Why Do We Need Robots : Demography

  This is the first part of three in our series "Why Do We Need Robots?". The goal is to highlight the major reasons why robotics will be part of our future, and an essential one, by looking a bit further. While the democratization of robots is rendering them more and more present in our daily lives, most people have still mixed-feelings about the future. Many apocalyptic movies have depicted a future where either the robots are exterminating the humans or enslaving them. Few (or even none) have done the opposite. That is to say illustrating the benefits of a society full of robots, and its inevitability.

Today we're looking at the first reason why we need robots : Demography

Know a country's population and you'll know its future.

To understand the future of a country, you must understand how its population is composed in terms of age range and gender. But not only its present composition, but also its future. That's where the population pyramids come into play. Depending on the shape of this visualization tool, you can quickly understand the demography of a country. And also how far it is in its own demographic transition. And where it's headed. As you can see, you can also determine the level of development of a country by looking at its population pyramid. Indeed, developed and developing countries have pyramid with notable differences. While developing countries have a pyramid shaped in "A" with a very large base which almost-guarantee that the population will grow very fast in the next few decades, developed countries show a different vision. With pyramids looking like "H" or even "V", we're looking at a slower population growth rate and even in some cases at a decline rate. With smaller younger generations, the deaths will not be compensated by births, and this will lead to an ageing population.

An ageing population in the developed countries

Now that we understand the inevitable fate of the population, we realize this leaves us with two vital questions :  who's going to take care of our elders? and who will be doing the jobs? As the elder's age group increase more and more in size, we would need even more geriatric caregivers without the population to sustain that need. A population which will not even be able to sustain the demand for workers and wealth producers in general. Yet we can't let the seniors lack the basic care they deserve. And we can't have the social security net explodes under the weight of the unbalanced ratio between retired and workers. Thus we need to find a way to prevent this scenario. That's where robots come into play. Last week we were asking ourselves "Will Robots Take My Jobs?" but we're seeing today that it's actually more about "Will Robots Take The Jobs We Need Them To". To use Elon's words "The full gravity of [the demographic implosion] is not well understood". Only by accepting robots in our future, we can successfully take on the challenge of addressing the issues brought by a demography of an ageing population

Coming up next in "Why Do We Need Robots?"

We'll be looking at why the future AI and the very survival of our species lie in Robotics and Robots in Part 2 and Part 3. Make sure to stay tuned!