Commentary

Part I discussed tech opportunities in areas like 5-G, cloud computing, healthcare, and finance, especially in insurance. This article examines opportunities for tech in meeting two huge issues facing the world’s economies. One is the growing number of older retirees in populations, and the other is the ever-present anxiety over climate change. Whether all the answers to these problems lie in technological solutions remains an open question—probably not. But tech certainly will have a huge role to play.

The growing average age of the population is indisputable and will present difficult economic challenges. Because birth rates in the United States and most of the rest of the developed world have remained low for such a long time, this country and others have a dearth of young workers to replace the retiring baby-boom generation. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the proportion of the population of retirement age has expanded from 9.4 percent in 1960 to 17 percent in the 2020 census. Not all of those over 65 have left off working, but the bureau reports that the country now has under four people of working age available to support each person of retirement age.

The medical burden this demographic situation will impose on the economy gives only a hint of the ramifications. Still more fundamental is the implied labor shortage. There is also the question of whether these four people of working age can produce enough to support themselves, their personal dependents, and one retiree and still offer the surplus needed for investments in economic growth. Without some change, these demographics threaten to slow growth or even stop it. Technology can, however, provide significant mitigations.

Here the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics come to the fore. To date, these technological strides have saved on labor costs and, by making wage differentials less of a factor, facilitated the reshoring of several industries from abroad. The nation’s demographic need will add to opportunities for AI and robotics, as a substitute for labor and by enabling older Americans to work longer than they otherwise might. Because these sophisticated devises require more training and retraining over time, their existence will also offer tech opportunities to answer training and educational needs.

Climate change will also enhance tech opportunities on several levels. One lies in finding alternatives to and enhancing the effectiveness of solar and wind. Wind and solar, though always mentioned first in discussions of climate change, have proved themselves to be unreliable and otherwise inadequate to the task of fueling the world’s power needs. They are also expensive, as is evident in how their development has long depended on heavy subsidies. No doubt, tech can find ways to improve their effectiveness and lower their costs, but even greater opportunities lie in developing alternatives. Nuclear is gaining attention, especially smaller reactors that seem to remove the public fear of disaster. Hydrogen technologies are still largely experimental but have a distant promise. Fission lies on a much longer timeline.

While such alternatives get attention and certainly offer promise, opportunities also lie in efforts to manage fossil fuels. Certainly, gains are available in substituting natural gas for other fuels, in carbon capture, and in emissions control that can make fossil fuels less ecologically threatening and hopefully not ecologically threatening at all. Even if such solutions fall short of this ideal, they can fuel economies less harmfully during the time needed to develop and apply for more radical answers.

Hardly ever mentioned in the media, but nonetheless a tremendous field in which tech can act is in mitigating the ill effects of climate change. Techniques of flood control, for example, could provide an answer to the greater frequency and severity of storms supposedly caused by climate change or by rising sea levels. Additionally, there might be opportunities in bioengineering crops that do a better job of removing carbon dioxide and other emissions from the atmosphere. There might be still other opportunities in designing crops that cope better with the excess dryness or wetness supposedly caused by climate change. The urge to return the planet to some prior balance, one with which people will be happier, is understandable. But short of such an ideal, tech can find ways that allow people to live more comfortable and safe lives despite a changing climate.

It is admittedly anodyne to say things like, “technology is the future,” but no less true for that fact. Today’s world—because of its many troubles and not despite them—offers a wide range of opportunities for technological experimentation and application. With those opportunities lies the potential for great gain, to the world at large and to those technologists who can bring it the needed answers.

Read part I here. 

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.