Artificial wombs and the future of pregnance and humanity

[griffon]

I have been fantasizing this technology for the past few weeks. Interesting how this thread just popped up.

What I envision, is baby factory, on a way larger scale than a lab, able to produce something like 10,000 babies per day. To start the production you need fertilized eggs. So this means there are two modes of production, one is cloning, another is the mixing of two high-quality individuals genes. Cloning is on a limited scale and probably on a smaller factory due to higher cost. While the latter is much easier, you just get a high-quality female to produce eggs, fertilized by sperms from high-quality male in a test tube, then transfer them to the artificial womb and grow.

Cloning is more precise and allow you the exact copies of the individual you want to produce, such as highly-intelligent scientists, engineers etc. The other method is not precise, it is based on the assumption that the offsprings of highly intelligent people are more likely to be very intelligent themselves, but they are much cheaper to produce because they do not involve the additional step, which is cloning.

Moreover, I think the production should be done at a huge scale, producing as many high-quality individual as possible, with the state's help. The state should realize that each baby produced, will eventually return a high-profit to cover the cost, considering they are likely to be highly intelligent. Incentives can also be implemented to maximize the involvement of the whole society, individuals can choose to "invest" in a number of new babies in promise that when they grow up, 10% of their wages will belong to them.

Basically it will result in a paradise, full of good-looking and highly-intelligent people, able to produce extremly advanced technology. The new people, might eventually replace Homo Sapiens, something I call "Second Evolution", or "Second Radiation". Homo Sapiens would be the new Neanderthals, to be replaced by the vastly more superior new human, whether they are willing or not.

[ImageBased]

I don't think it's practical.


-It would be too expensive to have any major net gain or minus to humanity. Few could or would do it.

-Most people who have children want to have children, not have a machine have their children.

-Due to the above realities, the irony would be that the very people who would find this idea appealing would likely be the very people that naturally would end up never having kids. In effect this could mean that you are actually promoting the birth of humans from biological lines that nature had selected for discontinuation.