[trhway]

>what the driver for reproduction will be

the people without such driver are naturally weeded out, so due to such weeding out the majority of the population always naturally consist of the people who have such a driver, it may be some crazy one in any given particular case, yet it is there.

>in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time.

and with artificial uterine it would mean that some people, the wealthy ones, would be able to have a hundred, or a thousand of children. Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.

>would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?

the people who wouldn't be able to afford it as having children would be less beneficial for society as you correctly noted and it will be more like a personal luxury/indulgence and thus would be treated accordingly - taxed, no child support help from government, etc

[teeray]

> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.

Time could be the great equalizer here. Spending time with your children is pretty universally accepted as beneficial, so we could make it mandatory for extrauterine births over some threshold. It could be structured such that the more extrauterine children you have, the more of your 24 hours per day must be spent with them. I’m intentionally hand-waving over specifics of what that would look like and enforcement, but I’m sure you can come up with ideas. The goal is: if you want to artificially have hundreds of extrauterine children, society will take from you all the time you could have spent building rockets and running companies.

[scotty79]

We are limiting sperm donors. I don't see why wouldn't we limit future parents for the same reasons.

[lotsofpulp]

Time isn’t a sufficient measure to serve as a proxy for quality parenting.

[ben_w]

But it is a way to limit people to a fixed maximum number of children.

Say it's a requirement for an hour per day per child — no matter how many drugs Musk takes to stay awake, he can't have more than 24 kids.

[satvikpendem]

But, lots of people have many kids thst they don't take care of. Genghis Khan is one such example, apocryphally having so many kids as to constitute 2% of the current Asian population having had him as an ancestor. So I don't quite get your point, there is no maximum.

[ben_w]

The suggestion is to change the rules, so what people currently do is irrelevant.

Genghis Khan set the rules, which is why actually changing them would be very difficult.

[satvikpendem]

The suggestion falls apart under any scrutiny, you can't force anyone to take care of their kids, if they want to, they will, and if they don't, they won't. Genghis Khan is more closer to our current ruleset than anyone currently is to this suggested rule set, he didn't set any rules, he was following the same rules as people currently do, as I mentioned in the previous sentence.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

I think a lot of people living at that time would constitute 2% of the current Asian population having had him (or her) as an ancestor.

[gnfargbl]

> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.

I agree that is a very likely outcome. We've seen that behaviour before in history, e.g. the Ottoman Imperial Harem contained a minimum of several hundred women at its peak. We would almost certainly see it again. Remember, though, that those children still need to be cared for after birth, and that requires humans.

[rsynnott]

The main driver for that sort of thing was a system where production of heirs was seen as socially essential; this is now largely obsolete.

(Even then, the really extreme examples of polygamy were more about social status than practical concerns around succession; again, this is now largely obsolete in most societies.)

[FORGIVENHEROs]

OT, and maybe, my words ain't effective, but talking to a young woman, i thought i'd talked to "supermom". She told me what she'd "left and quit just to be a good mommy for her daughter." I looked at her, "wearing glasses -too big, to 'be modern'", a warm pullover - knitted, masking upper arms and (her) middle. But than i saw her grabbing a cell-phone (daughter call incomming...), she became 'supermom'.

So if any, could remember that there were 'telephone boxes' ...changing clothes...

[Reports:Humor]

HINT: Action Comics #1 (published April 18, 1938).[1] Superman has been adapted to several other media...

(-;

[1] quoting: wikipedia

[trhway]

>Remember, though, that those children still need to be cared for after birth, and that requires humans.

I think AI and robots would make human involvement minimally necessary, be it basic physical care or education.

[ben_w]

On the one hand, based on FSD, Musk would be one of the first people to attempt this, well before the AI was capable enough to do a good job.

On the other, super-rich people can already afford a lot of humans to assist with raising their kids. AI isn't strictly necessary for this, as seen with e.g. Genghis Khan.

But yeah, if the G and the I in AGI is good enough and general enough, then robots directed by it could do a good job of raising kids — but at some point, you have to ask what life is even for, why you're having kids at all if you don't want to be involved in raising them.

[trhway]

> a lot of humans to assist with raising their kids. AI isn't strictly necessary for this, as seen with e.g. Genghis Khan.

it willn't be just kids. It will be "designer babies". Cleaned-up DNA with imports from Mozart and Einstein DNAs, and countless other improvements and enhancements for higher IQ, stronger muscles, faster reaction, better health, etc and cyber-enhanced with Neuralink style connection from may be even before being born, etc. There would be not many humans who would be able even to just keep up, less serve as teachers and trainers to such kids.

> to be involved in raising them.

engineering them is also involvement.

[ben_w]

> engineering them is also involvement.

Have you ever played video games with cheats enabled? Some of them are still fun, others feel pointless. If you want to treat your offspring as a machine to be engineered rather than raised, why bother with flesh in the first place, why not regard the AI itself as the offspring?

If a child were engineered as thoroughly as you suggest, the distance between them and their parents would necessarily be as severe as the distance between them and their potential human teachers.

But also there is a practical issue:

Musk specifically may well test such things on his own kids before the tech is actually ready, but any sensible person would want these interventions to have passed a full clinical trial before reaching their offspring. Such trials would necessarily lead to there being many humans with any one of those enhancements before all of them, making any gap much smaller in practice than you anticipate.

[trhway]

>to treat your offspring as a machine to be engineered rather than raised

raising is engineering, just very slow and with very limited results just because of the very limited toolset currently available. Look how parents using hormones and blockers, etc. - that is about max engineering available today and they do it because it benefits their children (i'm making pure engineering-wise point, and i'm not qualified nor have any intention to discuss whether it is really beneficial or not)

>why bother with flesh in the first place, why not regard the AI itself as the offspring?

The people replacing flesh children with AI would naturally be weeding their DNA out thus leading to the significant share of the population still preferring flesh ones.

>he distance between them and their parents would necessarily be as severe

parents want their kids to succeed, to do better than the parents. It is a biological imperative (as otherwise your DNA is weeded out by the one's who do get their children to do better, and thus those have been and will be the majority of the population). The first-gen immigrant parents working as say janitors and their college kids - huge difference and the parents are happy for it.

And don't forget that the parents here are themselves would already be the N-th generation of improvement, much ahead of the rest of the population.

>with any one of those enhancements before all of them

with any one, yet not all. Being a test subject for one feature is very different than having a package of those features.

>making any gap much smaller in practice than you anticipate.

in addition the test subjects may be prevented from propagating their DNA. (Cetaganda from the Vorkosigan saga :)

[scotty79]

> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.

Something is stopping Elon from founding fertility clinic and sperm bank with just his sperm.