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Let's say I'm put in charge of a government-sponsored group tasked with ensuring newborn babies come out of the womb as close as possible to a fully functioning member of society. Ideally this means they can walk, talk, feed themselves, etc. I have unlimited resources and there are no IRBs to stop experimentation. I have also gained immortality so I can see this project through to its completion.
What is the general procedure to get babies closer to self-reliance and how close do you think they could get?
(I've always wondered why we seem to be some of the only animals in the kingdom to not be self-sufficient immediately upon birth and what we can do about it.)
Uh.. Is keeping the babies in the "womb" for far longer a valid option? Maybe an artificial womb that really knows how to stretch, till they're there for half a decade while in immersive VR.
For all the ranges of intelligence known to occur naturally in mankind, including the most prodigious of geniuses, they all came out as wailing and useless babies. They only really distinguished themselves after at least a couple years of growth.
You'd probably need some kind of strong genetic editing, an ability to force ultra-rapid cognitive maturation in-utero, some kind of BCI that could pump knowledge by the bucket load into a fetal brain. Even then, getting them to be remotely useful at birth while even being vaguely human strikes me as unlikely.
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