No. A society made up of clones (and presumably, opposite-sex equivalents) of me would collapse within a generation, despite our best efforts.
I have some deficits that do not permit independent living, and while a lot of "me"s could try to create some infrastructure that would allow for support, we would not be able to organize well enough to keep a society going.
There are some jobs that I am not capable of doing. I would be capable of growing food, caring for domestic animals, and hunting, but I would not be capable of dealing with unexpected circumstances. Because the whole society would be made of me-clones, we would try to plan for unexpected circumstances, and as such we would survive most disasters--until one came along that we had not planned for, and at that point we would not be able to cope, or even survive.
We might be able to deal with problems like how to distribute food without anyone being capable of long-distance driving (we would probably have automatic railway lines rather than highways) or supermarkets (we would have vending machines). This infrastructure would probably rely heavily on machinery and most jobs would involve either designing, operating, or maintaining machinery. Such a society could be marginally sustainable.
But we would never get to have machinery in the first place.
I am essentially unemployable because I cannot sustain effort for very long, cognitively. The work week would have to be very short--no more than fourteen hours, with two to three months worth of vacation per year. And that would be a problem: In order to get to the sort of high technology that would allow for it, we would have to survive an industrial revolution with its attendant requirement of fifty-hour work weeks.
The only other alternative would be to stay in a hunter-gatherer society, which also has very short work hours. So the technology would not be an option, because we could never get to it. Hunter-gatherer bands, thirty people or less, would be able to get around that by living only in temperate or tropical fertile areas. We would not be able to develop agriculture, because of the long work hours that would be cognitively unsustainable even if I were starving--probably especially if I were starving, because hunger reduces cognitive resources for me. We might be able to sustain herds of animals, which would be better than hunting--I do not have the reflexes or quick-planning ability to hunt without technology at least at the level of a modern crossbow.
We would have a tendency to create small, portable, technology--we would invent things to overcome the cognitive problems; we would probably invent things like sunglasses very early on, though they would probably be more like loosely woven plant fiber half-masks.
However, in a hunter-gatherer society, the problem of unexpected events is magnified. We would be able to solve any problem we could predict, but an unpredictable problem would cause collapse and death. We would be an evolutionary dead-end because we would not have the quick-reaction flexibility that neurotypicals do.
We would all be what modern society terms "gifted", which would help us do the inventing and planning. We would also be unusually non-violent, with even the worst physical fights causing no more than bruises. Shutdowns would be common and expected, a normal part of daily life and probably accommodated for in some way. But some things would cause everyone to shut down at once, and then we would be very vulnerable.
Not to mention: We would all be asexual. Understanding the need to reproduce, we would probably have sex anyway, but because of the low desire to do so, our population would remain low and in times of stress, would become even lower because we would not have the mental energy to negotiate the problems of having and raising children. One major crisis, and the population would drop too low to sustain, and that would be the end of us.
24 Jul 2014, 5:09 pm
I'm disabled in this respect, normally like a preteen kid IS disabled when it comes to stuff like that (and hence needing help in practically every respect when it comes to self-help skills). Can you imagine an eleven year old housewife, a twelve year old president? You get it, then. (I don't count in wunderkinds).
