A lot of discussed strategies to reduce suffering/increase happiness revolve around memetic transitions from (existing) person to person, i.e. convince people to care about WAS, convince people to become veg*an, convince people to donate more, etc.

This is probably useful for a while iff done right, i.e. it doesn't backfire. But the total potential might be limited.

An alternative to memetic transitions of this sort are do-it-yourself approaches, i.e. directly donate money to poor people, personally help invent in-vitro meat etc. These are relevant whenever convincing others reaches its limit. Realistically, not everyone will care much about suffering of all sentient life, no matter how many ads are run.

With emerging technologies, two additional practical approaches may become increasingly available to suffering-reducers: Fast directed reproduction and hedonic and moral enhancement (in combination).

Once convincing people is no longer efficient, the next best step will be to make more people (of the right kind, i.e. low suffering/high happiness and high potential to care about reducing suffering/creating happiness). This could range from selected sperm donations to other forms of gene selection and having many children to paying the right people to reproduce to speculative stuff like brain implants and creating, modifying and copying brain emulations selectively (if influencing Friendly AI is not an option). This will become highly relevant very quickly if a "person duplication" technology becomes available, i.e. ems.

These paths are not obviously most efficient for current utilitarians. But in the future, just a handful of technological breakthroughs could change that. If so, other ideologies will certainly use it to their advantage if utilitarians don't! Making more people of the right kind is itself a form of "values spreading". That's maybe not a new idea, but something to remember in the long run for those who are truly strategic.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Once convincing people is no longer efficient, the next best step will be to make more people (of the right kind, i.e. low suffering/high happiness and high potential to care about reducing suffering/creating happiness).

Would this moral logic suggest, a quite unlikely to surface way of life of utilitarian's meeting up, fitting as many as possible into a given tenement and reproducing as much as possible that it is still possible to survive and meet the basic needs of all the individuals in the tenement and create a sort of generational thing of raising utilitarian's in a utilitarian environment and hence increasing moral effectiveness? And of course I'm not saying that's feasible to happen, but would that seem a very moral thing to persist?

If it would be then perhaps something tending towards that type of life (but not so fully) such as fitting a few utilitarian's and reproducing not too much and with more genuine consent between both individuals rather than just doing it for the better good of the morality of the utilitarian tenement would be a good way of living life. This is an extension of the extreme utilitarian life in which one live's like a moral drone. Absurd to most but I think possible for a minority of utilitarians. What's your reflections on the concept of an early 21st century utilitarian tenement/apartment?