By Ts. Lukas J. Tan | 6 September 2026
This morning, 6 September 2026, I came across a social-media post about China’s progress in the global brain-computer interface (BCI) race. It immediately reminded me of a conversation that Elon Musk helped bring into the mainstream through Neuralink: the possibility that the boundary between the human brain and computers may one day become increasingly thin. Not very long ago, putting a chip into the human brain belonged largely to science fiction. Today, brain-computer interfaces are being tested on humans, governments are treating the field strategically, and the conversation is gradually shifting from whether such technology is possible to how far it should go.
Social-media headlines should always be treated carefully, particularly when they declare that one country or company has become the “world’s first”. What matters to me is not whether China, the United States, Neuralink or another organisation can claim technological leadership today. The more important signal is that brain-computer interfaces are moving from imagination towards reality, while some of the world’s most powerful governments, researchers and entrepreneurs now regard human-machine integration as a serious technological frontier.
There is also a governance question hidden inside that technological race. When technology begins interacting directly with the human brain, the discussion can no longer be limited to innovation, investment and national competitiveness. Questions of consent, privacy, neural-data ownership, medical safety, cybersecurity, accessibility and human autonomy become equally important. If a computer can one day interpret signals from our brains, who owns that information? Who may store it? Can it be transferred to another company? What protection should exist against discrimination based on neurological data? And if such technologies eventually enhance human capabilities rather than merely restore lost functions, will access be determined by medical need or by the ability to pay?
These questions may sound premature, but governance is most useful when it develops alongside innovation rather than after society has already become dependent upon it. We have seen this pattern before with social media, personal data and artificial intelligence. Technology often develops faster than the rules, institutions and social norms required to manage its consequences.
Yet strangely, after reading about the brain-chip race, my thoughts travelled somewhere completely different.
I started thinking about the funeral industry.
At first, the connection sounds almost absurd. What does a brain chip have to do with funeral homes, crematoriums, burial grounds or memorial services? But this is precisely what interests me when thinking about the future. When a technology emerges, we naturally concentrate on its immediate market. We ask which companies will win, what products will emerge and which jobs might disappear. The consequences that interest me more are often further away: the second-, third- and fourth-order effects that appear only after technology begins changing human behaviour and social structures.
If technology changes how we work, it changes how we use our time. If it changes how we use our time, it can influence relationships, caregiving and family formation. When families change, demographics change. And when demographics change for several generations, almost every institution and industry eventually feels the effect—including industries that appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with technology.
That was the chain of thought that began with a brain chip.
A Demographic Change Is Also a Social Change
Long before brain chips become commonplace, another enormous transformation is already happening around us: the world is producing fewer children.
The United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024 estimated that global fertility has fallen substantially over recent generations, from approximately 3.3 births per woman in 1990 to around 2.25 today. More than half of the world’s countries and territories are already below the replacement fertility level of approximately 2.1 births per woman. Low fertility is therefore no longer an isolated demographic problem belonging only to Japan, South Korea or a handful of European economies. It is becoming a structural issue across a growing part of the world.
It would be easy to look at these numbers purely as statistics. I think that would miss the human story behind them.
People do not decide whether to have children according to a demographic chart. They make those decisions within the realities of their lives: whether housing is affordable, whether employment feels secure, whether childcare is available, whether they have time to care for ageing parents, whether a career can coexist with parenthood, and whether raising a family feels economically and emotionally sustainable.
For women especially, the question can involve difficult trade-offs between professional opportunities, caregiving expectations and motherhood. For younger generations generally, delaying marriage or parenthood may not simply represent changing values; it may also reflect the economic environment they have inherited.
Therefore, falling fertility should not automatically be framed as young people “refusing” to have children. It should also prompt governments, employers and communities to ask whether the societies we are building make family life realistically sustainable.
China is particularly important because of its scale, but the issue extends much further. Demographic change moves slowly through society, almost like a wave travelling from one institution to another. Fewer births eventually mean fewer pupils entering schools. Later, universities compete for a smaller student population. Eventually, fewer young people enter the labour market. Housing demand changes, consumption patterns change, healthcare requirements change and a smaller working population may have to support a larger retired population.
A child who is not born today does not change the labour market tomorrow morning. But that missing person will never enter the workforce twenty years from now.
The same delayed effect eventually reaches the funeral industry.
We tend to regard funeral services as one of the few businesses with permanent demand because death itself cannot disappear. Every person alive today will eventually die. From a demographic perspective, however, there is an important distinction between the certainty of death for an individual and the number of deaths occurring within an entire society.
In the near and medium term, ageing populations could actually create greater demand for funeral and memorial services. Therefore, I would not argue that declining fertility means funeral businesses are about to decline tomorrow. The demographic lag could take decades.
My question concerns what happens afterwards.
Imagine a country remaining significantly below replacement fertility for thirty, forty or fifty years. Each generation becomes smaller than the one before it. Eventually, the large older generations pass away. Behind them are smaller middle-aged generations, followed by even smaller younger generations. Unless migration or a meaningful recovery in fertility compensates for that decline, the total population eventually contracts.
At that point, even the business of death encounters demographic mathematics.
Fewer births today can eventually mean fewer deaths decades later.
But this should not be viewed merely as a prediction about market size. A shrinking and ageing society creates much broader responsibilities. There may be fewer working-age adults caring for more elderly people. More people may grow old without children. More people may live alone. Governments may face greater pressure on healthcare, pensions and long-term care, while communities confront questions about loneliness, social isolation and who takes responsibility when family support is no longer available.
The future of the funeral industry is therefore only one small part of a much larger social transformation.
AI May Save Time Without Giving Us More Life
This is where artificial intelligence enters my thinking.
One of AI’s strongest promises is productivity. Work that previously required hours can increasingly be completed in minutes. Research can be accelerated, documents drafted, information analysed, software developed faster and repetitive administrative work automated. As AI agents become more capable, one person may eventually perform an amount of work that previously required several people.
Logically, greater productivity should mean that human beings become less busy.
I am not convinced that this will necessarily happen.
History suggests that when technology increases human capacity, society frequently responds by increasing its expectations. Email made communication faster, yet it did not necessarily reduce the amount of communication expected from us. Smartphones enabled us to work from almost anywhere, but they also made us reachable almost everywhere. Cloud technology made information accessible twenty-four hours a day, while simultaneously allowing work to follow us beyond the office.
AI could take this pattern much further. If someone becomes twice as productive with AI, the economic outcome may not be that the person works half the day and spends the remaining hours with family. The organisation may simply redefine what one employee is expected to accomplish. What once required five people might be assigned to two. What once took a week may be expected tomorrow.
This is not merely a productivity question. It is a governance and leadership question.
If AI creates enormous productivity gains, we will eventually need to ask who receives the benefit. Does it appear only as higher output and lower labour costs, or can some of that productivity be returned to human beings in the form of better work, greater flexibility, more family time, lifelong learning and improved quality of life?
Technology itself cannot answer that question. Leaders, organisations and public policy will.
This matters because decisions about having children are influenced by far more than biology. Housing, financial security, working hours, childcare, education, relationships, career expectations and the distribution of caregiving responsibilities all contribute to the environment in which people decide whether parenthood is possible.
It would therefore be too simplistic to say that AI will reduce fertility. But it is reasonable to ask whether an AI-enabled economy could unintentionally intensify conditions already making family formation difficult.
This creates what I see as one of the great paradoxes of the coming AI era: we may invent machines specifically to save human time, yet create an economic system that immediately consumes every minute those machines save.
The real measure of AI progress should therefore not be productivity alone. A society that produces more but leaves people with less time for family, community, health and human relationships may be technologically efficient without necessarily becoming more human.
When Technology Moves From Our Hands Into Our Bodies
The brain-chip conversation, made globally visible in large part by Elon Musk and Neuralink, introduces an even more fundamental governance challenge. Until recently, most digital technology existed outside us. Computers sat on desks, smartphones moved into our pockets and smartwatches onto our wrists. Brain-computer interfaces represent a much more intimate frontier: technology interacting directly with the human nervous system.
This naturally raises questions about long-term health and biological exposure, but here we should be careful about separating evidence from speculation. Current scientific evidence does not justify stating as fact that AI devices, ordinary wireless technologies or brain-computer interfaces cause declining human fertility. Researchers have investigated radiofrequency electromagnetic fields and reproductive indicators, including sperm motility and oxidative stress, but findings remain mixed and do not establish a simple causal relationship.
For me, however, the absence of a proven answer does not make the question irrelevant. It tells us where further research and governance will be needed.
The technological environment surrounding a human being in 2050 or 2070 could be fundamentally different from today. We may live continuously alongside intelligent environments, autonomous systems, wearable AI, augmented-reality devices and perhaps implanted interfaces. What are the biological, psychological and social consequences of living within such an environment for fifty or seventy years? We cannot yet answer that confidently.
The responsible approach is neither to create fear without evidence nor to assume that every innovation is harmless until proven otherwise. It is to continue research, establish appropriate safeguards and ensure that commercial competition does not move faster than our ability to protect human wellbeing.
Brain-computer interfaces make this particularly important because brain data is unlike ordinary personal data. A password can be changed. A credit card can be cancelled. Neural information may reveal something far more intimate about an individual. As these technologies develop, societies may eventually need concepts such as neural privacy, cognitive liberty and explicit rights over brain-generated data.
The technological race therefore should not simply be about who becomes first.
There is another race that matters just as much: who can build the governance capable of making the technology trustworthy?
From the Funeral Industry to the Question of Human Dignity
Following these trends further changed my original question. Perhaps the future challenge for funeral businesses is not simply whether there will eventually be fewer funerals. A deeper transformation could come from the changing structure of the family itself.
Funeral traditions were developed around families and communities. This is especially visible across Asian cultures. When a person dies, children, grandchildren, siblings, relatives and friends participate in the process. Someone organises the funeral, someone handles burial or cremation, someone maintains the grave or memorial, and someone carries family memories into the next generation.
But what happens after several decades of very low fertility?
A family with five children and fifteen grandchildren has a very different support structure from a family with one child. A couple without children has another structure entirely. As more people grow old alone or without descendants, society will face questions extending far beyond the funeral ceremony itself.
Who supports someone through the final years of life? Who makes decisions when that person loses capacity? Who arranges the funeral? Who maintains the memorial? Who protects their possessions and records? And who makes sure that a person without descendants receives the same dignity at the end of life as someone surrounded by a large family?
These are not simply commercial opportunities. They are social responsibilities.
Governments, healthcare providers, communities and businesses may eventually need new systems for people ageing without traditional family support. Funeral providers could become part of that ecosystem, but their future role may extend beyond handling death towards protecting dignity, memory and legacy.
The digital dimension makes this even more significant. People already leave enormous digital footprints: photographs, videos, emails, social-media accounts, cloud files, messages, voice recordings and years of written communication. AI could eventually organise these materials into detailed personal histories and interactive memorials. People may begin planning their digital legacy before death in much the same way they prepare wills or insurance today.
This could transform part of the funeral industry into something broader: a legacy industry.
Yet this transformation will also require governance. Who owns a deceased person’s data? Should a company be allowed to create an AI representation of someone who never consented to it? Who has the right to deactivate such a representation? Can someone’s voice or likeness continue to be commercially exploited after death? Should an AI simulation of a deceased parent be available indefinitely to a child?
The technology to do some of these things may arrive before society has decided whether they should be done.
That is why innovation and governance cannot be separated.
The future funeral provider may eventually preserve not only physical remains but digital identity and human memory. If that happens, the industry will inherit an enormous responsibility: to protect dignity after death in the same way that other institutions are expected to protect dignity during life.
The Future Is Not Only About What We Can Build
I am deliberately recording these thoughts on 6 September 2026 because observations about the future are easy to make after the future has arrived.
I do not know whether the funeral industry will ultimately shrink. I do not know whether global fertility will remain low for the rest of this century. Governments may develop more effective family policies. Migration may reshape national populations. Medical science could extend healthy lifespan substantially. AI could ultimately give people greater freedom rather than increasing work pressure. Technologies we cannot yet imagine could change every assumption in this article.
Nor am I suggesting a simple relationship of brain chips causing lower fertility and lower fertility causing the funeral industry to collapse. Human society is far too complex for such a straight line.
What interests me is the chain of signals.
Brain-computer interfaces tell us that technology is moving closer to the human body. Artificial intelligence tells us that the relationship between labour and productivity is changing. Falling fertility tells us that family formation and population structures are changing. Ageing societies tell us that responsibility between generations will become increasingly difficult. Digital identity tells us that what a person leaves behind after death is becoming much larger than physical possessions.
Individually, none of these signals tells us exactly what society will look like in 2050 or 2070. Together, however, they encourage us to ask questions earlier.
When Elon Musk helped bring brain chips into mainstream conversation, the obvious question was what a brain-computer interface could enable. As China accelerates its own ambitions, another obvious question is who will lead the technological race.
I increasingly believe there is a more important question: what kind of society are we creating if all of this succeeds?
Technology changes human capability. Capability changes expectations. Expectations influence behaviour. Behaviour affects families. Families shape demographics. Demographics reshape economies and industries. At every stage of that chain, however, there is also a governance decision. We can decide how technology is regulated, how productivity gains are shared, how families are supported, how ageing populations are cared for, how personal data is protected and how dignity is preserved after death.
That is why technological progress should not be measured only by what becomes technically possible.
A country can win a technology race and still face profound social challenges. A company can achieve extraordinary productivity while its people struggle with time and family. An industry can successfully digitise itself while failing to protect the dignity and privacy of the people it serves.
The future I am interested in is therefore not simply a more advanced future.
It is a future in which innovation, society and governance advance together.
Perhaps decades from now, the funeral industry will remain largely as we know it today. Perhaps population decline will eventually reduce its traditional volume. Perhaps it will evolve into an industry centred as much on memory, identity and legacy as on death itself. I cannot know which outcome will prevail.
What I can do is record what I saw from where I was standing.
On 6 September 2026, a story about China and the brain-chip race reminded me of a conversation Elon Musk helped bring into public consciousness years earlier. But instead of making me think only about the future of computers, it made me think about the future of people: how we work, how we build families, how we age, how we care for one another, and eventually how we preserve dignity when a human life comes to an end.
Whenever I encounter a new technology today, I try not to stop at the most immediate question: what can this technology do?
I try to follow it further and ask: if this becomes normal, what else will change—and are our society and governance ready for what follows?
Because perhaps the most important measure of technological progress will not be how closely we can connect humans to machines.
It will be whether, after doing so, we still know how to put human beings first.