Let’s suppose that at some future date, a very expensive treatment exists for human aging. Or, alternatively, a very expensive treatment for death exists, where dead people can have their brains sliced and emulated, de facto giving you a virtual copy of the dead person to talk to. The “dead” person’s emulation at the minimum allows you to download skills from that person and use them as well as your own.
My thinking is that if this were possible, if you had a “family” of people who know how to do everything and who’s new members immediately start becoming optimal citizens at age 10 or so (just as soon as their body is large enough to accept downloads from their elders), such families would be dominant. No one who didn’t follow their strategies could compete. All the naysayers would become literal dust in the wind, their descendents repeating the same mistakes.
I don’t know. Lots of time technological and scientific progress is made when a younger generation replaces its elders. Young people may make a lot of mistakes out of ignorance or inexperience, but you can get a lot of innovation since they don’t don’t have as much of a stake in the status quo.
How successful do you think a family would be if all of its members had a typical 80 year old’s attitude towards computers?
Yeah, I’m also inclined to think that this would produce lots of backward thinking that didn’t take advantage of new techniques and technologies.
What I really find puzzling is why a family would become dominant based on something like skills. Seriously, look around and find me a single wealthy family that bases their wealth on skill for more than one generation. The reality - technology or not - is that you only need skill to get rich in the first place (and maybe not even then). After that, you can just hire skilled people to maintain the wealth, and your kids can devote their lives to scandalous TV shows.