Two sweeping visions of the future have been unfolding, each producing grim — yet seemingly contradictory — predictions for the fate of humanity.

On the one hand, we’re learning that the birth rate is falling all over the world, leading to aging societies and a global population set to decline this century. If trends continue on their present path, demographers warn, there won’t be enough people to work to support society. The extreme labor shortages would lead to stagnation, poverty, and ultimately — in the most dire scenarios — the collapse of civilization itself.

On the other hand, there are repeated warnings that artificial intelligence could take most, or even all, jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently predicted that AI would eliminate 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. Though other AI leaders are more skeptical about such sweeping automation, the International Monetary Fund did find that between 2010 and 2021, the US regions that adopted AI most quickly saw larger drops in employment rates, with men and workers in manufacturing and service jobs hit hardest.

What happens if we’re short on both workers and jobs? Can both be true at once? And if they cancel each other out, does that mean we don’t need to worry?

Many researchers studying these topics simply do not engage with one another — whether because of disciplinary silos that reward specialization, or timeline mismatches that make collaboration feel irrelevant. Demographers think in decades while technologists think in years, business leaders navigate quarterly earnings, and economists toggle between immediate policy concerns and long-term growth models.

The reality is also that researchers are operating under extraordinary uncertainty. We don’t know yet whether AI will complement workers or replace them, whether displaced workers will retrain successfully as in past transitions, or how aging populations will drive policy responses. This makes it easier to focus on more narrow predictions than to attempt forecasts that span multiple unknowns.

But these conversations are closely intertwined, and, even under uncertainty, there are clues to what we can and can’t know.

Population growth vs. economic growth

About five years ago, Joseph Davis, Vanguard’s chief global economist, started fielding questions from investors that he didn’t quite know how to answer. With the economy changing in unfamiliar ways — from an aging workforce to booming tech stocks — how should they think about where to put their money? Should they be bracing for long-term inflation? Should they just follow the momentum and buy into tech giants like Amazon and Nvidia?

Davis, responsible for guiding........

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