Falling birth rates around the world are destroying the basic idea that humans are at the center of how states and economies run. Meanwhile, they create both the need and the opening for cybernetic systems to step in and take over.

It used to be that when there weren’t enough workers or people aged out of the workforce, growth just slowed down. You’d get tighter budgets, maybe more immigration debates, but that was it.

Now those same demographic problems are treated as justification for replacing human labor and decision-making with machines and algorithms across nearly every system that once relied on people. Demography has become infrastructure policy. The fewer children born today, the more governments and corporations invest in nonhuman continuity mechanisms to replace the human layer in governance loops.

In the twentieth century, population growth helped secure the state’s legitimacy because it justified investment in schools, hospitals, bridges, mass transit, and other programs for the people. In the twenty-first, falling birth rates will become a legitimacy crisis for the state. Low birth rates transform the idea of what a state is for, because states have traditionally justified their existence by representing and managing large populations. As populations shrink, governments have to redefine their purpose. We’re starting to see that now as governments reformat themselves away from representing citizens and toward simply maintaining continuous operation, like always-on systems.

In other words, in the near future, the state’s authority will stop depending on large groups of people voting and working, and start depending on whether the system can keep running with fewer people and minimal human upkeep.

But think about what that means. When Nevada got hacked, gun sales, social services, and the DMV crashed for weeks. Nevada can’t even keep its DMV online, but Meta will have redundant exabyte vaults running in the desert. Meta plans to spend six hundred billion dollars on U.S. infrastructure within three years. And we’re not talking about bridges and schools. We’re talking about six hundred billion and nothing human. The sheer absurdity of the number exceeds the GDP of most countries. It’s bigger than two decades of Nevada’s total annual state spending.

You see where this is going. State outages are already starting to look like jokes next to private uptime guarantees. And when states can no longer guarantee their own continuity, cities become tenants of predatory platforms, outsourcing more and more functions to private infrastructure stacks to do what municipal charters used to do. When that happens, you get a slow handover of public utilities to subscription-based services, where people have no choice but to start paying for what used to be free, if they can afford to.

In some places, like Singapore, this evolution has taken the form of a continuity state, where governance looks more like a real-time operations dashboard than politics. In others, like Vijayawada, it mutates into platform municipalism, where vendor APIs replace the social contract.

The endpoint is an economy where legitimacy is about stability. But the system no longer ties its stability to human reproduction or wage labor. Some swear we’ll get a universal basic income where automation pays for itself by sending out monthly checks. But UBI is redistribution. It means we still matter, so the state gives us money to keep us working and alive. It’s meant to support humans.

What’s taking shape is closer to a machine-dividend model, where automated systems generate rents and tolls that flow into state accounts or public funds, paying out to citizens who are no longer needed as workers. The difference is that we don’t matter anymore, so the system gives us money to keep itself running. A person’s political relevance comes from their status as a stakeholder in automated surplus, not as a voter in a democracy or a worker in the workforce.

So the next time you read an article about how the global fertility crash isn’t all bad, remember that declining birth rates don’t just accelerate cybernetic integration, they chip away at the last reasons for keeping governance human-first. The old social contract relied on a self-replenishing population that kept the machine of the state moving. But a new machine is learning to run without us, and the fewer of us there are, the faster it learns.