This post made the rounds at USV this week and got us thinking about declining fertility rates around the world. While I am sharing that link with all of you, I don't agree with the author's conclusion about the inevitability of extinction. I think humanity is an extremely complex system with many self-correcting mechanisms in it.

But the charts in the header of this blog post are worth paying attention to.

I was emailing with a friend about this earlier this week, and he said that three charts he is staring at right now are 1/ global installation of solar, 2/ declining fertility rates, 3/ massive adoption of AI.

My friend is a very astute observer of history, technology, and the interaction between the two. I pay attention to what he pays attention to.

If the population of the world is going to be declining, not growing, and if we are adopting cheap, and getting cheaper, energy at a very rapid pace, and if we have technology to make everyone massively more productive, what kind of world does that look like?

It is a world very different from the one we are living in now. Pressing issues like the unaffordability of housing, for example, can change quickly if we are living in a shrinking world, not a growing world. And the need for robots that can do the work of humans will be a good thing, not a bad thing.

Of course, that doesn't mean we should ignore and stop working on the affordability of housing. But it does mean that at some point, those won't be our most pressing problems and humans do have a habit of fighting the last war, not the next one.

Being a venture capitalist gives us the privilege of focusing on future challenges more than most. And that is why I am going to incorporate the idea of declining population into my thinking more than I have been doing.

My mom, who is 95, asked me at the Thanksgiving dinner table if I could help her use AI on her computer. I was more than happy to oblige.

So on Sunday, during my regular weekly visit, we put Gemini onto her laptop via browser bookmarks and the Gemini app onto the home screen of her iPhone. I considered ChatGPT, but figured since she already uses Gmail and Google Search, she might have a head start with Gemini.

We spent about an hour prompting Gemini to do all sorts of things. She was excited about its knowledge of history, including her family history, its knowledge of travel and places around the world, and its knowledge of medicine and health care. We used it to draw some pictures, explain some science, and give us some advice.

By the time I left, she was already familiar with and excited to use Gemini and I expect she will. A lot.

My mom is very fortunate that at 95 she still has all of her wits about her and I am thrilled that she has the technology at her fingertips to learn, explore, and expand her mind.

I feel a little badly that I didn't suggest this to her a few years ago and she had to drag it out of me. So if you have elderly parents and haven't turned them onto AI, I would encourage you to do that. I think it's gonna be great for them.