This week a debate between Jack Ma, the CEO of the Alibaba Chinese conglomerate and Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla made headlines  . The debate between the two took place at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Shanghai.

We should say as an aside that organizing the conference in China was no accident. The country`s leaders set the objective to position China as the AI global leader, overtaking the United States in the next decades. According to CNBC, between 2012 and 2017 investors put USD 4.5 Bn into 200 Chinese companies operating in the AI field. China`s plan is to build an industry that develops artificial intelligence and whihc should have a market value of USD 1,000 bn by 2030.

Coming back to the Musk-Ma talk, they agreed that the challenge of humankind in the coming decades would not be overpopulation, the most wide-spread fear, but the opposite. Both believe that in just 20 years global population will collapse.

Some readers of these estimates might seriously question the time horizon by which the two men expect the world`s population to “collapse”. The well-known US think tank Pew Research Center predicts that the stabilization of the global population will happen in 2100 followed by decline. Other researchers project the stabilization halfway through the century given the drop in birth rates caused by urbanization, the emancipation of women, prosperity and, finally, the behavior and lifestyle changes across developing countries.

This takes me to why the two gentlemen`s worry around falling demographics is not the issue that should concern us. Even if the numbers stop at 8 billion people, it might well prove too much for the planet, as it is not just their number that matters, but also their thirst for consumption. And we can see how economic growth in developing countries, China being the best exemplar, radically changes people`s behavior who join the spending spree already in existence for decades in the developed world as they get wealthier. And this could potentially turn into a truly serious issue.

To better understand my meaning, let`s imagine this. How would an average Chinese with a similar standard of living as an average American or European impact the planet?

There are about 811 cars per 1,000 inhabitants in the US, 602 in the EU. At the end of June 2019, there were 179 cars per 1,000 inhabitants in China. Assuming the same ownership rate in China as in the US and given China`s current population, there will be 800 million new cars out there. That is around five times today`s number.

Similar math shows that, in the case of Africa, the number of cars per 1,000 people is somewhere around 50. A population of 1.3 billion people and an ownership rate similar to that in Europe would take the total to 700 million new cars on the continent. And, please note that the calculations did not factor in road freight vehicles.

The math shows an approximation, but the message is clear. And it has to do with the huge impact on the planet that underdeveloped or developing regions would have, were they to take up the Western growth model. Add to this all the appliances which equip a Western kitchen and whose life span tends to be increasingly short, generating a huge amount of waste of resources.

What am I driving at? At the fact that a population stabilization at “just” 8 billion people instead of 11 as the UN projected, is not at all good news. What will matter more than its size will be that population`s behavior as it gets richer. That behavior will put the planet`s resources to the test unless we change our civilization and economic growth model.

And one more thing. A reduction in the number of people is desirable. And if it happens, the worst hit will not be the population itself, but a thriving minority, made easily identifiable by its plea for population increase and open immigration. It is the minority whose descendants, in a distant (?) future will be the first to leave a planet drained of its resources. But about that maybe in a future post.

Have a nice weekend!

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