I grew up hearing about the "population explosion." On the horizon loomed the fear that the number of human beings on the planet would reach an unsustainable level. There wouldn't be enough food for everyone, they said, and many would perish from hunger. It was a form of Malthusianism; but, in the 1980s and 1990s, few dared to question these projections. Rural exodus was creating megacities around the world. Here in Brazil, São Paulo was a good example. You only had to go out on the street to be convinced of the problem.
China, for example, created the state policy of "one child." In that country, by law, a couple could only have one child. The justification was the supposed unfeasibility of organic growth in a nation that already had 1 billion inhabitants. In the West, no similar official policy was adopted, but a similar phenomenon occurred through other means: the birth rate declined to levels below replacement [1].
How can we explain such phenomena? I don't dare to propose a definitive explanation. But, whatever it may be, cultural change is certainly among the causes. And this change is not limited to the number of children. It reveals a deeper transformation: the way a generation views its responsibility towards previous and future generations.
It is impossible here not to recall Burke (1729 – 1797), who observed: “Society is, in fact, a contract. […] It becomes a partnership not only between those who are alive, but between those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born” [2].
GK Chesterton (1874 – 1936), always provocative, amended: “Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation by all entering a monastery or throwing themselves into the sea, so too can a group of thinkers, to a certain extent, prevent future thought by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought” [3].
The great British polemicist went too far in suggesting a vow of celibacy or collective suicide. The cultural shift of the 20th century would produce a simpler, quieter, and more effective way for one generation to prevent the birth of the next: choosing not to have children.
Society is indeed a pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born. When this pact weakens, the crisis ceases to be merely demographic. It becomes economic, cultural, and civilizational. And it is precisely at this point that the demographic problem intersects with the urban problem.
The modern city has not only concentrated people. It has concentrated expectations, jobs, consumption, services, and lifestyles. The city has become the privileged address of the modern promise. But every promise depends on a foundation. If that foundation is shaken, the migratory flow can be reversed.
This is where the title of this article begins to appear.
Today, faced with a likely “demographic implosion” [4], the exact opposite of what was predicted, I reflect on yet another risk: Artificial Intelligence.
But hold on. I'm not talking about a war between humanity and so-called "intelligent" machines, in the style of... TerminatorNo. My concern is of a different nature. And, as I always look for parallels in history, this threat is not entirely new either, confirming King Solomon, who said: “there is nothing new under the sun” [5].
To understand why the current situation is different, it is helpful to look at previous technological revolutions.
It has been just over three centuries since the steam engine appeared, and with it, the fear that thousands of human beings would lose their jobs. The change, however, was gradual and extremely slow, which made adaptation possible. Many jobs were eliminated; many others were created.
Then came the revolution fueled by electricity. Another repetition: fear, adaptation, job elimination and creation. More recently, in the 20th century, the emergence of computers and the consequent automation of various processes revived the same pattern.
In these three examples, there are important similarities. Most of the jobs eliminated involved brute force, manual labor, or repetitive tasks. There was considerable time to absorb the transformations. And new jobs emerged. This last characteristic, however, produced a decisive side effect: the so-called "rural exodus." Because most of the "new" jobs had one address: the city.
According to the World Bank, in 2024, 82% of the population in "high-income countries" lived in cities. The world average was 58%. In other words, previous revolutions not only destroyed old occupations; they displaced entire populations to the environment where the new jobs were located. The city was the great beneficiary of these transformations.
But the new professions had an attribute. sui generisMost of these jobs were intellectual. They were tasks that even computers couldn't perform, or that would be too expensive to automate. The modern city, however, wasn't sustained solely by industry or commerce. It became the great center of specialized functions: administration, finance, education, technology, health, communication, culture, and services. In other words, it concentrated not only people, but skills. And many of these skills were intellectual, or at least depended on a form of work that computers could not yet replace.
Now, imagine a scenario in which a new technology could target precisely that domain. Not the arm, but judgment [6]. Not just repetitive tasks, but analysis, writing, planning, diagnosis, programming, assisted decision-making. Indeed. Artificial Intelligence is the embodiment of that scenario.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote a lengthy article warning of this imminent risk [7]. The difference this time is that the transition could be abrupt. And the jobs at risk are those that, until now, seemed exclusive to human beings.
The crucial question, therefore, is not simply whether Artificial Intelligence will eliminate jobs. The question is more serious: what if it eliminates precisely the jobs that economically justify the continued presence of millions, perhaps billions, of people in cities?
And here I pause.
For much of modern science fiction, especially that which shaped our visual imagination, the future was urban. Modern cities with flying vehicles, lights everywhere, screens all around, and a seemingly inexhaustible life. Intelligent machines, robots indistinguishable from human beings, and... cyborgs composing the landscape, as Nelson Rodrigues would say.
All of this, of course, is accompanied by the ills caused by overpopulation and the also fictional disruptions of future technology. Our best fiction writers imagined this future. Just as, in past decades, we imagined the collapse of humanity due to the population explosion.
Some fiction, it's true, has imagined futures that are less urban and closer to the land, of Duna a Always Coming HomeBut they were the exception. The dominant imagination of modernity projected the future as a city: vertical, luminous, artificial, and overpopulated.
What if that very idea is wrong?
If millions or billions of jobs are eliminated, suppressed, or radically devalued in a short period of time, life in cities could become unviable for a huge portion of the population. Without income, many will have neither shelter nor food. And this incalculable number of people could be pushed back to the countryside, not in search of better living conditions, as in the recent past, but simply to cultivate the land and raise animals for their own survival.
Paradoxically, the Artificial Intelligence revolution could usher in a new rural phase for a significant portion of humanity.
Urban man has distanced himself too much from Nature, or rather, from his Nature. Life in megacities has reduced him to a cog in the complex social “machine.” The supposed comfort provided by metropolises has numbed his soul more than opium. Perhaps the return to the countryside [8] is not just an economic defeat, but the involuntary recovery of long-forgotten human dimensions.
This is not about romanticizing the hoe. Nor is it about fantasizing about a technological Arcadia. It is simply about recognizing a historical irony: the same modernity that uprooted man from the land can, through its most sophisticated invention, push him back to it.
Will the future be even more surprising than the one our best fictions imagined?
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[1] According to demographers, this rate would be 2,1.
[2] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.
[3] GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter III, “The Suicide of Thought”. I will return to this analogy later, but from the perspective of intellectual suicide.
[4] Secondly, once again, demographers say the rates observed in most Western countries are irreversible. And even China is concerned about the “success” of its “one-child” policy.
[5] Ecclesiastes 1:9.
[6] Forgive me the rhetorical anthropomorphism.
[7] https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
[8] This is not Arcadianism.
Cover photo:
