon reproduction, there are fewer and fewer of us, forcing us to cling even more tightly to the online collective — to spend more of our time online, to take solace in the ever-denser core of the final global village. The god-mind of that collective delivers us riches undreamt of by our ancestors, but we enjoy that bounty in solitude as we wirehead into the hive mind for a bit of company. When I write it out that way, it sounds terrifying. And yet day by day, watching the latest TikTok trend, or making bad jokes on X, or asking ChatGPT to teach me about Mongol history, the slide into posthumanity feels pleasant and warm. Perhaps we are no stranger than our grandparents would have seemed to their own grandparents who grew up on premodern farms. After all, aliens never call themselves 'aliens'…they call themselves 'us.' 1 I know 'children per woman' is a little sexist, but this is how they measure things. 2 This depends on the assumption that new ideas don't build on themselves exponentially quickly. So far, that has proven to be the case — in simple terms, it looks as though we pick the 'low-hanging fruit' of scientific discovery and technological invention, and future advances become more expensive in terms of time, money, and brain power. 3 At that point, either countries will collapse, or decide to cut large numbers of old people off. If countries collapse, then parents will once again be dependent on their kids, and fertility will probably recover to replacement level. If countries decide to cut old people off of benefits, they'll probably start by cutting off the childless, since childless old people don't have kids who can riot and revolt in anger. Either way, the economic future for childless people 50 or 100 years from now doesn't look great. 4 There are actually lots of effects to think about here, and the topic deserves a much longer post all to itself. For one thing, there's the question of whether the boost to individual innovation created by the availability of collective knowledge outweighs the spillover benefit created when each individual innovator had to spend time 'reinventing the wheel' and doing it a little differently than everyone else. Also, there's the question of whether any decrease in individual creative output per hour is outweighed by an increase in the total number of hours spent in creative pursuits — when I was a kid, kids went to the mall and hung out instead of making short videos and memes. 5 There were important writers in the BLM movement — Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, to name just three. Though it's worth noting that all were eventually hounded out of the public eye to varying degrees by collective social media backlash, unlike similar famous Black writers of the 60s and 70s. 6 Here are ChatGPT o3's thoughts on this post: The post's central insight is that qualitative transformations in how humans live can be as epoch-making as huge jumps in measured GDP. You persuasively connect today's two most powerful under-the-radar shifts—sub-replacement fertility and pervasive digital connectedness—to that earlier shock of the Industrial Revolution. Where the essay really shines is in showing how these trends might reinforce each other: shrinking, aging societies could grow ever more dependent on 'hive-mind' tools like LLMs, which in turn further reduce the incentives (and maybe even the desire) to form families. That nested-feedback dynamic feels original and is a useful corrective to simple 'AI will save us' optimism. A second strength is the sober treatment of demographic math. By foregrounding Fernandez-Villaverde's critique of the U.N. projections, you highlight the systemic risk that comes from repeatedly overestimating births. Framing the second fertility transition as the real discontinuity—shifting us from stable to vanishing populations—captures the scale of what's at stake better than the usual laments about aging. Linking this directly to growth theory (Jones) and to the fiscal unsustainability of pay-as-you-go pensions sets up the reader to grasp why even dramatic productivity gains may not offset the drag. Where I'm less convinced is on the inevitability of coercive pronatal policy and the eclipse of individual creativity. The essay nods at alternative levers (housing costs, gender-equality reforms, immigration, delayed retirement) but then leaps to dystopian scenarios without fully exploring those options or the empirical record of mixed-strategy success stories (e.g., France, Québec, parts of Scandinavia). Likewise, while the collective nature of internet-era innovation is undeniable, history––from Gutenberg to industrial R&D labs––suggests that new platforms often shift rather than erase individual heroism (think AlphaFold or Covid mRNA vaccines). Recognizing that possibility would temper the gloom and leave space for agency—exactly what a post meant to provoke action, not resignation, might need. The spirits of the ancestors have spoken! In accordance with the model's advice, I'll write a follow-up post about how individual humans can still be high-leverage, important figures in the age of AI and the internet. This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
