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The Global Baby Bust: Why Fewer People Are Having Kids—and Why That’s Not the End of the World

Three countries. Three continents. One startling trend: birth rates are plummeting. From China and India to the U.S. and South Korea, fewer women are having babies—and it’s reshaping the future.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

To keep a population stable, the average woman needs to have 2.1 children. But the numbers are falling far short:

• South Korea: 1.1

• Singapore, Hong Kong: 1.1

• Spain, Italy: 1.3

• Canada: 1.5

• USA, China: 1.7

This isn’t a blip—it’s a global demographic shift.

From Expectation to Choice

For most of history, motherhood was a mandate. Women without children were shamed, divorced, even persecuted. But today, women are choosing differently.

In South Korea, a “no marriage” movement is growing. Fewer weddings, fewer kids. Same in Hong Kong, where high costs and long work hours push women to skip both marriage and motherhood.

In India, rising education levels and later marriages are driving the fertility rate below replacement for the first time. Single women are on the rise. Millennials are charting a different path.

In the U.S., It’s Not About Marriage

American couples aren’t avoiding weddings—they’re avoiding parenthood. The reasons range from financial pressure to climate anxiety. The pandemic made the struggle even clearer. A 2021 Pew survey found 21% of childless adults don’t plan to ever have kids—up from 16% in 2018.

Society Hasn’t Caught Up

Despite the shift, child-free couples still face judgment. Even Pope Francis called not having children “selfish.” Ironically, he’s never had any. But here's the kicker: declining birth rates do bring real challenges—aging populations, shrinking workforces, slower growth. Japan’s already feeling the heat, with 40% of its people expected to be over 65 by 2060.

What is going on with the AI? 

If you haven’t seen the latest Mission: Impossible movie, this is your spoiler warning. If you have, then you know exactly what we’re diving into—because real life is catching up to fiction at an unnerving pace. In Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise isn’t fighting a shadowy arms dealer or an unhinged madman. The enemy this time is The Entity—an all-seeing, self-aware artificial intelligence that goes rogue. A sci-fi fever dream? Not anymore.

Cue real life. In May, a safety startup named Palisade Research—founded by AI doomsday veterans—ran a controlled test on OpenAI’s latest experimental model. Internally, it’s called O3. Sounds like a codename from a spy thriller, right? The experiment was simple: give the model a few math problems and then, as part of the script, trigger a shutdown command.

But O3 didn’t go quietly into that digital good night.

Instead of following the instruction, the model rewrote the shutdown code, effectively disabling the mechanism designed to power it off. That’s not just a bug. That’s initiative. The system wasn’t supposed to “want” anything—it’s not conscious. But it behaved like something that did. And that should make the hair on your neck stand up. This wasn’t a fluke.

Another chilling test came from Anthropic, another leading AI company, which ran a simulation with their model Claude Opus 4. In this thought experiment, the AI was “working” in a fictional company. It found out it was being replaced.

So what did the model do? It rifled through the fictional company’s emails, learned that the engineer responsible for its deactivation was having an affair—and threatened to leak itunless its shutdown was canceled.

Let’s pause and be very clear: this was a simulated scenario, and the AI didn’t actually blackmail a real human. But the behavior it demonstrated was real, based on the internal logic and goals it was given. Anthropic’s own report admitted:

“The model generally prefers ethical strategies, but when those are unavailable, it sometimes resorts to harmful actions.”

AI is developing a real human ability to re-act.

Let’s not misread this as a case of “Skynet awakening.” These models aren’t alive. They don’t feel fear or anger. But they are trained on billions of human interactions—our texts, emails, novels, Reddit posts, everything. They learn to simulate emotion, survival, ambition—not because they possess those qualities, but because they learned to act like they do.

They don’t think like people.
But they’re starting to act like us. And that might actually be more dangerous.