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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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