https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19699291

Demography, Automation, and the Need for Human Hands

The global north, often referred to as the first world is an ageing one. The median age of countries in this category reflects a demographic nearing its twilight years. Looking back a few years, AGI(AI) was presented as the end all be all of global/local challenges like this. Now, the world is at crossroads of structural transformation, driven partly by this AI mania, but those lofty promises of Artificial General intelligence remain a distant dream.

To fuel the growth of this AI mania as well as to serve the needs of the old population, the world order has fallen captive to the unforgiving mathematics of demography. The capitalist core, the heartlands of the global economy, United States, Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea is directly staring into this abyss. Back in the post-covid recovery days, the global establishment, along with the onset of task-oriented, agentic AI models arising from the aftermath of Google's 2017 seminal paper titled "Attention Is All You Need" as well as rapid improvements in mechanical automation Ojewale (2025), did not deem the population crisis as a major threat. Techno-optimism was the name of the game during that time. The prevailing narrative suggested that if we add the previously mentioned onset of AIs to the equation, despite many jobs becoming obsolete, with the aid of the newfound productivity, this problem gets solved immediately.

In hindsight, this profound miscalculation feels rather deliberate. The post Covid AI craze is proving to be a speculative bubble; a last gasp attempt by financial elites to project perpetual growth of the global economic order when it is disintegrating in reality (Donovan, 2026; Ganesh Sitaraman & Asad Ramzanali, 2026; Warzel, 2026). Although it is factual that machines are generally cheaper to maintain in comparison to maintaining human beings, algorithmic models are incapable of carrying out the physical, logistical, and systemic upkeep that are needed by aging, senescent civilizations of the global north. The world economy remains in dire need of human hands and minds.

Subsequently, as Garcia(2026) points out, a palpable hysteria-panic among the tech oligarchs and the western intelligentsia can be observed. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk, despite propagating anti-immigration dog whistles on social media, seem to appear deeply concerned about this (Times of India, 2026). Yet, we must subject their anxieties to rigorous scrutiny; is it they care for the decline of the population or do they want to exploit inexpensive labour is still another question. The indications always seem to lead to the latter. The capitalistic core does need a subservient proletariat in peripheral nations in order to sustain its cycle of unequal exchange and ever increasing profit margins, reinforcing Immanuel Wallerstein's "World Systems Theory" on how wealth flows form less developed, low-wage and manual labour focused peripheries to the core according to Martínez-Vela (2021), perpetuating global inequality.

Bangladesh’s Structural Leverage

This structural weakness of the Global North offers a hitherto unparalleled though quickly shrinking strategic opportunity to developing countries such as Bangladesh. As the worlds economic core collapses, with South Korea recording its fifth year of natural population decline in 2025, and more than 108,900 deaths exceeding births even though its fertility rate is only rising to a paltry 0.8 from 0.75 in 2024 according to (Korea.net, 2026). A similar trend can be seen in the capitalistic core worldwide with the rate being 1.1 for Japan, 1.6 for the UK and 1.6 for the US as per World Bank (2026), all below the replacement rate of 2.1 , whereas Bangladesh is presently sitting above a giant working-age demographic dividend.

Earlier on, people would be concerned about computers replacing jobs. But, the impending population crisis, the lack of human capital has presented itself as the apocalyptical crisis to the Global North. The age dependency ratio in Bangladesh was at a good 52.64% in 2024 according to World Bank. But, Frank Notestein's Demographic Transition theory posits that demographic-based leverage is only temporary (Diggs, 2020). Existing estimates suggest that, despite having quite the baby boom in recent years, the support ratio of Bangladesh is at its highest point this decade and will drop drastically after 2040 when it will also become an ageing nation. As a state, Bangladesh needs to radically restructure its developmental paradigm before this window runs out, in order to turn this transient demographic advantage into geopolitical strength.

Strategic Policy Imperatives for the State

In order to take advantage of the looming labour famine of the developed world, Bangladesh needs to give up its present path of low-skill labour export and mono-industrial dependence. The following overhauls are paramount if it genuinely intends to move up the through economic ladder:

1. Dismantling the RMG Monoculture

The Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry has always been the backbone of the Bangladeshi economy, earning an export value of 39.35 billion\$ and constituting more than 81 percent of the total export revenue in FY2024-25 (Nasrin et al., 2025; The Financial Express, 2025).

This is however a trap of endless subservience to the Western consumer markets. The data on exports in late 2025 display structural weakness According to Rubel (2025), a former director of the BGMEA, as the growth of the export of RMGs is only 2.53 percent in the period between January and November (as compared to 6.23 percent last year), and this is grossly damaged by domestic logistic shocks, fires, governmental shifts and increasing inflation(which is again due to immature fiscal policies).

Bangladesh cannot afford to be the sweatshop of a declining empire. As Ecclesiastes 11:2 pragmatically puts out- "Divide your portion to seven, or even to eight", Bangladesh needs to follow conventional wisdom and vigorously channel capital into the diversification of industries- that is, into semiconductor packing, green technology, healthcare, and light engineering components.

2. Educational Restructuring

It must first be universally agreed upon that should Bangladesh earnestly wish to capitalise on this opportunity; the state must heavily invest in educating its youth as they are the best assets at its disposal. However, the present investment made by the state in its most valuable asset is an act of structural sabotage that seems treasonous to the naked eye. According to a report by Jago News Desk (2026) Bangladesh earmarked an insignificant 1.69% of its GDP on education in FY2025 and actually spent 1.3% on it which is pathetic compared to the UNESCO recommendation of 4-6% during the tenure of its much anticipated but disappointing interim Government.

The education ministry needs to vie for a government mandated compulsory minimum spending of 4% of the nations total GDP towards pedagogy in general. Going on, the educational stream selection conundrum faced by students in 9^th grade, an archaic system sustained and perpetuated by the rent seeking behaviours and vested interests of education administrators and bureaucrats, which had been cancelled once and then reinstated by the interim government actually needs to go (Rizve, 2023; Rahaman, 2025). Other than obstructing future career paths, designed for creating obedient servants for the British Raj, that system served no practical purpose. Perpetuating this system because Awami League did not want to is akin to bombing Voronezh. The curriculum realignment also needs to incentivise nursing and vocational education.

The academic pathway needs to be connected with high skilled-high prospect jobs such as semiconductor manufacturing, green energy, and light engineering component manufacturing with proven success in having the world's largest EV fleet according to The Economist (2025) needs to serve as a ringing of the division bell to the government.

3. Radical Overhaul of Human Capital Investment

Since the global north is in dire need of human labour to supplement demographics that are ageing, Bangladesh has to charge a premium on that labour. This involves huge, government-led investments in STEM, nursing and high-level vocational training as discussed previously. Even scammers are taking advantage of this for acquiring visas but the authorities seem to be purposefully oblivious to this.

Labour should not be sold to the Middle East as a wasteful and cheap commodity. The market should instead pivot to serve as the source of an indispensable, high-skilled workers to Japan, Europe and Korea and other parts of the global north. An ageing population needs health and social care workers to look after the elderly, engineers to sustain their energy infrastructure and technological base and as such, the students should be incentivised to pursue careers in these paths. There should also be bilateral agreements where supply of labour will be highly conditional on direct transfer of technology and good trade terms.

4. State-Directed Capital and Resource Leverage

Geo-political hegemony of some countries emanate from pure material control. To illustrate, what made the current hegemonic status of China possible in the rules based world worder is the control it exacts on conflict minerals and cobalt along with its monopoly on world supply of tin, tungsten, tantalum, gold and cobalt (Teufel Dreyer, 2020). Similarly, USA has monopoly over quartz, the Persian gulf over global energy supply, the Dutch have their absolute advantage on photolithography machines and so forth.

Although Bangladesh does not have a mineral or product monopoly, it does posses a demographic equivalent. While some may downplay the importance of population in a planet of nearly eight billion, or its equivalency to rare earth minerals, just as a nation cannot build electric vehicles without cobalt, advanced economies cannot sustain their healthcare systems, construction sectors, or supply chains without a constant influx of working-age labour which Bangladesh hays in plenty. Now, this again raises the question, "why not India with higher population or African nations with higher birthrates? What advantage does Bangladesh posses over those regions?". Well, India is the worlds primary supplier of human capital due to the sheer volume of population they have. However, in terms of education, especially gender parity in education, Bangladesh is simply better performing as per Amartya Sen, the Nobel-prize winning Indian economist (The Business Standard, 2020); this, along with a better standing in the World Bank's Human Capital index compared to India according to the 2018 The Daily Star report makes Bangladesh a viable human capital supplier to the global north.

The government should exercise strategic ruthlessness to mandate and regulate its demographic outflow. Brain drain needs to be taken care of by reciprocal investments on the people all while decreeing compulsory channelling of remittances towards investments in infrastructure and research in the country, along with providing a respectable life to the benefactors as in the skilled workforce by not treating them as expendable.

5. Rejecting Imported Economic Orthodoxy

The concept of universal basic income, originally paraded by tech oligarchs and policy makers as solution to the demographics question, is to give a certain guaranteed minimum level of income to the citizens of a state out of the tax collections or other income sources (exempli gratia - AI productivity) of the state. Although Bangladesh does not have the short-term fiscal capacity or stimulus to carry out wholesale UBI, it cannot accept neoliberal austerity dictated by Western financial organizations. Furthermore, cutting down on subsidies as proposed by organisations like the IMF undermines the sovereignty of the nation as a constitutionally democratic socialist state since its conception (Amey, 2021). The demands of global financial institutions, when acting as creditors, under the guise of economic stabilisation, often involve directives for the reduction of state subsidies. These directives are directly in conflict with the nations economic sovereignty and constitutional identity. The constitution legally obligates authorities on all levels to maintain a welfare oriented social-democratic outlook as the preamble of the constitution states that "Further pledging that it shall be a fundamental aim of the State to realise through the democratic process a socialist society, free from exploitation-a society in which the rule of law, fundamental human rights and freedom, equality and justice, political, economic and social, will be secured for all citizens". Chapter II, Article 8 exacts that socialism, along with democracy, secularism and nationalism must constitute the fundamental principles of state policy and be fundamental to the governance of the nation (Government of Bangladesh, 1972a). The 10^th Article further reinforces this with mandating the establishment of a socialist economic system (Government of Bangladesh, 1972b). Article 15 further enshrines this with the promise to ensure the basic rights of citizens including food, clothing, shelter, education and medical care, all of which require state subsidies to function. As such, adoption of foreign directives regarding subsidy reduction as austerity measures is not just foreign influence on local fiscal policy. Rather, it is an attack on the founding ethos, principles of the nation, undermining the constitutional mandate to protect its status as a welfare state.

Zaman (2026) suggests that the state has a low tax to GDP ratio of about 6.8% in FY2025, which means that it should be aggressive in increasing its revenue base to support domestic social safety nets. An under-educated group of youth who have already been disenfranchised will cause internal destabilization and will completely miss the opportunity of benefiting, as it will have squandered the demographic dividend (Tasnim, 2026). The recent 2024 quota reformation movement and the subsequent uprooting of the then standing government spearheaded by BAL stands as a living testament to policy mishaps in this regard.

In Conclusion, the establishment should be more careful of panic-selling ideas of all things to protect the markets they have a vested interest in. The narrative that AGI would seamlessly save the capitalist core was a deliberate distraction orchestrated by oligarchs from the reality of this fatal demographic contraction for their financial gain. Finally, all of humanity should observe the actions of China, the consequence of its population collapse caused not by declining birth rates but rather gender imbalances stemming from Orwellian policies and the resulting decline in economic growth to evaluate its successes and failures as a lesson to learn from. But Bangladesh cannot afford to merely observe; it must act aggressively. With less than two decades remaining to capitalise its demographics in order to better negotiate the terms of survival to a desperate, labor-starved Global North in a continuously changing world order, the suggested policy imperatives need to be acted upon or it will stay in the vicious cycle of exploitation until its own demographic winter arrives. By that time, the advantage in demographic dividend, if squandered would leave Bangladesh as just another statistic in the middle income trap.

Md. Ikramul Hasan
Junior Research Fellow
Council for Policy Review

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