It is said that demography is destiny since the future of populations is closely correlated to what happens today, and in Japan what's currently taking place in this respect is more than concerning, it is truly suicidal.
The clash between the post-war corporate culture and society has reached a breaking point where the younger generations are being served a very bad deck of cards and consequently they have stopped playing and having babies.
This is especially true for women who simply cannot juggle a career and family life at the same time and are therefore obliged to jettison the former just to survive economically. The clash between what our society wants, equality and education for women and what women want, men who earn enough to progress socially, means that practically, 70% of men in Japan do not qualify anymore to build a family due to low income and poor long term job prospects.
Japan has tried to throw money at the problem but to no avail. What is economically not viable cannot be generated artificially and the birth rate consequently keeps falling. The rest of Asia, especially Korea and China started later but are caching up fast with other developed countries close behind.
The most terrible fact is that there is no simple solution to this conundrum. Society, work habits and corporate culture must change but these changes in ordinary times take decades or more unless a major economic shock obliges a complete overhaul of everything. This is what we're heading strait into. The current paradigm cannot last much longer.
The illusion that robots will replace people is just that; an illusion. Without younger people, a society completely lose its dynamism and wither into nothingness. This is not a prediction but what's actually happening in Japan in the countryside where villages of shrinking before reverting to nature. Because Japan has built a very stable, homogeneous society, this process is taking place without much social unrest and is managed smoothly by a competent administration which gift like all administrations worldwide is to keep things as they are and change as little as possible. But eventually what cannot last won't.
This may look like a secondary roadblock towards our AI-managed, robot-everywhere, bright future but such relentless trends are in the end what shape the future. A top heavy society is not a stable structure. It becomes conservative, unable to adapt and dream its own future which looks more and more like an extension of the past until suddenly shit happens. We are getting dangerously close to such an event.
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