[Duke]

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The fact that we don't need to have tons of kids for survival is what marks the most recent evolutionary breakthrough. We evolve culturally now, and our children 'inherit' these traits through our upper level interactions with them instead of exclusively through genetic process.

It's not hard to see how the more extreme cases of what you're describing produce 'less fit' offspring. They work in construction yards and factories, they are the warehouse grunts. They are needed to bootstrap the rest of society and provide a foundation for infrastructure. If they ever become useless to society their economic means will certainly be cut off and their numbers will dwindle. The process regulates itself, there's no need for anyone to engineer a selection mechanism.

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This is something that a lot of people just don't get. We will not always need those warehouse grunts, or the garbage men. We will automate every single mundane process that there is, and then move on to more difficult things to automate. You understand this, but most don't.

I hear a lot of "someone has to pick up the garbage," and the like, but that's criminally short sighted.