Unless you are actively for killing people once they hit a certain age, demographic collapse is a real problem. You cannot care for the elderly with nothing but robots. Elders need healthcare. They need people in general and unlike young people they don’t move from dead rotting towns. In demographic collapse they don’t even have anyone to make them because they don’t have kids.

See Japan for how demographic collapse is working out. Young people are being crushed by the weight of what it takes to care for too many old people. And the cycle is only getting worse because of course young people don’t have kids when very stressed. Japan has whole towns going to rot. They’re economy is experiencing negative effects from not having the expected amount of workers for what they need.

You really want a gradually declining population. You want your birth rate to be about 2. 2.1 is the replacement rate. Currently the US is the only developed country doing this and mostly by accident due to immigration. The US is experiencing a much less pronounced pension crisis than other developed nations. Instead we can focus exclusively on our fascist regime bid for power. That’s our of population decline as well, but we get to fight against it since the US is fairly balanced in demographics (for now. It remains to be seen how the millennial generation will handle being dominant generation in a decade or so)

The wealthy require a functioning economy to continue to be wealthy. A functioning economy requires that there be enough money being spent. People can’t spend money if they don’t have jobs. The wealthy will ensure people will have jobs. They might not be great jobs and people might be treated like shit, but there will be jobs. There might be periods where there is vast unemployment, but those periods never last long.

Go ahead, see how many cashier openings there are at your nearest Walmart.

Go ahead, see how many cooper(barrel maker) or elevator operator openings there are. Before the invention of the ICE there used to be an incredible number of people involved in farming because it is super labor intensive from start to finish. It used to be one of the primary employment source for a majority of the country, the world even. Now one farmer can till, plant, and harvest hundreds to thousands of acres all by their self. all thanks to technology. Once it took tens of people to till fields, then some stone age genius invented the plow. So it took a handful of people to pull and direct the plow. Then someone realized they could hook animals up instead of using other people. Jobs are constantly disappearing and being replaced with new types of jobs. Your point is moot, as history has proved time and again.

That’s not really how that works. There’s not a section in one’s DNA that codes for bones, rather there are sections that code for proteins that get involved in chemical reactions that begin building bones themselves. DNA codes for chemicals that when they come together at the right time produce your fingers for example. It’s not that the DNA codes for a 32mm birth canal it just codes for the proper chemicals to come together to begin developing what will eventually become the birth canal.

So editing the DNA to modify a particular physical aspect is not just reprogramming a new number somewhere in the DNA, it’s coding for more expression of particular chemicals to come together. But like anything, adding more reactions can have various side effects, having those chemicals linger for too long and the tissue may eventually become too frail to even give birth to begin with.

You know, like utilize our knowledge of DNA to fix known issues as such

And that’s easier said than done. Editing DNA isn’t something we regularly do and when it is done, it’s usually done on something simple because editing usually results in a 99% loss. Long story short, editing haploids (and most likely male sperm) is going to be the primary means for germline genetic editing that “might” be passed on to children because most people are not ethically okay with attempting to edit embryos with a 99% failure rate.

But editing haploids doesn’t assure that the trait will be conveyed to the offspring. During combination some of the genetic material is mixed around in a sort random fashion. So that new trail could get mixed around and now you’ve coded for a pregnancy that might end in miscarriage or even worse, might not.

It’s really complicated and incredibly error prone to edit DNA. Which is why it is mostly done with sperm, yeast, bacteria, and what not. Things that if we kill 99% of it, isn’t some big ethical concern. Editing an embryo is like rolling ten million dice and every single one of them have to land on six otherwise you’ve just doomed that person. That’s not an impossible thing, just a highly improbable thing and no one is really comfortable with those odds from an ethical standpoint. We’re not really good at editing DNA correctly the first time, but given enough of something, we can eventually have success. So if the odds are one in a million and you have 500 million of something, then you’ve got really good odds at success.

So you should keep that in mind when you think about editing DNA. Even if we got really good at knowing which genes to express and which ones to repress (which we’re not even there yet), putting in those changes that would actually make it to the offspring would also be monumental. So yeah, we’re not anywhere near where I think you think science is at.

start growing people in a lab

I also commented elsewhere about this notion. But also, even if we did have an artificial womb today, it’s likely going to be in the NICU of your local hospital and not some laboratory. Because an artificial womb, as I indicated in my other comment, would only really be for preterm births greater than 22 weeks gestation, which is way better than what we get with incubators that only give moderate success rates at 28 to 32 weeks gestation and are ideally for 32 to 37 weeks gestation.

You’d “flip the fuck out” if you were born in a bag in a laboratory, but wouldn’t flip the fuck out if you were born out of your mom’s genetically modified bag? Why force lifelong gene alteration on 50% of the population because you don’t feel good about where you might have spent 9 months you’d never remember?

I suspect the narrow birth canal issue is a result of evolutionary trade offs. Sure, you might be able to engineer a wider birth canal but doing so without impacting your ability to walk might be challenging.

Tell ya what though, if I found out I was grown in a bag in a laboratory, I’d flip the fuck out. You want more people with psychological issues, go ahead, start growing people in a lab…

Why? What difference does it make? I’d have no problem with that. In fact I’d think that’s pretty cool. Would you freak out if you found out you were delivered via cesarian section? I’m not really seeing how this is much different.

You know, like utilize our knowledge of DNA to fix known issues as such, while still encouraging natural biological processes?

I would love to see us do that and in fact I think that’s the direction we need to go if we’re going to survive as a species. The big thing we need to watch out for is that we don’t start developing into a monoculture. We need to maintain a certain amount of diversity or else we open ourselves up to being wiped out by a single pathogen or disaster.

Ultimately our medical knowledge is getting too good. Genetic disorders that would have been death sentences 200 years ago are just mild inconveniences now and so those genetic defects are starting to proliferate. We need to utilize genetic tech to fix those obvious problems, while also not going overboard and classifying unusual variations as defects to be fixed which would ultimately result in the monoculture problem I discussed previously.