Expert Sounds Alarm: AI Could Shrink Humanity to UK-Size Population by 2300

While most people worry about AI taking their jobs, one professor thinks the robots might accidentally wipe out nearly all of humanity—not through some Terminator scenario, but by making us too depressed to have kids.

Professor Subhash Kak from Oklahoma State University dropped this cheerful prediction: Earth’s population could shrink from 8 billion to just 100 million by 2300. That’s roughly the size of the UK. No nuclear war needed. No killer robots. Just good old-fashioned existential dread.

The mechanism is almost boring in its simplicity. AI takes jobs. People freak out about their futures. Nobody wants to bring kids into a world where robots do everything better. Birth rates plummet. Population crashes. Game over.

Kak, who wrote “The Age of Artificial Intelligence,” isn’t talking about some far-fetched sci-fi plot. He’s pointing to demographers who see the writing on the wall. The collapse won’t come from violence but from “economic and social stagnation.”

Translation: We’ll literally bore ourselves out of existence.

Cities could become ghostlands. Major metropolitan areas like New York and London might turn into abandoned shells by 2300. Not because of zombies, but because there’s no point living there when jobs don’t exist. Rural areas might turn into “apocalyptic wastelands”—his words, not mine. The few humans left would probably cluster in whatever regions still function.

The psychological fallout reads like a therapist’s nightmare. Mass unemployment leads to mass depression. Traditional work-based identities vanish. People lose their sense of purpose. Mental health services get overwhelmed. Society basically has a collective nervous breakdown.

What’s wild is how mundane this apocalypse sounds. No explosions. No drama. Just millions of people deciding not to have kids because the future looks pointless. Advanced economies already see declining birth rates. AI could supercharge that trend.

Some tech leaders echo these concerns, though not everyone buys the doomsday math. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts half of entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear within five years. But Kak insists we need “broader public discourse” about AI’s unintended consequences.

Given that 300 million jobs could be automated by AI by 2030, Kak’s concerns about mass unemployment driving population decline may not be so far-fetched.

Because apparently, accidentally erasing 99% of humanity qualifies as an oopsie worth discussing.

The scariest part? This prediction assumes we handle AI semi-responsibly. Imagine if we screw it up.