Depopulation, AI and the Emptying Earth

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A world without humans

For thousands of years, power needed people. Kings needed soldiers. Factories needed workers. States needed taxpayers. Democracies needed voters.

What if that is over?

Drive through rural Bulgaria. Almost a third of the population has vanished since 1988. Schools closed, clinics boarded up, houses left to the weeds. In Spain they have a name for it: España Vaciada, emptied Spain. Italy, the Baltics, South Korea and China are next in line. Nobody bombed these places. People simply stopped coming, and stopped being born.

Now walk into a modern office. The managers are disappearing. AI is no longer just doing the work; it is making the decisions. First the villages lost their people. Next the cities lose their purpose.

And the young know it. This autumn, hundreds of thousands of French teenagers took to the streets and blocked more than a thousand high schools, in the largest student revolt in twenty years. Over six thousand arrests, most of them minors. Their message: our future is being taken away.

Are they wrong?

AI can do the things better we were never good in Finance and Bureaucracy: what can we still do asks Yuval Harari our prophet?

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France owes close to €3.6 trillion, 119% of everything it produces. Next year it is expected to pay more in interest to investors than it spends on its children’s education. The state cannot fix its schools, cannot balance its books, and cannot promise its youth a job. So what exactly is it still for?

Here is the uncomfortable truth: a government that no longer needs its people will eventually stop listening to them. A small elite, allied with AI, could run the cities of tomorrow. Everyone else becomes surplus.

Plato’s old myth of gold and iron returns, now written in code.

Or perhaps the people will simply leave. Empty land is cheap, sometimes free. New pioneers could found new colonies, with their own schools, their own rules, their own currencies, beyond the reach of a bankrupt state. It has happened before: in Paraguay, German-speaking colonies have governed themselves for more than a century and every year new europeans are sttling down with their own anti establishment lifestyle.

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WHO NEEDS HUMANS?

• The villages are dying. Bulgaria has lost almost a third of its people, and Spain, Italy and Asia are following.
• The cities are next. AI is taking over management and production, not just the routine jobs.
• The young are revolting. France is seeing its largest student uprising in 20 years, from a generation without a future.
• The state is broke. France spends more on interest than on its children.
• The choice: a new AI aristocracy, or new colonies with their own currencies.schools and government even own military.

Who needs humans? Come and find out, before the machines decide.

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