Plus infinite life seems a near super power. Would they just hand it to nobodies? Seems like at that point they could produce a special few that live forever while the rest of the plebs have a largely normal life.
And heck, to extend your idea further; if it is equally difficult than perhaps you could do both, not one or the other. So make many mortals and a select few chosen royalty bloodlines that live forever. You get a population you can predictably control and forever royalty.
.. sometimes i'm glad i wasn't born 500 years later.
So the whole economic structure would have to be very different. Maybe AI’s will be specifically designed to serve humans, and maybe they’ll design particularly rebellious humans, as they present more novel requests.
Of course the technology might never get there either but to me gene editing for a birth defect sounds easier than gene editing to live forever but maybe i underestimate the former.
It wasn't a feature; it was a bug. The company marketed it as a feature, but in reality (before Rachael, maybe) they didn't know how to build Nexus-6 with more than a four-year life expectancy. When Roy finally tracks down his creator and demands he remove it, Tyrell admits that he can't.
```
Tyrell: You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
```
It's the realization that his own creator, despite all the marketing hype, isn't a god, but just another flawed mortal... that the two of them are fundamentally equal creatures in this mad universe... that pushes Roy past the edge into madness and eventual redemption, when he realizes that in the face of a universe so cold and uncaring about the life within it, it's only life that can care about life. All of it, in all its forms.
But in the real world people already die at a predictable age - we are all statistics.
Pretty much a science fantasy, but what stops the population from engineering it back?
replace it to "when". Hopefully we can avoid it and use the tech to fix health problems for existing people
People who don't want to raise kids probably also wouldn't want to raise artificial kids.
If the kids are put in state's care, well, current society can't take good care of existing orphans. How are we going to handle more parent-less kids?
I have two children whom I have tried quite conscientiously to not expose to the more toxic parts of our culture. They have, to my knowledge, never watched any of the sitcoms where some significant fraction of the comedy revolves around parents and other adults complaining about having children/families. None of the standup comedians of that ilk (supposing that's still a part of their schtick). I avoid anything that talks about how "your carbon footprint will be smaller if you just don't have kids". They weren't really aware of the term "overpopulation".
Most of all, I've always talked quite fondly and genuinely of having become a father myself.
And, now, even as teenagers, they seem to look forward to the idea of becoming parents themselves one day.
I don't have a large sample size, and it's hardly scientific, but the biggest problem I think is that our culture revels in how awful parenting is. The act of believing that idea causes people to be incapable of enjoying it. I also suspect rather strongly that it is more than just some arbitrary meme that bounces around in everyone's collective heads, instead the idea itself causes people to fail to enjoy parenting and to avoid it. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy, should they fail to achieve lasting childlessness.
Why should such a culture deserve to even survive? Your civilization requires that people continue to reproduce, but shows nothing but contempt for the concept. It shows contempt for itself. All of the very ideals this civilization embraces and exalts seem contrary to reproduction, and no one shows any awareness that that would have to change, let alone interest in making the changes.
Also, orphans is an interesting word. This isn't Charles Dickens' London. There really aren't all that many orphans anymore. No big wars, plagues with that one exception are rather uncommon. Don't even do the thing where we steal the infants of unwed teenagers or natives anymore. When some rich people want to adopt, they usually end up having to fly halfway around the world to purchase them from warlords and conmen.
Also, what if, they engineer these "artificial" humans to die preciesly when they reach a particular age? The state can then accurately predict retirement benefits, design infrastructure, distribute benefits more uniformly