For the better part of the last century, the civilization altering properties of the haber-bosch process have been discussed ad-nauseum. Briefly, two parts elemental hydrogen are combined with elemental nitrogen endergonically, yielding ammonia for the hungry masses.
The process, in its stoichiometric simplicity is directly responsible for the nearly fourfold explosion in human growth from 1900 to today. That’s right, your existence, your parents, grandparents and every direct human interaction you’ve ever experienced was strongly facilitated, if not entirely enabled by a quirky fertilizer production breakthrough.
While this perspective is not particularly new or interesting, I think it provides a critical lens through which to understand the mid and long-term effects of AI on human population structures as eroded by market forces. Namely, investopedia tells us human employees in contemporary America requires roughly 300k to raise to adulthood in 2026 dollars, and critically people continue to incur baseline maintenance cost ranging from poverty to a middle-class until retirement, at which point they bleed the state dry. Qualms with retirement policies aside, it seems obvious that deploying a synthetic member of society (MOS) that costs the same as a conventional person amortized over an average lifespan, but perform half the productive intellectual labor is achievable even with todays compute constraints and energy costs.
So what’s holding us back? Why continue producing fertilizer at scale, inefficiently converting fixed ammonia to plant biomass using row-crops, subsequently growing animals using harvested feeds, and footing the bill for transporting, refining, packaging, distributing, stocking, cooking and finally metabolizing foodstuffs? Clearly, a direct, plug and play replacement to the human experience, powered by the sun photovoltaically, and not biochemically, with raw inputs moving through copper and thoughts beamed at near lightspeed through fiber optic cables would be vastly superior to culturing humans for 80 years, of which only 30 years meaningfully represent a productive career, penciling out to just 62K working hours anyways.
Frankly I don’t have a real perspective on this that paints the story in a positive light, perhaps market forces which first stimulated human population growth, particularly in the developing world and postwar Europe recalibrate, and humans are replaced slowly by cheaper, more efficient surrogates. Maybe AI turns out to be entirely inefficient at human-domain specific creative tasks, and the working world relegates all near-routine work, blue and white collar alike, to titanium MOS, and humans are uniquely coveted for high level troubleshooting and decision making. In this brave new world, the education system is broadly reformed, and a child’s curriculum is idiosyncratically tailored, rendering a fully formed adult optimized for human-niche activities. Maybe the explosive productivity enhancements mediated by limitless employees renders the need for human managers all the more pressing, and so the same market forces actually generate an uplifting effect to human populations. Who knows? I’ll be curious to see how it plays out.
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