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Because whether a significant decline in fertility is a “crisis” is a matter of opinion. One can make the argument (and I’m not necessarily making it) that with mass automation Japan declining in population from say 125 million to 20 million people wouldn’t really be a ‘crisis’.
The two problems are a) it's not clear mass automation is getting there, and b) it's very far from clear that whatever's causing the fertility drop will stop at after a few or even few dozen halvings of the human population. Especially if you think there's some critical number of humans necessary to keep that automation infrastructure working, there's a lot of ways this pathway goes that don't have directions out.
((I'll ignore the financial clusterfuck, since tbh even with saner fertility numbers it's still gonna be a clusterfuck.))
The two problems are a) it's not clear mass automation is getting there, and b) it's very far from clear that whatever's causing the fertility drop will stop at after a few or even few dozen halvings of the human population.
The supply chain for high-end semiconductors includes multiple single-supplier components, with the single suppliers being spread across three continents. It seems more likely than not to me that we really need a whole planet to support a 3nm fab, and that 3nm fabs would cease to exist if the number of high-IQ people in first-world countries halved.
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If there's a genetic component that contributes to propensity to have children, then that will end up rapidly spreading through the population. So, give it a millennium or so, and the problem will have solved itself.
(Some here might say there's a dysgenic aspect here--high time preference winning over low time preference, for example--but if it ends up out competing, isn't that ipso facto eugenic?)
It would be ipso facto selected for and evolutionarily sound But eugenics is the selection of genes that people find good, meaning literally good genes, not just another word for what gets selected for.
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