To be fair, artificial womb technology would really mess with society.

It could end the abortion issue if fertilized eggs could be moved early enough. Any woman who didn't want a baby could have it transferred to an artificial womb and sign away all rights to/responsibility for it. Any father who wanted their child when the mother didn't could keep it. It could help premature infants too.

That's very likely to be the future of the human race where governments produce, train and push out artificial humans like a factory. Well if we don't solve aging and robotics by then, then we'll probably just stop having babies altogether or at least not in a quantity that matters.

Artificial womb developed decade ago (2016): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb

> If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.

We could but maybe we don’t? Slavery is pretty inefficient. If South Korea could mass produce people, I’m pretty sure the government would be happy with just letting them be normal members of society instead of some kind of Smurf slave caste for a populace vanishing from demographic collapse.

Fiction is nice when you want to speculate on “what if …” but reality is infinitely more complex.

Gene editing is a whole different topic. And only the very first one would need to be "born of woman".

Artificial eggs are basically irrelevant to the dystopia you're describing.

Eggs are simpler than Wombs. Chickens are simpler than Humans. Of course we have to solve the simpler things first. Of course, this is leading along the same path as occurs in Brave New World. We have to be able to grow chickens before we can move on to humans.

We already have cloning. But have lacked being able to do it without implanting the egg into a female. This is just getting us closer.

Baby steps. That the dystopia isn't happening today doesn't mean we aren't working on it.

What is "it", exactly? I have probably read some of the same dystopian science fiction novels as you have. But this is Jurassic Park, not A Brave New World.

In one of the movies, they did clone a human, they just didn't lean into that story line. It was treated as a one-off, but the same science allowed both. (in the fictional story)

The point isn't that we'll have humans tomorrow. Just that this one step. We'll need to solve problems on simpler animals first. An egg is easier than a womb, a chicken is easier than a human. It's the start.

So yes. Brave New World isn't today. But its obvious this technology is on the same path.

So I'm not providing a good literary survey of books with similar tropes and providing some of the positive ones? There are literally half dozen very famous negative examples, but I didn't do good enough search to find a positive one?

That would be like every comment on AI should include some example from The Culture Series as an example that all this AI stuff could great.

No man, it's just that saying "this scenario is popular because it makes for a good story therefore it'll happen in reality" is an absurd point to make.

Taking scientific breakthroughs and extrapolating and/or comparing to Science Fiction? Shock, clutch my pearls, who would do such a thing. The absurdity. Surely nobody has done this before.

And they were all about as right as chance!

Sure. If you take all of Science Fiction, if you want, take all of Literature. And compare it to everything that actually has happened. Then Fiction has guessed at more things than have actually happened. So, a poor predictor.

Not sure what that point is proving. We shouldn't look at fiction for any inspiration or cautionary tales? Just shut up and calculate?

The point is proving that "chickens now, maybe humans later" is just an extremely poor predictor. It's a useless disapproval of a new technology based on "hey, you can't prove it won't happen!".

Never said it is a proof.

But it is a necessary step.

So, we might not get humans. Ok, but we also wont get humans without simpler test cases along the way. Simpler animals, simpler mechanisms. So now we are taking those steps.

We can't see the end, but we are on the road.

Maybe that is why the fictional stories resonate here. It is easy to see the possible connections. Easy to make the leap from here, to what could be. Even if it is not an actual predictor like a scientific proof.

I still don't understand how an artificial hard physical egg, like the ones a natural chicken lays, which I'm pretty sure is not where humans come from; I don't understand where that is "on the road" simply because, and again, I'm no biologist, but as far as I know, humans don't come from hard shelled eggs.

Its the crawl before walking argument.

You need to invent transistors before you can invent the computer.

If you went back in time when transistors were invented and told them to be careful, those might lead to a global computer network controlled by social media companies that will enslave you. They would look at you like your crazy. And yet there was sci-fi stories at the time about future computers.

So, on one hand, yes I'm making a leap. But on other, it isn't completely crazy. Not so crazy to dismiss.

The egg is on the same technology path. But yes, humans are far off.