I think this is an interesting discussion to have (even if it’s unlikely to be realized due to negative societal opinions of cloning).
It’s worth being aware that cloning a dead person isn’t currently technologically possible. You need an intact nucleus, I believe (though I’m not an expert). Cloning a living person is probably possible, since other primates have been cloned, though the success rate there was poor.
Regression to the mean is important to consider as well, as other comments have pointed out. If you could clone a great theoretical physicist, what you get is probably not a great theoretical physicist, but rather a pretty good theoretical physicist. There does not seem to be a shortage of pretty good theoretical physicists in the world, and if anything maybe there is a glut. It would seem tragic for the outcome of the project to be a bunch of pretty good theoretical physicists who are forced to settle for data science jobs.
Therefore you may be better off considering professions where there is a shortage of pretty good talent. Software engineering is such a field, which is why pretty good software engineers make a lot of money. So you might consider cloning a great software engineer, such as Jeff Dean or the like (and there are enough of them out there that you could probably find one that would consent to the plan). The Dean-clones would likely not match the original in capability, but they’d be well equipped to make a good living and contribute in a positive way to society.
Another thing to consider more explicitly is the replacement value of a person, from a societal perspective. How much money they make is a relevant but very-imperfect measure. For example, a top pro sports player makes a lot of money but offers barely any value over replacement, because if they didn’t exist, then somebody else would be the top player. For that reason, the safest bet is to consider people who make a lot of money in ways that seem generally pro-social, such as engineers and entrepreneurs.
As far as entrepreneurs go, cloning a founder-billionaire seems potentially interesting. Elon Musk seems to have created billions of dollars value, so maybe Musk-clones, even though (because of regression to the mean) not quite as talented or driven, would create a lot of value too.
I think this is an interesting discussion to have (even if it’s unlikely to be realized due to negative societal opinions of cloning).
It’s worth being aware that cloning a dead person isn’t currently technologically possible. You need an intact nucleus, I believe (though I’m not an expert). Cloning a living person is probably possible, since other primates have been cloned, though the success rate there was poor.
Regression to the mean is important to consider as well, as other comments have pointed out. If you could clone a great theoretical physicist, what you get is probably not a great theoretical physicist, but rather a pretty good theoretical physicist. There does not seem to be a shortage of pretty good theoretical physicists in the world, and if anything maybe there is a glut. It would seem tragic for the outcome of the project to be a bunch of pretty good theoretical physicists who are forced to settle for data science jobs.
Therefore you may be better off considering professions where there is a shortage of pretty good talent. Software engineering is such a field, which is why pretty good software engineers make a lot of money. So you might consider cloning a great software engineer, such as Jeff Dean or the like (and there are enough of them out there that you could probably find one that would consent to the plan). The Dean-clones would likely not match the original in capability, but they’d be well equipped to make a good living and contribute in a positive way to society.
Another thing to consider more explicitly is the replacement value of a person, from a societal perspective. How much money they make is a relevant but very-imperfect measure. For example, a top pro sports player makes a lot of money but offers barely any value over replacement, because if they didn’t exist, then somebody else would be the top player. For that reason, the safest bet is to consider people who make a lot of money in ways that seem generally pro-social, such as engineers and entrepreneurs.
As far as entrepreneurs go, cloning a founder-billionaire seems potentially interesting. Elon Musk seems to have created billions of dollars value, so maybe Musk-clones, even though (because of regression to the mean) not quite as talented or driven, would create a lot of value too.