Robots & Babies - Part 1
Well chaps, we seem to be staring down the barrel of population collapse!
When you become a parent you think about time differently. You realise you’re the ghost of your children’s future. The very act of having a child is placing an implicit bet on yourself, and on the world and society around you.
My daughter, born in 2024, will start primary school in 2028. Finish high school in 2042. Walk into her first real job somewhere around 2046. Buy her first house, if such a thing still exists at her income level, sometime in the 2060s. Maybe have her own first child, statistically, also in the 2060s. And finally, will continue to pay into someone else’s social security until the late 2080s.
Nobody knows what 2048 looks like. Not the parent making the decision tonight, not the policy shop modelling next year’s tax credit, not the AI lab whose roadmap runs to 2027 and gets vague after that.
We are all trying to manage the slowest decision a human ever makes, whether to have a child, using systems whose feedback loops run in quarters, election cycles, and product launches.
This mismatch is the story I want to tell.
The standard takes on the fertility crisis split into two camps.
The pessimists say AI will make it worse: companions replace partners, automation kills the entry-level jobs young people need to feel stable, attention economies eat the social fabric that used to deliver pair-bonds.
The optimists say AI will make it better:
productivity surges,
household incomes rise,
the cost of raising a child finally bends down.
Both arguments are made on horizons that can’t actually see the answer. Both are evaluating a decision whose payoff lands in the 2060s on data that won’t be conclusive until the 2070s. The clock the decision lives on, and the clocks the arguments live on, are different clocks.
The Four Clocks
There are at least four clocks running in this conversation, and only one of them runs at the speed of the actual problem.
The capital clock is the fastest.
It runs in quarters.
The most consequential bets in the AI economy are being placed and re-placed every earnings cycle.
Strategy decks get rewritten in March, June, September, December.
By the time a single round of capex compounds into deployed product, an entire generation of policy debate has come and gone.
The policy clock is one notch slower.
It runs in three-to-five-year evaluation windows, tied to election cycles and budget rounds.
South Korea’s total fertility rate ticked from 0.72 in 2023 to 0.75 in 2024 to a provisional 0.80 in 2025, the latest from Statistics Korea. The optimistic read is that the country’s policy mix is finally working.
The honest read is that we are watching a one-year wiggle on a variable that takes a generation to settle. And the OECD’s own analysis attributes most of the rebound to delayed-pandemic-marriage catch-up and the “echo-boom” cohort hitting peak childbearing age, not to the cheques.
Regardless, within 18 months, the rebound will either be claimed as policy success or dismissed as policy failure, and the budget will move accordingly. The policy clock demands a verdict that the data cannot give.
The household-formation clock is slower still.
A typical Western adult meets a partner, forms a relationship, settles down into housing, and has a first child somewhere between 25 and 35.
That is a 10-to-15-year sequence, each step contingent on the one before it.
The decision to have a child is not really a decision in the moment; it is the cumulative result of a decade of decisions about education, work, geography, and partnership, each of which is sensitive to economic and social conditions that themselves change on a five-year clock.
A young adult today, weighing whether to have a first child in 2032, is forecasting their own income, their partner’s income, the housing market, the labour market, and the social fabric of their peer group, into a horizon longer than any one is confident in forecasting.
The fertility clock is the slowest.
A fertility decision today shows up in the labour force in roughly 2 places.
At 22 years old, when you’re at prime age to have children
Again in the dependency ratio at 65 when they retire
By the time the demographic data confirms or refutes any current theory about AI and fertility, the people that was supposed to answer the question has aged out of the choice.
There is no way to run the experiment fast enough. There is no instrument calibrated to the right window. The system, as currently designed, cannot self-correct in time.
Different gears move at different speeds. Ironically, the slow gear is the one we actually need to move, and it is the only one nothing in our political economy is built to grip.
Why the ‘Baby Bonus’s’ keep missing
This is what the failed-pronatalism literature is really diagnosing, even when it doesn’t say so.
South Korea has spent about 700 trillion won (close to half a trillion USD) on low-fertility measures since 2006, according to a Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs report this year. Over that span the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) went from 1.13 to 0.80.
The curve bent further down through the 2010s, bottomed at 0.72 in 2023, and is now ticking back up. The first three of those moves cost the Korean government roughly half a trillion dollars and the fourth, on the OECD’s own analysis, was driven mostly by demographic mechanics rather than the cheques.
Hungary runs family policy at roughly 5% of GDP, among the highest in the OECD; yet despite this, its TFR slipped throughout the early 2020s.
The US is at a general fertility rate of 1.57 per thousand women aged 15–44, down 23% since 2007, per the CDC’s April 2026 provisional release. France (often praised as the European pro-natalist success story) is at 1.66 - well below replacement levels, and falling.
Israel sits at 2.87, the highest in the OECD by a wide margin, on a fraction of the per-capita pro-natal budget Korea has spent. But their reason for the abnormally high birth rate is religious and social and historical, something other countries can’t emulate.
So let’s take a look at the scoreboard:
Half a trillion dollars in Korea, and the rate fell.
5% of GDP spent in Hungary, and the rate fell.
France, the celebrated model, below replacement and sinking.
The one rich country comfortably above replacement got there through something no treasury can purchase.
The standard conclusion at this point is to argue about the size of the cheque. I think the evidence points somewhere different:
that money paid on a five-year clock cannot reach a sixty-five-year variable.
Not because the amounts are too small, but because of how the system is built. And you may have noticed that AI, which framed the opening of this essay, has barely appeared since. That’s deliberate. AI doesn’t change this story.
It does something worse: it widens the gap between every clock I’ve described, on every channel that matters. Work, wages, and the very relationships that produce children in the first place.
Part 2 makes that case: why the money structurally can’t work, what AI does to each of the four clocks, the strongest version of the argument against me, and what a fertility policy honest about time would actually look like.