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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

How exactly would human cloning affect world population to any significant level? You still need someone to be pregnant for about nine months to give birth to a clone, why does it matter if they give birth to a clone or a normal child?

Or do you mean human "printing", some machine that can carry a pregnancy instead of a human doing it? I don't think there is even a glimmer of such technology on the horizon. Then again, you seem to also think that there is some imaginable chance that we'll discover interstellar travel in the next 75 years, so maybe that doesn't stop you?

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It is indeed quite a stretch to see how this could affect world population in the next few years, but I have read about people going through crazier developments over the course of a lifetime.

One example scenario would require some narcissistic billionaire women to start producing their personal cloning machines. Production could go up to, say, an extra one of them (except for the billionaire part) each year. If that catches on, in a similar fashion to plastic surgery, we could see global fertility rates revert to Catholic levels. It also helps to think in terms of identical twins, triplets, and beyond.

Having a lot of children is now mostly limited by raising of said kids to require a lot of effort and money. It does not seem like a stretch to assume that robots could lend a hand here, at least on the 75 year horizon.

Could be like blade runner where you make adults and just inject childhood memories inside their brains.

well you're in for suprise!

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02901-1

now while this isn't nearly at the level of human cloning, it never ceases to amaze me how far we've come.

Artificial wombs don't reduce the period of bring a child to be be a functioning social being (currently 18 - 28 years). Nor the costs or other incentives or disincentives.

To me, the most likely consequence is to reduce the total fertility rate to one child per woman.

This is far from even hinting at an artificial womb. It is at best a replacement for an infant ventilator and incubator. In the best case, it will improve survival rates for fetuses that even today sometimes survive.

But the first 20 or so weeks, from conception up to viability, are an entirely different prospect and we have no idea how we could replicate them yet.

i understand where you're coming from but like any other ecosystem, we'll need a bunch of puzzle pieces and this just happens to be one of them :)

I believe this particular piece is like claiming that the ancient Egyptians being happy that they are closer to building space rockets, now that they understand how to build an aerodynamic tip for an arrow. It is a piece of the puzzle, but it is very far from the part that is extremely hard to do.

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