> And what do you reckon is the reason for that?
Declining birth-rates seem to happen to every society that passes a certain level of industrialization, with the most well-off and secure in these societies having the fewest kids, and birth rates as a whole declining as more people enter this "totally well-off and secure" demographic. In fact, people in these same late-industrialization cultures who aren't well-off, whose futures remain uncertain, do not experience any decline in aggregate birth-rate at all. Nor do people in societies where nobody is well-off — these in fact tending to be the societies with the highest birth-rates!
The trend in my own observations, from personal experience with both family-wanting "trad" people, and "child-free" people, is that as the self-perceived value and security of your own life goes up, two things seem to shift in your perspective:
1. your subjective resource-commitment bar for bringing a new life into the world grows ever higher proportionally to your available resources (i.e. a millionaire has the intuition that they'll have to allocate a good portion of their millions to any kids they have; a billionaire thinks the same, but now it's a good portion of their billions.) Having kids is always intuitively expensive — but as your own life becomes better and more secure, having kids begins to feel exceedingly, inhibitingly expensive. (Even though it's likely eminently practical for people with 1/1000th your resources, let alone for you!)
2. specifically for women, the act of gestating and raising of a baby grows ever-larger in its subjective potential for negative impact on their (increasingly-highly-valued and de-risked) lives — in terms of both time-cost and risk to their health, career, etc.
Given these trends, here's my hypothesis for what's happening:
We have seemingly evolved to feel driven to reproduce when under a sort of optimum level of scarcity and uncertainty. We feel this drive the most when:
• things are bad enough that you feel your own opportunities for a good life are done and spent — so having kids is your genes' Hail Mary to trying again in 15 years when opportunities could be better; with this lack of further opportunity making the risk to your health and resources of having a kid feel "worth it";
• but things still aren't so bad at the moment, that any kids you conceive would literally starve and not make it to reproductive age themselves.
This heuristic worked just fine for the entirety of human evolution (and perhaps long before that); but it seems to "go wrong" in post-industrial society, for people experiencing no present scarcity or uncertainty. The heuristic wasn't designed to cope with this! It outputs nonsense — things like:
• "you never need to have kids, you'll be immortal, always healthy, and will always have infinite opportunities"
• "the right time to have kids is after you retire, when you'll have time, and also money accumulated to raise them. But of course, only if you can get someone else to carry the baby for you, since you won't have working gonads by then. And only if you can afford a team of nannies and private tutors, since you won't be able to handle the rambunctiousness of a toddler by then."
...both of which, as intuitions, tend to result in people just never having kids — despite often eventually regretting not having had kids. Because, by the time these intuitions shift or resolve positively, it's too late.
This broken intuition about when (or if) you should ever have kids, seems to lead to people also developing very different perspectives on sexual relationships. These "child-free" people — especially women — often seem to experience much lower sexual drive, or even fear of sex for its potential to force an (unwanted) child upon them. And this negative attitude toward sex, secondary to fear of reproduction, often then leads to either strained romantic relationships, or just not bothering with romantic relationships at all.
If you wanted to medicalize all this, you might call it a specific kind of neurosis that humans develop, when they no longer need to do anything much to ensure all their needs are satisfied. It's a compulsion toward catastrophizing all the negative aspects of reproduction, child-rearing, sex, and romantic relationships; and a disconnection from the emotional valence-weight that the positives of these same subjects would normally have.
(And I suspect that this is exactly the framing various societies will eventually take toward this developing "problem" — as I can totally imagine drug companies developing and marketing treatments for "reproductive neurosis", that trick just the part of your brain that cares about that sort of stuff, into thinking you're not well-off and not secure, so that it'll spit out the signals to tell you to feel more positively toward these subjects.)
> Do you really think we'll get some utopian fantasy like UBI?
Yes. Why wouldn't we? As soon as nobody has to labor, UBI is just one global (probably bloody) proletarian revolution away.
There has always been a "so who does the work nobody wants to do, then" blank spot at the end of the Marxist plan, that left all previous Communist revolutions floundering after the "revolution" part.
But "intelligent robots grow all the food autonomously, cook it, and give it out for free, while also maintaining themselves and the whole pipeline that creates their parts, to the profit of no one but the benefit of all — the mechanistic equivalent of Sikh Langar, accomplished at megaproject scale in every country" (and analogous utopias re: clean water, housing, etc) form a set of neat snap-in answers to that blank spot. I have always presumed that these are what AI advocates are vaguely attempting to gesture toward when they imagine AI "taking over all of the work."