Or automation and increased productivity fill the gap, as they have always done.

I’d file that under “quality is going down”.

Are you imagining machines delivering canned food or something?

Medical advances too - drugs and procedures that didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago are commonplace along elderly populations now, a trend that will no doubt continue. Attitudes and regulations around euthanasia will inevitably change too. Personally I'm not worried my final years are going to be of significantly diminished quality of life compared to what my own parents have experienced. I might not be so sure of that if I lived in a country like South Korea or Italy, mind you.

It's not going to happen in a day. We can go from 10% to 12%.

It happened already over 30 years, and in most countries should plateau in less than 10 years.

You went from about 200 years of an industrial world where <5% of the population was elderly to - in the span of 30 years - that going up to the mid 30s to low 40s in almost all developed countries.

Japan & Italy led the charge.