I like to look at this from the perspective of "how are we going to organize society given further technological advancement in the far future" and how do we get there.
Ignoring the endgames that come after the cessation of traditional human existence - either robotics replacing organics completely or mastery of genetics leading to the engineering of super-intelligent custom lifeforms to replace us - we are almost always either going to go extinct or refine our genetics to optimized templates. Eventually, we will be manufacturing humans with mathematically weighed balances between genetic diversity for disease resistance and optimized traits and features to make people live longer, stronger, and smarter. Probably going to be codified to be obedient to authority and not deviate from the social order as well, because that just honestly seems borderline unavoidable.
These humans will eventually be manufactured in artificial wombs in automated facilities meant to produce the population because in practice its severely debilitating and economically inefficient to take the females out of operation for so long to reproduce with such high biological risks associated. Cloned gametes from engineered templates grown in factories. The children would probably be mentally implanted with knowledge via brain-computer interfaces and taught everything virtually. Their biology would accelerate their development as much as is possible within our genetic profile. Years of research would have gone into optimizing their environments, interactions (if necessary, organic ones), and development to yield the most potential.
When you start stepping back from there, the closest bridge to that reality is going to be the institutionalization of child rearing. Before we have automated facilities breeding engineered templates we will almost certainly have public institutions dedicated to population replacement - in the optimistic scenario, women would simply "major" in parenting and live their careers as mothers. We will probably already be using engineered gametes by then because the technology is already mostly available, so these women would just have children and raise them as their full time career. Given current understanding of developmental psychology there would probably also be men assigned to play paternal roles in upbringing in full employment at such facilities as well.
I don't think at all this evolution in child rearing would ever happen overnight and its very likely in the same way you can still ride a horse today over owning a car or in the future how some will still drive manual cars in the age of autonomous vehicles some couples will do it "the old fashioned way" because they can. But it will probably, almost certainly, happen a lot less often.
And honestly from my perspective its for the best. Historically raising children is an absolutely full time job. Living on a farm, despite "working" in the fields at all hours of the day, still lets you keep the children at hand and raise them. You are never separated and the family is always together. That seems to be, barring abusive relationships, the optimal way human children develop. We have constructed employment institutions that make that impossible and try to both put pressure on laborers to reproduce but then also to somehow "do the job" of parenting at their own expense and economic disadvantage. It costs tremendous amounts of time to raise children, even more to actually do it well, and its never priced into the economy.
For now, this isn't a problem, and it likely won't be for a long time. We just get the collateral damage of mentally and physically harmed children from parental negligence that society pushes them towards. Eventually the economic pressure not to reproduce drives enough people not to that replacement becomes impossible and then such professional parenting institutions need to start being taken seriously. When it happens, its likely to be a very good thing - children raised by people paid to raise them, whose job is to be the best parent possible, and who will have comprehensive education in the hugely complex fields surrounding human development will be a substantial boon to the first children raised under it. Its just the cost of basically privatizing reproduction has to justify the investment, both culturally and economically, to make it happen.
For now the best thing to do would be to reduce the economic burden of life on adults to let them be more recreational and social and thus less lonely. Trying to force people back into a mold that was already broken to begin with is a violation of liberty with no real corresponding benefit - we aren't going to go back that way ever again, because truthfully we can do much better. We just have to choose to.
Ignoring the endgames that come after the cessation of traditional human existence - either robotics replacing organics completely or mastery of genetics leading to the engineering of super-intelligent custom lifeforms to replace us - we are almost always either going to go extinct or refine our genetics to optimized templates. Eventually, we will be manufacturing humans with mathematically weighed balances between genetic diversity for disease resistance and optimized traits and features to make people live longer, stronger, and smarter. Probably going to be codified to be obedient to authority and not deviate from the social order as well, because that just honestly seems borderline unavoidable.
These humans will eventually be manufactured in artificial wombs in automated facilities meant to produce the population because in practice its severely debilitating and economically inefficient to take the females out of operation for so long to reproduce with such high biological risks associated. Cloned gametes from engineered templates grown in factories. The children would probably be mentally implanted with knowledge via brain-computer interfaces and taught everything virtually. Their biology would accelerate their development as much as is possible within our genetic profile. Years of research would have gone into optimizing their environments, interactions (if necessary, organic ones), and development to yield the most potential.
When you start stepping back from there, the closest bridge to that reality is going to be the institutionalization of child rearing. Before we have automated facilities breeding engineered templates we will almost certainly have public institutions dedicated to population replacement - in the optimistic scenario, women would simply "major" in parenting and live their careers as mothers. We will probably already be using engineered gametes by then because the technology is already mostly available, so these women would just have children and raise them as their full time career. Given current understanding of developmental psychology there would probably also be men assigned to play paternal roles in upbringing in full employment at such facilities as well.
I don't think at all this evolution in child rearing would ever happen overnight and its very likely in the same way you can still ride a horse today over owning a car or in the future how some will still drive manual cars in the age of autonomous vehicles some couples will do it "the old fashioned way" because they can. But it will probably, almost certainly, happen a lot less often.
And honestly from my perspective its for the best. Historically raising children is an absolutely full time job. Living on a farm, despite "working" in the fields at all hours of the day, still lets you keep the children at hand and raise them. You are never separated and the family is always together. That seems to be, barring abusive relationships, the optimal way human children develop. We have constructed employment institutions that make that impossible and try to both put pressure on laborers to reproduce but then also to somehow "do the job" of parenting at their own expense and economic disadvantage. It costs tremendous amounts of time to raise children, even more to actually do it well, and its never priced into the economy.
For now, this isn't a problem, and it likely won't be for a long time. We just get the collateral damage of mentally and physically harmed children from parental negligence that society pushes them towards. Eventually the economic pressure not to reproduce drives enough people not to that replacement becomes impossible and then such professional parenting institutions need to start being taken seriously. When it happens, its likely to be a very good thing - children raised by people paid to raise them, whose job is to be the best parent possible, and who will have comprehensive education in the hugely complex fields surrounding human development will be a substantial boon to the first children raised under it. Its just the cost of basically privatizing reproduction has to justify the investment, both culturally and economically, to make it happen.
For now the best thing to do would be to reduce the economic burden of life on adults to let them be more recreational and social and thus less lonely. Trying to force people back into a mold that was already broken to begin with is a violation of liberty with no real corresponding benefit - we aren't going to go back that way ever again, because truthfully we can do much better. We just have to choose to.