by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright July 2018
Starting late in the 21st century the Population Bust is going to hit Earth. By then most people will be urbanites which means that compared to the 2010's the fertility rate will be low and the population will be very old. Japan and South Korea are examples of this happening in the 2010's. This Population Bust will be a crisis of the day, and humanity will be trying many ways to solve it.
One way of solving the problem will be to let cyber muses create baby clubs and do child creating and raising. In this timeframe humans will also be doing a lot of child creating and raising in baby clubs so the difference will simply be that the raisers are purely cyber muses instead of a mix of cyber and humans. Again, this will happen because not enough humans want to get into this child raising activity, they will have too many other interesting things to do which are competing for their time and attention. This distracting has been a characteristic of urban environments ever since they were invented around four thousand years ago.
So, if cyber muses are raising children instead of humans, what will be the difference when the kids grow up? What will be different between human-raised and cyber-raised adults?
That is what this essay is about.
There will be two big differences in the raising process between humans and cyber muses. First, the cyber muses will not be distracted by other activities going on in their lives, they will be giving full attention to the raising process all the time. Second, the cyber muses will have different agendas concerning what they think the raising should accomplish.
The result of these differences is that the adults that come out of these raising processes will have different thinking styles. Their priorities will be different, their living styles will be different, and their methods for solving the problems they face will be different.
These differences will begin at the beginning -- choosing how to engineer zygotes and choosing which to raise will be different between human and cyber child raisers. The differences will then continue all through the child raising process -- both nature and nurture are going to be different for human and cyber-raised children and the adults they become.
What will be the goals of pure cyber child raising? This is hard to forecast. There will be a mix, the process doesn't have to be uniform, just as with human raisers there will be variety from club to club. Two likely priorities are raising kids in an ambitious style so they will contribute to humanity's prosperity, and raising kids in a family-friendly style that makes them want to have lots of their own kids. This latter presumes the cyber think that human-raised kids are preferable to cyber-raised kids.
Because their raisers are single-minded it is likely the adults will be more single-minded as well. Unless the cyber raisers see virtue in distraction, or their kids dealing with distraction, their progeny are likely to be very directed in their day-to-day lifestyles. They will have clearly defined goals and put a lot of attention and effort into accomplishing them. Again, these goals are likely be in at least two categories: making the world a better place to live and making lots of children of their own.
This is going to make them seem a lot like the people I encountered at MIT when I went there. These people seemed standoffish when I first met them, then got nice and friendly when I got to know them better. What was happening was they were standoffish at first because they were very busy and thinking about what they were busy at. They got friendly when they discovered that I was one of them and I could be of help with what they were busy at. I envision that these cyber-raised people will have a similar attitude about people they meet.
Some people are going to be upset that this pure cyber raising is happening. They will get even more upset when these kids mature and are seen to be distinctly different as adults. Conversely, there will be other people who are deeply concerned about the Population Bust. They will recognize the difference but feel that it is a price that must be paid to sustain the human population. How high profile this controversy gets will vary.
When communities are deeply stressed by other issues the profile will rise. When stress is high this will be one of the "things going wrong with our community", which means it will become a target for "fixing" in various ways, some of which could become violent witch-hunting campaigns.
When stress is not high this will be just part of the mix of new lifestyles that will be emerging in the late 21st century.
--The End--