Economist Igor Lipsits, in his new book "Does Humanity Have a Future, or the Apocalypse of the D.R.AI. Era" and in a conversation with journalist Kirill Martynov on a YouTube channel, outlined a scenario where civilization faces the simultaneous convergence of a demographic crisis and a technological transformation. According to his assessment, humanity could disappear within 200 years — not as a result of a single catastrophe, but through the gradual narrowing of population reproduction and the displacement of humans from the economic system. The central thesis of the work, which Lipsits formulates directly: "For the first time, we are getting a new economy in which humans may turn out to be largely unnecessary to the economy."
Demographic Decline as a Systemic Risk
One of the key lines of Lipsits' argument is the steady decline in birth rates in prosperous societies. The economist points out that countries with high living standards and developed social infrastructure paradoxically stop having children: career ambitions, the cost of upbringing, urbanization, and changing value orientations lead to the fact that natural population reproduction falls below the level necessary to maintain numbers. The population is aging, the share of the able-bodied is shrinking, and state pension and healthcare systems are coming under increasing pressure. Lipsits views this not as a temporary fluctuation, but as a structural shift that, without external intervention, will deepen for decades.
AI and Robots: Displacement from the Labor Market
The second vector of transformation that Lipsits overlays on the demographic trend is the massive introduction of artificial intelligence and robotics into production and service sectors. According to his assessment, AI displaces people from the labor market not point-by-point, but systemically: from routine operations to intellectual tasks. As a result, entire countries risk finding themselves in a situation where workers become critically few, while simultaneously the purchasing power of the population narrows. A paradox arises: if robots produce goods and no one is left to buy them, the classical model of the economic cycle — production, distribution, consumption — loses its meaning. Lipsits emphasizes that this is not a question of "man versus machine," but a question of how to rebuild the entire architecture of prosperity if labor ceases to be a universal source of income.
Work as a Privilege and the Question of Reproduction
In his conversation with Martynov, Lipsits enters a plane that most public discussions about AI avoid: can work become the privilege of the few, while the majority of the population ends up outside economic activity? In such a scenario, he says, society will be forced to reconsider the very logic of the social contract — from the right to work to the right to exist outside the market. An even more radical question posed by the economist concerns the reproduction of the species itself: if natural birth rates fall to critical values, will humanity have to transition from giving birth to children to their artificial production? Lipsits does not give a definitive answer, but notes that this scenario is ceasing to be fiction and is becoming a subject of applied discussion in demographic and bioethical literature.
Why AI Might Accelerate Rather Than Prevent Catastrophe
The narrative accepted in public discourse assumes that artificial intelligence will become a tool of salvation: it will solve the problems of energy, medicine, logistics, and allow humanity to overcome resource constraints. Lipsits, on the contrary, views AI as a factor capable of accelerating catastrophe rather than mitigating it. If technological progress outpaces the adaptation of social institutions, demographic structures, and legal systems, a gap emerges in which society loses, and a narrow circle of those controlling computing resources and algorithmic infrastructure wins. In this context, the "apocalypse of the D.R.AI. era" — after the abbreviation Lipsits uses in the book's title — is neither nuclear war nor plague, but the slow yet irreversible fading of human civilization from within, through the loss of the human economic role and the cessation of natural reproduction.
Context and Significance of the Publication
Lipsits' book and the accompanying interview coincide with a moment when the discussion about AI in Russia and beyond has shifted from the question "Will a machine be able to replace a human?" to the question "What to do if it is already replacing one?" The publication in "Novaya Gazeta" and the YouTube video format allow the author to convey his arguments to a wide audience extending beyond the academic and economic community. Lipsits does not call for halting technological progress; his task is to show that without the parallel restructuring of demographic policy, the distribution system, and the legal foundations of economic participation, technological progress may turn out to be not salvation, but a catalyst for systemic failure. Under conditions where by 2026 large generative AI models are already integrated into industry, finance, and public administration, these questions cease to be a matter of futurological speculation and become part of the agenda for the coming decade.
