>>11634325As small as we want, according to science's own ability to control and build at smaller levels. However, this will remain impractical unless these little people are also given an environment similar to our own, just on a smaller scale, like that one movie with Matt Damon, since the brain has evolved to fit into certain environments and would be completely obliterated by other environments.
This won't really ever be necessary, though, since we will master artificial intelligence and machine learning before science has the ability to synthetically recreate people on a smaller scale. The former will be much cheaper than the latter, and will also be easier to train, since science can evolve this artificial intelligence at a higher speed than them evolving synthetic small human-like creatures in artificial environments. Not to mention the greater control science will have over organisms they synthetically create at that point would already function like a machine since all guilting and artifice and the moral cunning that produced things like religion could potentially cause a little-person uprising where little-people earn their "natural rights" in hyperadvanced capitalism-democratic civilization and slowly skew decisions with their power. Since computers don't have artifice, then they will function similarly.
Then again, if we reached that point then women might already be extinct since sexuation is no longer necessary with cloning and advanced genetic engineering meaning unnecessary pitying and sympathizing which was evolved in women since women who had these traits were able to produce and raise their kids more effectively thereby carrying their genes and spreading these traits more and more will be gone (but only if weak feminine men are then obliterated as well which can only happen if enough selection pressure is put on the species as a whole which will eventually need to be done (hopefully by the rich coalescing against the resentful, inciting war)).
