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"The future belongs to those who show up with robots." —Mark Steyn, possibly
“Demography is destiny” is one of those aphorisms so old that there are entire columns devoted to figuring out who might have actually said it first. Talk about confusion. John Weeks — a Distinguished Professor at San Diego State University — a dozen years ago looked into whether it was first said by 19th century French sociologist Auguste Comte, but eventually settled on Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg in their 1970 study, The Real Majority.
I learned that demography is destiny from reading Mark Steyn on the internet 20-plus years ago, but the times, they are a-changin', as some other writer lost to the shroud of history is supposed to have said.
Either that or it was Bob Dylan.
My apologies for the inappropriately lighthearted intro, but we have some heavy stuff to get into — which I swear I'll keep as brief as humanly possible — before we get to the fun stuff that is the non-beating heart of this week's essay.
My week started off pretty much ruined when I stumbled across one of those reports telling me yet again that this country is still speeding toward the fiscal cliff, with Congress stomping on the accelerator instead of pulling on the pursestrings.
"More than half of the federal budget will go toward benefits for Americans 65 years and older by 2036, and that percentage is set to only grow," The Center Square reported over the weekend. "The Joint Economic Committee’s 2026 report shows that non-interest federal spending on Social Security and Medicare payouts will climb from 45% to 52% over the next decade," which the JEC also concluded "does not represent a peak, but rather a step in a continued upward trajectory."
“Given long-term demographic forecasts, this increase does not represent a peak, but rather a step in a continued upward trajectory,” the report noted. The main culprit, as I've written so many times before, is Medicare spending, although Social Security plays a smaller part, too.
Rather than rehash the inefficiencies, susceptibility to fraud, or boneheaded incentives of either program — you must be more tired of reading them than I am of writing them — let's do something even worse!
I kid, but not by much.
Let us instead stipulate — admit, acquiesce to, whatever — that Congress will continue to consist of fools, knaves, and criminals who will do nothing to fix either program until it is too late. If that.
That still leaves us with an even more pressing problem, if you can believe such a thing: Where are the future taxpayers whose burden it is to pay for tomorrow's benefits? The sad fact is that for the most part, they're otherwise engaged in the serious business of not being born.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned earlier this month that the nation’s birth rate has reached an “existential crisis” posing a “threat” to both the economy and to our national security. At a White House event on maternal health, Kennedy blamed what he called a “toxic soup that our young women are walking around in," and also reminded listeners that "In 1970, men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today."
But it's less about the blame — sperm counts started their mysterious decrease long before smartphones and social media — than it is about the stark numbers that aren't quickly or easily corrected. If they can be corrected at all.
In 1960 — when Social Security had been around long enough to get an idea of how it was working in the medium term — there were just over five working-age taxpayers per retired recipient. By the mid-'80s, when President Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan initiated limited reforms, that ratio had dropped to 3.3 workers per recipient. Today it's just under 3-to-1, and by 2050, there will be just two workers supporting each retiree.
The numbers are even worse when it comes to Medicare.
Either retirement benefits have to get the axe or taxes have to go way up — and unlike young people, old people get out and vote. Which means that those who were born might regret it.
“Because younger workers generally earn less and rely more heavily on wage income, a larger share of their total tax burden directly funds senior-oriented initiatives,” the JEC report noted, and that "over 80 percent of the taxes paid by the bottom 40 percent of households function mostly as direct transfers to seniors.”
There might be some cold comfort to be found in knowing that the demographic situation is far worse in rival nations like China and Russia, but not much. That's because the biggest part of the affordability crisis for America's young people is America's old people — and I'm the middle-age-and-not-getting-any-younger father of two of those fine American young people.
For me, and millions just like me, it isn't about the scary numbers... it's about my sons.
So between those thoughts and some depressingly un-springlike cold weather, you can understand the funk I've been in all week. That is, until I saw a humanoid Chinese robot picking tea leaves in Hangzhou.
You're allowed to do a double-take after that one, but then watch this: "At the 8th China International Tea Expo in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, a humanoid robot stepped into a nearby tea garden, learning to pick West Lake Longjing leaves with surprising precision."
"The American south will absolutely wreck global tea production," Lyman Stone predicted. "The labor cost bottleneck has been prohibitive for American tea, and using a cutter to harvest is a big quality loss," he continued, but a skilled "leaf-plucker robot would allow capital-deep American farmers to get in the game on a crop which is extremely well-suited to the climate of the southeast."
This isn't really about all the tea in China — or even Georgia — but about AI's long-promised productivity gains.
The kind that might turn two workers per Social Security recipient into three. Or 20.
Forget how slowly the android moves because it's merely a prototype, or whether a humanoid robot is actually the most proficient form for an AI-enhanced automated leaf-plucker. What's remarkable is that China's AgiBot, the android's manufacturer, seems to have gone some way toward solving one of the toughest problems in humanoid robotics: the hand.
"There are really only three hard things for humanoid robots," Elon Musk said on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast earlier this year. "The real-world intelligence, the hand, and scale manufacturing... From an electromechanical standpoint, the hand is more difficult than everything else combined. Human hands turn out to be quite something."
Tesla's Optimus android isn't there yet, but advances over the past three years are something to see.
Tesla is building a completely new production line for a product the world has never seen
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) May 5, 2026
Optimus Gen 3 is going to be absolute insanity
I don't think people realize how crazy this transition is going to be pic.twitter.com/hggaudMkNW
I don't know what AgiBot's plans are — or even whether that tea-picking video was nothing more than state-sanctioned propaganda — but Optimus is supposed to be a self-learning, AI-driven multipurpose android that owners plug in at night and set loose to do whatever during the day. That's supposed to include everything from manufacturing to folding shirts.
Why an android, when we already have factories filled with robots that look nothing like human beings? Because the human form is incredibly adaptable to most any kind of work — and if you doubt me, just look at the country human beings have built. Androids get better every year while people remain what we've always been.
But there's also the cost, and androids that cost the same or more to operate than a human being does don't make much sense. I asked Grok — one of my paid automated research assistants — to estimate how much it costs to "operate" a human being in the U.S. for a year, and here's what it came up with:
Rough National Total for Modest Basics: ~$30,000–$40,000/year ($2,500–$3,300/month) for a single adult in a typical area. Bare-minimum frugal living can dip toward $25k in low-cost regions; high-cost cities easily exceed $50k.
"Assume Tesla gets the consumer cost of Optimus down to $30,000, as Musk says is his goal," I next asked Grok, "and that each android has a lifespan of five-to-10 years, with probably three years between battery replacements. Estimate the annual cost of operating Optimus."
Estimated annual operating cost for a Tesla Optimus at $30,000 consumer price: ~$4,000–$8,000 per year (midpoint around $5,500–$6,500). This is dramatically lower than the ~$30k–$40k+ "operating" cost for a human we discussed earlier, which is the key economic insight.
Grok estimates the hourly operating cost for Optimus at no more than $4 an hour. Compare that to the minimum wage in most blue states, which averages approximately infinity.
Part of getting the cost down might be moving the "compute" off the android, which is where Tesla might hold an advantage over American firms like Boston Dynamics and the entire nation of China.
And Another Thing: I won't get into downsides like the virtual elimination of starter jobs, which are best left to a future Thursday Essay. Maybe I'll have a robot write that one for me.
We've talked before about SpaceX's plan for orbital data centers to power xAI, the company's artificial intelligence division, but never really looked at how they might change things here on the ground.
The most obvious advantages to orbital clusters include:
- Free and uninterruptible power from the sun.
- No water issues.
- No real estate costs.
- Lower regulatory and environmental hurdles.
- And no expensive and time-wasting NIMBY nonsense.
There are plenty of technological challenges, particularly in shielding and heat dissipation, but one study estimates that orbital compute costs could be as little as $5 million per megawatt of compute vs. $12–15 million for terrestrial.
Of course, it helps if you have the world's lowest-cost launch company working on an all-new launch system that's radically even less expensive — and, what do you know, Musk seems to have thought of that.
If getting the price of multipurpose androids down to $30,000 does end up requiring moving the most difficult compute to the cloud(s), that would change the math a bit. As opposed to an android with full AI autonomy, an android even just partially tethered to external compute would presumably come with a subscription fee.
Jokes and salary requirements aside, someday you could hire somewhere between four and 10 androids for the same basic cost as one human being. Don't think of this in terms of job losses. Instead, think of it as weaponizing productivity.
And Another Thing: It must be 25 years since I first joked that if you want to see the future of Japan, imagine a nursing home with 80 million people in it, tended to by android nurses, and guarded by giant anime-looking combat droids. Less of a joke now than a prophecy.
I've written before about the Pentagon's "loyal wingman" program — now called Collaborative Combat Aircraft — that leverages advances in AI to turn one fighter pilot into an entire strike package. CCAs are unmanned, lower-cost stealth jets that will fly in formation with a F-22, F-35, or F-47 pilot. They can act as radar scouts, antiaircraft missile carriers, light bombers, or even sacrifice themselves to enemy missiles to protect the pilot in his jet. And all the pilot has to do is assign his CCAs their missions, or change them up as needed, and let the AI pilots do the rest.
Imagine a small business where one carbon-based "employer" runs what is effectively a six-person (or more) micro-factory, fulfilling 50–100+ orders per week instead of five–10. This crushes competition on price and speed for niche markets while the owner captures most of the margin. Etsy, eat your heart out.
And Another Thing: I showed my wife one of those Optimus videos last year and she immediately asked, "How much?" I said, "Elon says $20,000, maybe $30,000." Without looking up from the screen, she said, "We'll sell one of the cars."
Or how about a doctor who supervises a handful of android medical assistants, stepping in only when his expertise — or a human face with human understanding — is required? One doctor becomes five, and we'd need a lot more Somalis to rob us of that productivity gain.
Me, I just imagine never having to do laundry again — and I don't even mind doing my laundry.
But that's in the future. Let's look at how AI has weaponized productivity in the Los Angeles mayor's race, where Spencer Pratt has an unpaid army of volunteers rewriting the rules of political advertising. I doubt there's a PJ Media reader who hasn't seen one or two of those absurdly great in-your-face Pratt for Mayor videos, but what you might not know is that many of them aren't even produced by the campaign.
Here's one, made gratis by L.A.-based filmmaker Charlie Curran.
LA is worth saving. Vote Spencer Pratt. pic.twitter.com/GpQpnfsuJe
— Charles Curran (@charliebcurran) May 5, 2026
If Pratt wins, it will be in no small part because AI allowed citizens like Curran to create and share for free what high-priced ad agencies used to charge a fortune to produce, and another to broadcast.
Weaponized productivity, indeed.
I wish I had an answer to the demographic crisis, because despite my reputation, I actually like people and want there to be plenty of us inhabiting this gorgeous globe of ours. But as I wrote in a previous Thursday Essay, "From Hungary to South Korea, every First World government that’s tried to reverse the birth dearth has failed. And they've tried pretty much everything."
Until people get back to the happy business of making and raising babies, I guess the future belongs to those with the best and smartest robots. Particularly in rapidly-aging countries like China and the U.S.
No matter what happens to Social Security and Medicare, my wife and I do all we can to make sure we can take care of ourselves in retirement. Well, we've done all we can for now — there's still that deposit on an Optimus or two to tend to our needs, and free up our sons to pursue their own android-enhanced endeavors.
Last Thursday: Which Way Russia? Nixon Knew.
