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Industrial scale artificial births are the surest path to success, IMO. Orphans turn out alright, all things considered. Many of the problems with orphans are probably biologically rooted, their genes are probably closer to drug fiends than fantasy heroes. If you picked out good genes and ran a functional education system I think you'd get good results.
Even Mongolian TFR is declining from its peak of 3. I saw someone just today say that it had fallen 10% in the latest statistics.
https://x.com/Aaronal16/status/1830956670345978198
Alternately, maybe a cultural fix where parents get affirmative action in university and the workforce would stem the bleeding?
All of this will probably come too late to matter, since no major leaders are aggressive enough to make tough decisions. No country has stuck with a 'pick out good genes and run a functional education system' strategy for more than a few years even with regular people, let alone clones. South Korea is still mucking about with lame financial incentives.
I'd like to imagine that they are all secretly AGI-pilled. Realistically, it's probably eternal boomer syndrome: anything that takes more than 15 years to have serious effect will come after I'm retired. They can't blame me, it will be someone else's problem then!
I'm surprised that multiple people are suggesting this.
Do they?
But even if you could create governmental institutions that could raise children from birth to 18 and create psychologically healthy people, the result seems catastrophic from a cultural perspective.
One of the core structural units of society is the family, whether that is the western mother-father-kids atomic option, or clans, or other arrangements I'm less familiar with. This is a pillar of every society ever. The differences between different family structures are defining features of different cultures.
It should be assumed that tinkering with family structure in any culture will lead to large outcomes. It's a very central node of society, messing around with it will have large effects. But you aren't just talking about tinkering with it, you're talking about eliminating it entirely. An entire layer of society and culture simply excised from the stack. Is it not obvious that that would have massive and unpredictable societal implications?
Lets say we build a system that can raise orphans successfully, and we artificially create a generation of highly optimized orphans that turn out psychologically healthy (which I question the viability of, but for the sake of argument) - imagine how that would change the political balance of power. Atomic family units as part of a larger network of families or in some places a full on clan, have a huge amount of sway in creating the political landscape. Your newly raised orphans will be completely devoid of any kind of familial association. They won't have any cultural heritage besides whatever is inculcated into the at the institution. No family history or values. Most children grow up to reflect their parents values and politics, well, not anymore, they don't have that.
This seems to totally remove a central break on the expansion of institutional power whether thats governmental or otherwise.
Whoever, or more realistically whatever, is in charge of raising the kids, will be a new cultural structure with enormous power. It will consume a huge chunk of the political power currently contained within family structures. Why would you want that? Who knows what it will look like?
I would have thought that reducing the atomization of humans in modernity was an obvious core goal held by most people raised in western nations in modernity, I have not really heard people argue that they are in favor of increased atomization. But it seems like that is what you are suggesting?. Do you consider the atomization of humans in modernity to be a good outcome? I mean that question sincerely, I think I may need to reconsider my assumptions.
Community has already disintegrated. Atomization has already happened.
I agree that replacing natural families with clones is a long shot. This would never happen in a functioning civilization. We are not a functioning civilization and thus we shall have to trade off wants for needs. I don't think the state should have such great powers. Nevertheless, all these things are wants, survival is a need.
You're talking about using a theoretical technology to prop up a civilization that is, by your description, not functioning. It is unlikely, but beyond that, not a good outcome.
Then let the civilization collapse. If the civilization collapses, then we would return to the original ecosystem we evolved for, and the problem would be gone. If the requirement of maintaining our current high level of technology is raising children as orphans via institution, then wouldn't it preferable to abandon high technology and start over? What about high technology is so great as to be worth this trade off you offer.
I don't want civilization to collapse because I'm enjoying sanitation, electricity, digital technology, relative safety, fresh food from around the world via refrigerated supply lines.
I don't enjoy hard manual labour in fields, reading books by candle-light, starving as agriculture disintegrates (does anyone know how to do things with horses today) or getting massacred by gangs of looters.
And nor does anyone else. There are plenty of coercive things that the modern state can do, China has a history of interfering with reproduction.
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Raising children en-mass != eliminating families.
There's no reason we can't have both, with people having children the old-fashioned way and then vat grown children to supplement the TFR to above replacement. You could even put them up for adoption, and while the demand for such isn't infinite, a good number of them would find their way into decent homes.
The alternative being discussed here is outright demographic collapse and the failure of technological civilization after all, while such methods of producing citizens might not be ideal, it beats a gerontocracy that can't support itself.
I suppose @RandomRanger and I would both agree that such measures are unlikely to be necessary if AGI shows up soon, with the automation of skilled and unskilled human labor table stakes, and then things like outright elimination of aging being on the agenda, at which point even very low TFRs become no big deal. (Leaving aside artificial families run by AI nannies and role models)
Still, I don't see this system as being worse than the alternative, and probably on par in terms of outcomes with situations like millions of children who are/were punted over to boarding schools for most of their lives and having disinterested parents. They do alright. The biggest issue with most orphans is the genes they've inherited, and we can fix that.
I mean, we can already subsidize local fertility by importing migrants from areas with higher fertility. I don't think that replacement is a good thing. You're system would prevent that replacement and instead replace some amount of local family raised humans with institutionally raised humans. They will be more alien to me than foreign born humans, in so far as at least foreign born humans have a family.
Having both is irrelevant. If the system gets off the ground you'll radically disrupt society to the point that it is unrecognizable. The lab grown kids will either be radically more effective than normal kids, in which case they will replace them. Or they'll be less effective than normal kids and fill the same role as replacing locals with immigrants, except instead of immigrants (who at least have the normal human background of being raised in a family are even more alien) you'll have the lower local caste replaced by clones with all the bizzare effects that would have. Bad outcomes either way.
How is this system better than total collapse? What does high technology offer that could possibly be worth replacing the family unit?
Do you have all day?
Honestly, this is not something I can expect someone who asks this kind of question to understand by being explained, not any more than you could explain to me why intelligent people adopt Christianity as adults in the year 2024. When you see the world not as an ineffable force of nature to cope with and accept, but as a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want, it is plainly obvious that such a system is, in fact, better than total collapse.
I do not like the "original ecosystem we evolved for", we could do better by changing both the ecosystem and the pressures by which we evolve to match it.
I have time. This is an asynchronous forum.
That sounds like a pretty interesting conversation to me, to be honest. We would disagree but we could still communicate I think.
I feel like that runs contrary to the purpose of this forum. Communication and argument across perspectives is what makes it interesting to be here.
For most of my life I had that standard nerd perspective that the world was improved by technology. It's only been experience that has lead me to question the upside of technology. Its only been experience that has lead me to the more conservative position that modernity is not so great.
I have nothing against attempting to manage nature as "a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want" but in my experience that isn't what civilization has done. It has not made something optimal. There are some good things about advanced tech. Medicine maybe, and certainly space flight - the hope of creating extraterrestrial colonies still appeals to me deeply - but beyond that, is life for the individual improving due to technology?
I'm not a luddite. Technology is great. But if it is incompatible with human flourishing, I don't think I see the point. Replacing the standard system of humans being raised by parents seems to empower the technological system too much. Religion is, itself, a form of technology. If we have outrun our ability for our social technology to maintain a healthy social system due to rampant material technological growth, than perhaps we need a reset.
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Technically, no. Elimination of aging (and menopause) avoids the problem via drastically increasing TFR*, not by making very low TFR irrelevant. Even the Culture still needs a TFR of 1** to avoid dying out; it's just that 380 years of fertility make TFR 1 pretty easy.
*In particular, it moves female fertility from Mediocristan to Extremistan; even if only a small fraction of people decide to pop out four hundred babies, it has a rather-large effect.
**1 rather than slightly over 2, because all Culture citizens can bear children instead of slightly under half of them (they are sequential hermaphrodites).
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In boarding schools, it's still the parents who choose the school and strongly influence what the child is taught and how it is raised. Before boarding school, the child was raised by the family or at least in very close proximity to the family. After boarding school, the child remains a member of the family. It's a looser form of familial organization, but it's still there. And even orphans ultimately grow up in a society founded and shaped by and still composed of and structured for the benefit of families. Having vat-grown humans as a large part or even the majority of a population will be fundamentally disruptive in unpredictable ways. I wouldn't discount @Crake's concerns so easily, even as I agree with your point that printing humans may be better than demographic collapse. Especially his point about the sheer degree of power invested the institutions that print and raise and educate those new and infinitely available humans. Take any concerns people might have about the faults of educational systems, propaganda or state control over society, and multiply by an arbitrarily large factor, and that's probably still not enough worry given the immensity of the monster that would be created there.
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