Fortunately Luxembourg is big enough to fit us all

I guess by now most of the 6.999 million people will have heard the news: we've hit the 7 million mark! But should we congratulate ourselves, or rather feel sorry for overcrowding our planet? Well, the thing is not that we're too many to fit - it would take an area smaller than Luxembourg to fit us all, shoulder to shoulder. Nor is the problem how to feed the whole population - there's plenty of scope to increase yield per ha in vast parts of the globe. Just consider, for example, that many farms in sub-Saharan Africa yield only 10% of their north-American peers.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that our patterns of production and consumption are simply not sustainable. Period. This is all because of the technological advances we have made over the past centuries, which made man redundant in many aspects of what is supposed to be his productive life. And let's face it: why pay someone who's prone to failure and fatigue, when a machine can perform the same job at a fraction of the cost and without nasty labour unions nagging about physical and psychological well-being?

The demand for educated labour is being reconfigured by technology, in much the same way that the demand for agricultural labour was reconfigured in the 19th century and that for factory labour in the 20th. Computers can not only perform repetitive mental tasks much faster than human beings. They can also empower amateurs to do what professionals once did: why hire a flesh-and-blood accountant to complete your tax return when Turbotax (a software package) will do the job at a fraction of the cost? And the variety of jobs that computers can do is multiplying as programmers teach them to deal with tone and linguistic ambiguity.

Now, you cannot simply have 6 million bums while the remaining 1 million are working, can you? So we simply had to come up with unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, which would require people to staff repair offices, call centres and other customer services, while keeping factory workers happy with supplying the ever-continuing demand of unsustainable products, invented by engineers to last as long as not to upset customers (too much), but as short as to keep them buying the gimmicks they invent every other year or two.

Because of this problematic situation - a growing (skilled) workforce and a general lack of labour demand for basic products and services - jobs have always been a sword of Damocles hanging over politicians' heads, especially in periods of economic downturn. Heck, even the weapons industry, to name but one, gets away with crying foul when governments dare not to approve a murky deal with a semi-friendly autocrat - while in reality they only employ a few hundred people and represent (in most cases) less than one percent of GDP. I don't know the solution to this problem, but maybe it's time for more ideas to have sex?