31 January 2024 | The 6th edition of The Apolitical View by Apolitical CEO and Co-Founder Robyn Scott. Subcribe to the newsletter

In this week's edition:

  • Artificial wombs
  • A blow for multilateralism in Africa
  • How could one public toilet cost $1.7 million?

Technology offers important solutions for the pressures of declining fertility and ageing societies. Some of these advances can also quickly get dystopian.

This month, a new World Economic Forum report on longevity made a radical recommendation: “In OECD countries, in order to maintain the current balance between working-age and non-working-age populations, by 2050, retirement ages would need to increase by an estimated 8.4 years.”

Reading about ageing populations and declining fertility made me think again about a technology that has been preoccupying me for months: artificial wombs. Scientists have already successfully grown a lamb in an artificial womb, and humans could be next. According to a connected friend in Silicon Valley following the technology closely, five years is the earliest we could see a human grown in an artificial womb. But it’s a when, not an if, question.

There is rightly much excitement about the potential for these advances to improve outcomes for premature babies. It could also be powerful for those who struggle to carry children. As someone who had terrible, bedridden pregnancies, this is good news. But it’s not hard to imagine how things could get dark: it just takes one cornered state, desperate to address a demographic time bomb, to start growing new citizens en masse. As embryo screening and selection would necessarily be part of the process, a dose of intelligence and other fitness selection becomes highly tempting. An arms race could quickly follow.

This is another example of why we need innovation in multilateral governance to ensure conversations about such tricky technologies happen before they arrive.

Not all innovations to address the silver tsunami are this alarming, with many producing good news.

Japan, the epitome of the challenge of ageing societies, is at the forefront of finding solutions. The problem is so acute, there have long been reports that Japan’s sales of adult diapers threaten to outstrip those of babies'. Japan’s strategy has included pumping money into research and technology — and especially AI — that can help deliver better outcomes for ageing citizens, ranging from genomic medicine to long-term care. Even before the arrival of generative AI’s superpowers, 28% of AI-related patent applications globally came from Japan, the highest figure in the world, between 2010 and 2015 — many related to solutions for ageing, from the medical to the social. Totemic solutions for loneliness and dementia include Paro, a charming and cuddly AI-powered baby seal.

PARO AI baby seal

Governments are re-thinking lifelong learning. Always important, lifelong learning is about to become existential for economies, and governments are starting to grapple with what this means. Should societies give all citizens two years off in mid-life to return to school to learn and re-skill? Should a certain number of annual training hours become compulsory for all adults? Governments are already exploring this. In 2020, every single Singaporean citizen was given a one-off credit of $500 to encourage them to reskill and upskill for the future economy. A 2023 skills survey in South Korea found 51% of employees reported improved performance in their current job roles due to training initiatives, and 58% said upskilling had helped them explore new roles. Whatever the precise form this takes, AI-powered personalised learning is going to play an important role. It’s also possible that policy solutions for lifelong learning, where there are fewer legacy systems, might translate into new best practices that can be adopted by the often innovation-resistant school system.

Of course, some of the best policies will have nothing to do with technology: I’m no tech utopian. We clearly need more affordable access to childcare (like any parent, I can rant about the dearth of this, ad infinitum!) and health systems that help people get fitter and maintain a healthy weight, leading to extended “healthspans” — as well as longer lifespans. But we only have to look to the 2023 French riots protesting an increase in retirement age, the massive uptake of Ozempic for weight loss, and the fact that birth rates are falling even in Scandinavian countries with their excellent childcare for a reminder that the challenge of behaviour change will push us, again and again, to the promise of tech solutions.

In unrelated and under-covered news, Africa dealt the latest blow to multilateralism when military-led nations Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso quit the important regional West African body ECOWAS. This didn’t make much news outside of Africa (like too much African news), but it rhymes with the growing negative sentiment globally when it comes to multilateralism.

Robyn Scott

Apolitical CEO & Co-Founder

My recommendations

And finally...

If you haven’t been following the saga of San Francisco’s $1.7 million (still not built) public toilet, it is a mind-boggling tale about how government regulation run amok can defy logic. Innumerable committee reviews, approvals that take years (it takes 605 days on average to get building permits in San Francisco), and exorbitant labour costs have turned the price tag attached to #toiletgate into a Californian scandal.

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