> A few thousand years of this and the only thing left will be people who really want kids
It would take less than a hundred years to create the first baby from scratch without human intervention. From there, the possibilities are endless. China seems like a probable candidate that lacks human rights controls and has enough biotech to build world’s first baby factory, but even if only North Korea has the tech and political will initially, the pressure on the depopulating countries would either legalize these or at least relax immigration to the extent necessary to benefit from them.
The problem with this theory is that the family is the most important human institution and all of human evolutionary history has occurred in the context of this fact. So if you think you can just make babies without families, well… just go see how things went whenever communists have tried to replace the family with the state.
It would take less than a hundred years to create the first baby from scratch without human intervention. From there, the possibilities are endless. China seems like a probable candidate that lacks human rights controls and has enough biotech to build world’s first baby factory, but even if only North Korea has the tech and political will initially, the pressure on the depopulating countries would either legalize these or at least relax immigration to the extent necessary to benefit from them.