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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I don't see a net benefit to give your janitors, for example, high-end mental enhancements (other than pruning "boredom" and "ambition" nodes).

I'd say that retoolability counts as a benefit. Operating off a strict genetic caste system based on assigned social roles is unsustainable since it requires you to somehow be able to reliably forecast your future needs (like what ratio of janitors:scientists you would need in X amount of years). If and when skilled roles unexpectedly open up that need to be filled, it'll be very difficult for anyone else to fill them.

The only way this remotely works is if it's possible for forms of mental enhancement (genetic or mechanical/technological) to be applied to service-class mods later in life so they can operate at the same level as those modified as embryos, allowing a society to react to circumstances as they arise. But even if that can happen, radically changing someone at a later stage of development would likely inherently be more difficult and time-consuming than embryo editing and introduces a huge amount of unnecessary lag and unwieldiness into the system. The simpler and more optimal solution would be to make it so that people can pliably adapt to a range of jobs from the outset.

Also, there's automation (which likely would develop in tandem with other technologies like genetic modification), and that would make a lot of "janitor"-type jobs irrelevant in the first place.

EDIT: added more