As for demography - this being 2022, we cannot rule out that further progress in biotech will result in kids born from artificial uteruses.
If by 2030, first kids are born in "factories", governments will plan for the future in a different way than if they know that there are no alternatives to natural births.
Who would raise the artificial kids? Who would pay for it in the first place?
Maybe government. Or scarier some company.
It would be awesome if we could fully support children and education. It would be gross if the only way to do that was capitalistic incentives.
Maybe that's a sick sci-fi startup idea to pitch (more like write a book about).
Raise kids from scratch, long term 50 year roi horizon returned from the increased earning potential from having raised the kids and educated them better! I doubt VC money would go for something unless you could speed up development to get your unicorn in 5 years lol
Joking aside it seems to me the answer is way simpler and doesn't require magic tech. We still have working bodies. We just have to support them with free childcare, great education, healthcare, and other social support for parents. But we can't seem to get enough votes for that. Immigration is an easy solution too but same thing...
Given how specialization works in other areas of life, I would expect "professional parents" to emerge, adopting 5-10 artificial kids over their lifetime. Possibly even more. That could actually be a reasonable job for people who are otherwise less qualified.
In more authoritarian countries, I would expect government-run boarding schools to emerge, preparing boys for future careers in military or the Party, girls ... well, that would depend on local culture, probably.
"Joking aside it seems to me the answer is way simpler and doesn't require magic tech. We still have working bodies."
If it were so simple, some countries would be able to solve it. I would, on the other hand, say, that it is as "simple" as solving the obesity crisis: a problem that looks straightforward from a distance, but turns into a maze of nightmarish "devil's details" up close.
We do not really have working bodies. Peak fertility is in late teenage years and early twenties, but societies which highly value education must shift childbearing to much later age. And after 30, a lot of people who want to have kids are no longer capable to do so without medical help, and this process is so tedious and stressful that you will wind up with smaller families than wished for.
Already about 5 per cent of kids are born out of IVF, which indicates that the cohort of people struggling with fertility is significant.
No, they aren’t. Assisted reproductive technology (including IVF) is involved in about 2.1% of US [0] and 0.3% of global [1] births.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/art/state-specific-surveillance/index.ht...
[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/03/02/218...
Interesting thought about gender separation in authoritarian countries too. A lot of outdated concept of gender is rooted in the role of motherhood, which in this scenario wouldn't really be a thing. More a specialized career.
Yeah I guess my meta point was a lot of people wait to have kids because of their careers and the ginormous cost of raising kids. But that's a good point about education; even with all the resources in the world it's hard to raise kids and attain grad school or higher education. But graduating college by 21 still leaves a lot of time.
The same time in the past was 1846, when railway was barely a thing and Morse's telegraph just entered experimental use.