>>461077>you thought this explicitly classist, capitalist, Yes, it is. Lets do a class analysis, the falling demographic trends mean that workers will become scarce, and the supply of labor-power will become much smaller than the demand for it. The working class will become powerful once more, and assert the political economy of labor above the political economy of capital. That's what they mean with the end of the world rhetoric, their little hyper-rich-people bubbles will end.
Nothing they can do will change this, there is no cultural or genetic "hack" for them to get out of this bind, because it's essentially a physical process, they exploited people so hard that it depleted their ability to reproduce. It's an energy and entropy problem and neither cultural norms nor genetic engineering can offer a way out of this. Or to put it in terms of the article this happens at the level of atoms and information, which is more fundamental than culture and biology.
The only way to avoid the "de-population bomb" is to reduce exploitation, reduce wealth inequality, redistribute the surplus, away from the capitalists back into society.
>creation of a techno-ubermenschen overlord class is based?Don't worry too much, consider that it was possible to sell guys like Peter Thiel simple blood transfusion for 1000x the normal rate, with the fountain of youth scam, which is so old that you can find it in Greek mythology. The superpower that these people have is greed, not intelligence. They aren't going to create the homo-deus, they will just get scammed. Also some of this isn't meant for real but rather for ideological consumption, these people are running out of excuses why they should be the ruling class, especially because the world is going to shit.
For the genetic manipulation stuff, that can be done, but it's going to be a slow process to build up a knowledge-base for it. Like many tens of thousands of years. Removing genes has a limited potential for getting rid of some congenital defects that are also very rare to begin with. For anything more you have to add new genes or change existing ones. And you have to take into account all the possible environments that the organisms will face or else you will get catastrophic failures. So if they really try to build Ubermenshen based on the currently very limited and shallow bio-technology-stack, they will create very sick people that will live very short lives.
At the moment there is more potential in genetic health-care, because genetic therapies are relatively simple and cheap treatments, that could help lower the cost for public health care. It's also more reversible, than other treatments, so it's less hard to press undo, if there's bad side-effects. The genetic health-care only works if it's got large sample sizes. It's not going to work as an exclusive service for a minority of affluent people.
Realistic actually existing bio-tech is going to be about making relatively simple single-organisms do useful things
read this to get an idea:
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/20/5815582/synthetic-biology-genetic-engineering-explainer By the time we can design hyper complex organism like humans we will be likely be in the phase of interstellar communism, that might include other intelligent species from other planets. Exo-biology might prove helpful to understand organic life at a more fundamental level.