>For me, I think the simplest solution to that would just be making a full-time parenting/raising job that people could do for the grown humans.
There's already plenty of mostly women out there working at daycare centers while the parents are out working a job they barely give a damn about to keep society's gears turning.
It would create an unavoidable caste system; where these people will feel resentment for being even more rootless than the typical person does for not having blood attachments.

>Assuming we have the power to determine certain genetic characteristics of the babies, should we keep what genetic traits those babies have random or allow people to choose? Potentially, maybe even settle on an optimized "ideal"

Would be spoiled by too many hands and bitching from all the sidelines from the get-go, at least in a democracy it would. I can easily envision the crying from interest groups if too many European Blonde Babies are born. Then the lobbying for laws that would hold the institutes beholden to strive for "equity" with a to-be-determined ratio of babies of X,Y, and Z race raised. That's what I can think up right away. I believe others are capable of seeing further in than I can and would bring up further complications that just make the juice not worth the squeeze.

The solution to demographics isn't going to come from such pie in the sky science; it's a simpler matter to say that the reason birthrates are in the shitter is because the older generations of us living too well are literally in the way of the younger generations, and we are seriously cramping them in just about every way.
African countries don't have this problem as bad because people simply die younger there, hence a 20 year old man can actually live like a man, and a still healthy and now fairly wise 35 year old can become a leader of a nation.

>>115066
Eru?!

>>115067
>and now fairly wise 35 year old can become a leader of a nation.
You have no idea about African politics if you think this is the case
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Biya

>>115069
Fair, I never heard of this guy, but I was aware that Mugabe was ancient too while posting this. I think what I said still has weight; especially on the more day to day where a man can get into a professional role sooner and take charge, whereas in the west someone in their 50's is squatting it.

Eugenics is one of those subjects that good internet communities avoid bringing up, but I guess we can try...

The thing is, people generally want their children to be like them, even if it's a pure negative. Dwarfs want dwarf children and blind people want blind children. This is something that comes up in adoption a lot. Yes, it's a terribly selfish thing, but it happens. As to what they will look like, hoo boy that's a can of worms. It feels like outside of isolated communities like the Amish it's probably the only way most recessive traits will survive and be expressed in sufficient numbers in one or two hundred years since fertility levels are so low. It's kind of weird to think about, but also not very joyful so it's not something I'd talk about on kissu.

That's not a viable use of the technology because doing it the natural way is way more cost-effective. You're proposing that the government take control of population replacement and fund it with taxes and institutionalize child-rearing (even more than it already has been), but a government that totalitarian could just institute reproduction requirements on the populace to keep things in line. And there's not even a need to do that unless the well of immigrants somehow dries up or their integration manages to fail hard enough to turn a majority against the practice.

The more likely use-cases will be as a form of fertility treatment for women who wait until their 30s-40s to have kids and already have to pay through their teeth to have a reasonable chance of it and single men of the same ages who can't/don't want to deal with real women since it could let them escape the rights issues surrounding surrogacy/adoption. And, of course, people who want designer babies, but that technology is way, way more complex than in vitro incubation. The limiting factor is how long it takes to become financially secure enough to raise a child and the resulting culture that encourages people to spend their most fertile year studying/having fun/building a career/doing literally anything but starting a family, it's not about the months or two of productivity a woman loses at the end of pregnancy.

Oh, and activist groups definitely will argue that modding out disabilities is discriminatory and dehumanizes/devalues disabled people and their contributions to society. Personally, I don't think any regulation in that regard will take because it'll come down to a parent's right to choose what's best for their kids and nobody is going to accept not getting their ideal baby for the sake of equality or whatever. With in vitro fertilization, parents can already choose which eggs they want to attempt implantation with, though the level of knowledge they have is nowhere near what you're imagining. When we do get to that point, it'll be a question of whether normal people can afford to make the stronger, smarter babies the rich are cooking up.

>>115071
>Dwarfs want dwarf children and blind people want blind children
Do you have some source for this? I know those people probably don't think their lives are as horribly worse as we do, but I doubt people would typically go to such extremes. Cursing your kid with ginger hair is one thing, but inflicting them with a deadly allele or robbing them of a sense is another.

The reason populations are declining is simply a matter of low housing availability(often caused by urbanisation) plus high living standards.
To put it simply, if you have to work until you are 35 to get a 2 bedroom apartment then you are probably only going to have one kid. But if you can get a 5 bedroom suburban house before you turn twenty then you will likely have 4 or more. But because of this as the population declines and housing becomes cheaper it will start bouncing back up again(maybe, it's possible that in western countries immigration will never allow it to get to that level).

Artificial wombs don't address this at all. Really the only way they could would be as a replacement for immigration but in a pretty dystopian way, they would have to be manufactured by the state in huge facilities that mass produce children and raise them to adulthood in tiny cubicles for them to then enter the work force.

I think the real solution to this is to try to de-urbanise society. Make it so people are not all crammed into small areas and competing over small apartments.
But this has to be done in a way that does not disrupt industry. I think in some ways it could be done with little or no disruptions, there are many jobs that could be done from home and if they are done from home then the person does not need to live in a city to do it.
Other than that it might mean spreading out cities instead, so instead of a huge city that includes all industries, you try to make many smaller cities that focus on one or two industries.

>>115072

That thing about the dwarf/blind/disabled kids - It sounds bad the way they said it at face value, but I think it can be a plus as well.
A parent that is crippled in the same way could emphasize with the struggles of the child, as well as give much more meaningful advice to the child to cope with life, than a more normal parent could, even though that parent may have more ability and income even overall.

>I think the real solution to this is to try to de-urbanise society. Make it so people are not all crammed into small areas and competing over small apartments.
Not enough land for that; all the good spots are just about taken as well. There just are too many around for the whole 40 acres and mule thing of 150 years ago even.
In far antiquity mankind was estimated to be about 100 million worldwide and this was a time when Babylonian kings were hunting the last Asian lions to extinction other than some holdouts in Greece. To say nothing of the other megafauna.
Imagine if instead of living in an apartment and just getting their weekly stuff from a market this same person and about every other neighbor on your street was competing against you for land and cattle/goat/whatever grazing and water access.
Living in cities is a compromise we all make where we reduce ourselves since there's so damn many people.

Collapse will, hopefully, fix most of these problems

>>115075
True, I'm Australian so I just thought about it more in that context. I think we easily could create new cities.

But even other countries while not being able to do that they can still get people back into the country. Japan has a lot of empty houses in the country the problem is that that is not where the jobs are.

>>115077
>the problem is that that is not where the jobs are.
That's the easier part.
The other thing is that most people don't even know how to be self-sufficient which is a big part of being successful while living rural. It's been lost and even taken away over generations and it isn't something that can simply be returned to with an ambitious plan.
I visit rural towns in America often and the people living there are usually either old or they are stuck there living a meager life working at the local mart or truck driving, or they are commuting easily over an hour to cities like anyone else. They have no deep attachment to the land or ability to make their own profitable work in an impactful way, and a surprising amount live on government welfare, and on top of that they are just as reliant on the same supply chains from cities. ( I starkly observed this during C*vid)

People talk feminism this herbivore male that when it comes to Japan, but the problem with the Japanese birthrate seems mostly to be the workaholic culture.

>>115077
The problem with new cities in Oz is that there are lot of climates nobody wants to live in. There could be dozens of Milton Keynes in oz but good luck getting people to live in the Northern Territory

>>115076
I pray for collapse. The future without it is even bleaker than one with it to the point where birthrate wont be a big issue because of how many could die

nothing is ever better after hospitals stop working

The best thing for humanity would be a genetically engineered supervirus that kills ~99% of the population and spares the most intelligent men and all japanese females. The virus could also be designed to cause the survivors to produce ~80% female offspring so every man could have a harem of japanese girls and also it should get rid of female puberty so all the girls will be lolis. Then artificial wombs can be used to make more lolis.

too many psychos here. Kill them all and society will go back to normal

>>115082
Short-term pain could save the earth environmentally

>>115086
>Kill them all and society will go back to normal

Reigns of Terror never work

>>115084
this almost sounds like a vrappi post but it’s too coherent

>>115089
you're extrapolating something I didn't even mean. I just think everyone in this thread is delusional. Masking their psychopathy behind good intentions. Killing everyone who wishes for the world to end would inevitably prevent it from ending.

>>115078
The Chinese can teach us how to do it. They're quite good at 艰难度日

>>115092
Paradoxically, killing all psycopaths makes you a psychopath too

>>115094
crazy that some women have masculine features

>>115095
it would be the paradox of tollerance

I blame the internet, not just for the cold disregard for human life but for the isolation that delusion that people can live independently from each other. People forget that their lifestyle is dependant on hundreds of thousands of people harvesting, creating and maintaining various things. Global population collapse would mean that we can't play video games and post on the internet and do lots of other things that we've come to expect. No man is an island.

>>115097
I was talking about supply chain collapse because of climate issues before a massive climate collapse

Climate change is good for the environment. Warm climates will increase precipitation and both this and high levels of C02 are good for plant life. As plants are what support ecosystems this will be a net positive for life on Earth.
Well in aggregate, there will be winners and losers of course but what have polar bears done for us really?

I for one welcome the return to an era of giant bugs

>>115099
A lot of places will be gone forever or unliveable! Talk about callous psycopathy

compute rendering. Do not be afraid, this is not real.

>>115101
And allot will be made liveable again. Increased rain fall and changing weather patterns could green the Sahara and central Australia.
Losing Florida is a worthwhile price to pay.

¥Prioritizing Australia while disregarding pacific islands sinking into the ocean
Hmmm...

>green sahara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification_in_Africa
It would just get ruined like they did with the Sahel

>>115104
They're not being used for anything anyways. And just sandbag up the important ones

>>115105
Doable with good planning, some trial and error and scientific plans.

and likewise the exploitation of the capatalist ideas of converting life into money. It's why we should be thankful that they are against American and Europe and pro-Communist where they regularly do(and often fail) at teraforming projects, while the West just sits back on oil proffits and expoiting child labour while promoting moral supperiority over totalitarian regimes.

We need more people who are willing to make the hard decisions about which fractions of the world to kill

>>115073
>I think the real solution to this is to try to de-urbanise society. Make it so people are not all crammed into small areas and competing over small apartments.
But this has to be done in a way that does not disrupt industry.

I'm seeing a lot of weird (and decidedly western) ungratefulness ITT. Things are fine; modern life is fine. Are there problems? Sure. But that's just how life is. A "collapse" would fix some things, but it'd create a bunch of new problems that only look lesser now because you're viewing them from a distance.

Appreciate what you have and stop romanticizing what you don't.

>>115128
>modern life is fine
We're all gonna die because of climate change.

>>115131
Some of us will die in the climate change, but people will be okay in the end.

>>115119
Those decisions were made long ago. We're in the Noah's Ark phase right now. When seas start rising and resources become scarce, you already know who will be sacrificed.

>>115131
And the sun's gonna go out eventually. I get it's probably a bad comparison, but you get the point I hope. We're talking about something that hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen for a while. And beyond that, >>115136. Humanity is a lot more resilient than people give it credit for. Our adaptive trait is that we're adaptable. So long as we can physically survive it, we can bounce back.

As an addendum to >>115163, sudden, complete "collapses" aren't really a thing. People just like to think about it that way because it's easier. This is not going to an apocalyptic event. Humanity will have enough time to adapt.

>>115164
Where do you live. Something tells me it's by a lake

>>115165
He means across the world, of course single areas can get quite bad quite quickly

>>115128
>>115131
>>115136
>>115141
>>115163
>>115163
>>115165
>>115166
Yes, yes, we're all going to die, the world a shit. But what do we do about the real issues of the world like pic rel?

>>115167
Homophobia is both overexaggerated and underexaggerated worldwide

>>115168
every peabrain needs an enemy to keep them occupied

It was a hard decision, but I've decided the mass repliers need to be sacrificed for the greater good.

in my opinion? things would be way better if we just killed the "on topic sager" guy

your target for this mission is a "webmaster" currently living in quebec
he has been seen near boats and has an affinity for darkness in both lighting and as a lifestyle
be constantly on the lookout while searching for him, someone might speak french to you

please do not organize hits on the wrong person

please organize hits

>>115136
they expect one of us in the wreckage brother

I think artificial babies being made is a bit far off in the future.
Maybe in like, generations from now.
Anyways we should be building massive O'Neil Cylinders and colonizing them. You know if the Economic Forum was proposing that I would be okay with it, but what they want is mega-city slum crowding. Think Kowloon but the size of Chicago.

>>115067
While there are a good amount of daycare workers out there, I don't think it'd be a bad idea to have a field dedicated to raising kids from birth to adulthood in a caring and productive way to mostly assure the healthy upbringing of kids born out of these artificial wombs. That is, if we assume a scenario where we're just pumping out babies because nobody wants to have them. I think it'd probably be one way to help with finding employment for some people that are inevitably cut off by lack of usefulness to society and it could potentially be a fulfilling career to them given it has purpose and would probably have fair enough pay from the government. The rootless issue seems like it'd probably be a thing that lasts for a couple generations before the artificial children are more normalized into society, but change doesn't occur without a few growing pains. Also I do agree with that we're pampering the older generations way too much. If people allow dinosaurs to run their country it assumes they entrust some level of competency to a person of that age which should be perfect justification for raising retirement ages unless they want to institute age limits.

Aside from that, I think if we assume race differences to be a matter of upbringing and environment there's probably no real reason in a world where the government grows babies to not simply implement some sort of balance system to even out those genetic qualities in babies. Though, assuming a society where people are able to choose and getting children from growing facilities I don't think that equity arguments would be able to hold much water, since it'd be governments forcing their decisions about what a couple's kid should be like for them which would really get on people's nerves and probably cause more pushback than any possibly equity argument would. Forcing babies with undesired characteristics unto couples also seems like a recipe for disaster as well with the resentment it may breed in those that are forced out of a choice by the government, potentially jeopardizing the upbringing of the child. Although that does get a bit weird when we run into arguments like >>115071 where we're purposefully disabling children as per the wishes of the parent. In that case you're somewhat morally responsible for whatever hardships the child goes through because of your selfish decision to make the baby like you, which would probably turn a lot of people off from making this an issue in the first place.

>>115072
>And there's not even a need to do that unless the well of immigrants somehow dries
That's why I'm assuming a society where we've fully developed and first-worlded every nation. Since at that point everyone should theoretically be suffering from birth rates falling below replacement. Also you say totalitarian, but is it necessarily so? I don't see why public funding for population raising centers would really be such a uncrossable line if it were needed to keep society from slowing dying out. But for the hypothetical centers I've thought up I haven't really given it much thought as to how they should work to raise kids through adulthood maybe there's some sort of necessary totalitarianism in that process that I haven't seen. For the most part I think they could work as places where the kids are taken care of and fed for the most part with maybe some guidance from the caregivers as they live out mostly normal lives aside from that quirk. Having specific government-funded facilities for it seems like a good way to make sure the "parents" are financially secure enough to provide for the kids.

Also to add on to my original point on this, I don't think that any arbitrary moral wrong of 'eliminating' disabilities from birthed kids would sufficiently outweight the actual moral wrong of intentionally allowing or even forcing kids to be disabled for the sake of social justice. We seem to be in agreement mostly on that though.

>>115066
will the new homunculi be cute

>>115261
tater tots

>>115261
Tiny little spud (30, unmarried).

>>115257
Even if it does become necessary, a government that forces its citizens to have (or not have) children is a totalitarian one. It's an extreme level of interference in the lives of the people. What your vision would lead to is likely government-run boarding schools where all the orphans live. The school system is already the instrument by which the government exerts control over the child rearing process, so it would make sense that it gets expanded in this scenario to encompass the new realities. And if the government is getting that hands-on about ensuring productive future workers, I can see a gradual shift towards all parents placing their kids in these schools until the idea of parents raising children on their own becomes completely foreign. But that's just my fun little dystopia idea.

As for disabilities, I don't even think it's just a social justice thing, it's just a matter of subjective morality. There are disabled people living much more fulfilling lives than I'm living and there have been ones who contributed more to society than I do. Why then is it right to refuse them life on the sole basis of their disability? And even if we do, at what point is it acceptable to take action to prevent disabilities? Should we shoot handicapped people? Smother disabled infants? Abort disabled fetuses? Refuse implantation of fertilized eggs that will grow to have disabilities? Reject the use of DNA that leads to disabilities? Different people will have different answers. You and I might see it the same way, but that doesn't make our moral viewpoint objective. That's why you shouldn't make laws on moral basis.

>>115266
I hope the Japanese are inspired (to make hentai) by the inevitable forced seedings in red china

Democratic backsliding is a process happening worldwide so governments definitely could sooner rather than later

>>115266
I think somewhere along the line my idea was misinterpreted.
>a government that forces its citizens to have (or not have) children is a totalitarian one
My proposal wasn't the government forcing its citizens to have children or not have them, but rather having human growing facilities that have people employed by the government to take care of the kids grown to keep the population at replacement levels. I think that the current school system could still work under these conditions since making the facilities do everything would be a bit too much to ask of its caretakers. But yeah, the idea of parents taking care of their own kids might become foreign to people if they rely too much on the caretaking facilities and those that grew up in them probably would understand it to be the norm. Ideally, in a society where free expression is valued the government wouldn't interfere too much in their upbringing, but that may be a bit naive assuming we give them the control to do so.

When it comes to the disability issue, my point is more about if we have the ability to prevent disabilities by altering their genes in some way. At that point the question isn't about deny life to people based on disability, but rather denying a normal life to those we know without treatment would otherwise be disabled. Is there really moral justification for that?

>>115266
Was actually reading about this just the other day.
One of my favorite modern writers argues that legislating a problem away even with force just doesn't work anyways, and that there's even historical precedent for it failing to do so.
https://www.738x738.com/post/%CF%80%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%86%CE%B7%CF%84%CE%B5%CE%AF%CE%B1-92