We’re told the Baby Boom happened when two historically contingent things combined: first, advances in medicine meant that high childhood mortality (which had been a part of humanity since the beginning of time) decreased noticeably for the first time in history. (Buried in this history is the fact that a certain emotional coldness toward a baby that may not live past the age of 5 was culturally baked in, and so all of the psychological unpacking of the generational and emotional trauma that “early emotional neglect” caused could not happen until late-20th Century at the earliest). High infant survival brought the need for effective contraception, so its introduction and normalization in the mid-20th century wasn’t simply a matter of changing morals but a practical response to the new reality that children no longer routinely died.
The second, is that high survival rates required more food production and economic growth to absorb the new people. Coincidentally, the world had just fought a war and solved industrial output and production so that after said war, they had the capacity to feed, house, and eventually sell cars to the new babies that would have died fifty years earlier.
In retrospect it looks like the 20th Century’s Baby Boom happened because the analog economy was able to weave together advances in medicine and industry to sustain more people than it could at any time before. Abundance appeared and the population expanded, and society had to reorganize later.
A.I. Abundance?
The doomers have a new crowdsourced stock argument which is we’re all going to lose our jobs to AI. Certainly my own use of AI over the past three years makes me understand they’re on to something. Capitalism has always used increases in efficiency to shed workers. It is already a remarkable story, how computers entered the workspace in the 1980s and 1990s and made some obsolete, and for the first forty years required specialists trained in their arcane programming languages. These specialists acquired wealth and social privilege as a result. But now the machines are able to process a corpus of preexisting code so well that coders are no longer required to write things from memory or cut and paste from Stack Overflow. The algorithms have been written to automate an Excel spreadsheet. The YouTube podcasters post their videos with alarmist headlines, “all jobs replaced by 2030” etc etc.
There’s currently a propaganda commercial by Bell running on Canadian TV explaining how they’re laying the pipe to enable AI by invoking the Industrial Revolution. “At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,” the voice-over tells us, “No one called it that. We had no idea about what we’d eventually be able to do. We just had some machines that made sense to use at the time, until one day we looked back. At what was once impossible, suddenly wasn’t.” The Industrial Revolution’s promise was abundance through displacement — it put hand-weavers out of work and eventually fed the world. Bell is telling us they’re going to do to our skilled knowledge workers what was done to our great-great-grandmother’s loom.
If the AI Revolution follows the same logic, we’ll only know what to call it in retrospect. We cannot yet name this era, but we can project ourselves toward its possibilities — and some of those have already been imagined for us.
Some tell us AI will lead to the post-scarcity environment many are familiar with from science-fiction like Star Trek, but this reminds me of how the internet was supposed to bring world peace as imagined in 1996. Not likely, but it’s worth noting that we already experience a post-scarcity world as compared to a hundred years ago. We have an abundance they didn’t have in 1926, including the fact that practically everyone on the planet carries a pocket computer that is reachable by a unique code (ie a phone number). What is apparent about the AI we already have is that we’ll be able to manage a level of complexity that we couldn’t manage fifteen years ago.
The digital revolution we’ve already lived through has been all about that: we could only manage so much in the analog world, and so it took 6-8 weeks to get your mail order or the like processed. Now you can get an Amazon delivery in 24 hours. To extend that example, with AI we might open our doors to find something we’re about to need without realizing it yet. There will be op-eds and angry social-media posts about overreach and creepiness but here I’m just imagining the further development of the predictive analytics that was already in place in the early 2010s, like when Target used purchase-pattern data to infer which customers were likely pregnant and sent them coupons for baby products.
Now let’s set aside the conventional familiarity of Star Trek and think about The Expanse. For those not familiar, The Expanse TV series ran from 2015-2021 and was based on the novel series by co-authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck writing under the combined pen-name of James S.A. Corey. It imagines the world of the year 2350 - mid-24th Century, where the Moon, Mars, and asteroid belt have been colonized, and inter-solar-system space-ship traffic is as much a part of daily life as our intercontinental airplane travel. The Earth is home to 30 billion people. It is politically administered by the UN. Half of the population - 15 billion - do not work because there is no job available. Most survive on what they call “Basic” which is basic sustenance: housing, food, etc provided for.
The exploitation of solar system resources led to such abundance that the year 2100’s projected population of 10 billion tripled, but this resulted in a new scarcity of opportunity. The population in this scenario are limited in education and employment opportunities because there isn’t enough work to go around, and jobs are assigned by lottery. Corruption in this system comes from jumping the queue for a position.
Is this where we’re heading? Not within the next three hundred years but within the next twenty?!
“Hey, do you mind if I ask you something?” The girl shrugged, her smile an invitation. “Is everyone who works here the same age?” “Well,” she said. “Pretty close. Gotta collect your pre-university credits, right?” “I’m not from here,” Bobbie said. “Explain that.” Blue seemed actually to see her for the first time, looking over her uniform and its various insignias. “Oh, wow, Mars, right? I want to go there.” “Yeah, it’s great. So tell me about the credits thing.” “They don’t have that on Mars?” she asked, puzzled. “Okay, so, if you apply to a university, you have to have at least a year of work credits. To make sure you like working. You know, so they don’t waste classroom space on people who will just go on basic afterward.” “Basic?” “You know, basic support.” “I think I understand,” Bobbie said. “Basic support is the money you live on if you don’t work?” “Not money, you know, just basic. Gotta work to have money.” — James SA Corey, Caliban’s War (2012, p. 164-166)
We could, in other words, engineer The Expanse scenario without intending to. Material security provided by AI leading to a population boom administered by AI, but with little to do in way of jobs, and so an immiseration provided by AI.
Their cruelty is their point
What I’m more concerned with is how much cruelty factors into contemporary politics. The X.com bros keep tweeting things to the effect of “you only have two years to achieve generational wealth” and by that they mean you’re supposed to get rich before the AI apocalypse, because socialized sharing of resources in an abundance economy is unimaginable to them.
There’s long been an implicit message churning beneath the surface, that the poor are supposed to fuck off and die. It’s a fascistic attitude that I keep documenting.
But I’m not the only one. When Margaret Atwood was interviewed on Stephen Marche’s podcast last summer (2025-08-19) she too called out how the United States seemed to be giving up on its poor. “In your deepest, darkest, most horrible imagination, you would have to think America has decided it doesn’t need all these poor people,” she said (16:15).
“So it doesn’t need cheap labor or it doesn’t need that much cheap labor. So what are they going to do? They’re going to cut health services. They’re going to cut social security. And a lot of those people are going to die. That’s a pretty conscious decision. If you look at what they’re doing, you think, okay, Robert Kennedy is involved in some very twisted social Darwinist experiment. ‘So, let’s take our grandkids swimming in a toxic swamp. Because they’ve got healthy immune systems and they will resist it. And people who don’t have healthy immune systems, well, too bad for them. They’re not the fit.’ It’s just speculation. Is it conscious thinking? I don’t know. But that will be the result.” (16:26 - 17:26)
“What do we need these poor people kicking around for?”, she asked rhetorically, after contextualizing the above. “[The thinking is apparently] let’s just finish them off. Remove their support systems. Genocide of the poor.” (17:34-17:43)
This is what it looks like when a society begins treating its surplus people as a management problem rather than a human inheritance.
Of course, instead of the eugenicist fascism that would see the poor killed off, we could instead provide which is what these manly bro-o-sphere dudes hark on about when they imagine their traditional gender roles and their trad wives and trad kids. The irony is that the bro-sphere’s own fantasy of trad wives, trad kids, a man providing for his household is a Baby Boom fantasy, and the Baby Boom required exactly the kind of state provision they’re currently cheering the dismantling of.
The Boomers were ok because the postwar world chose provision. An AI abundance will generate its own cohort — a Boomer 2.0. The only question is whether we provide for them, or whether we decide they’re Basic.