Can AI help humanity cope with the fertility crisis?

Tyler Cowen’s answer is a resounding yes… but not for the reasons you expect

Can AI help reverse the dramatic population decline worldwide? For now, the answer is no. But according to Tyler Cowen, AI may be able to make life better for the few humans that will remain.

Let me explain. Most reflections on AI and the fertility crisis begin with fear: more isolation, fewer marriages, weaker communities, and an even deeper retreat from family life. Tyler Cowen suggests that the story may not be entirely bleak. In an AI-saturated world, the distinctly human may become more valuable: presence, warmth, beauty, charm, touch, and the mysterious reality of embodied encounter. However eccentric some of his examples may be, the deeper point is worth taking seriously.

From a Catholic perspective, this may be one of the lesser-known good possibilities of the AI age. Family is not founded on information, convenience, or efficiency. It is founded on persons. Marriage does not begin because two people found each other useful, but because they found one another lovable. Family life is born from attraction, fidelity, sacrifice, tenderness, and openness to new life.

So, for Cowen, if AI increasingly handles the merely functional dimensions of life, it may force us to see more clearly that the deepest human goods were never located there in the first place.

Of course, this future carries dangers too. A culture more focused on appearance, charisma, and social presence could also become more vain, more performative, and more superficial. Catholics should say that plainly. The human person is not a brand, and courtship cannot be reduced to aesthetic competition without losing its meaning. But even with those warnings, AI may still reveal something important by contrast: that human beings are not made for artificial companionship, but for real love, real marriage, real children, and real homes.

AI will not solve the fertility crisis. Only a recovery of hope, love, and family life can do that. And Catholics should not “throw the towel” in pursuing the rebirth of fatherhood, family and children. But if the rise of artificial companionship helps make the beauty and irreplaceability of the family more visible, then even this disruptive technology may serve a truth greater than its makers intended.

In the end, the future does not belong to the artificial. It belongs to husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, children and homes—to the ordinary sanctuary where human life is welcomed, loved, and taught what no machine can ever give.