> Despot rulers with the willingness and ability to pre-pay for 18+ years of care, feeding, education, etc. for an uncertain long-term outcome: Very unlikely.

> Despot rulers with the willingness and ability to pre-pay for 18+ years of care, feeding, education, etc. for an uncertain long-term outcome: Very unlikely. The Spartan Agoge existed - a group training program where boys entered at age 7, no thoughts were given towards keeping them particularly safe or well taken care of, and whose effect was to output ferocious warriors. In the intervening years, we have developed this concept for other animals - we can grow massive amounts of chicken in a very small area, give them hormones to grow quickly, inject antibiotics to ward off germs on the short term, etc. If the same were to be done to (cloned) humans, they can be brought up to age 7 level quite a bit faster, with the costs manageable. If we assume that no one cares if they can have a family, or even expects the to live past age 45, that dispenses with a lot of the care giving. While I would like to believe that no-one would actually raise people the way we raise cows, I am not sure it is really that far fetched on a technical level. (concentration camps have existed, and even now many Uyghurs are placed in camps that seem decidedly inhumane)