There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine environments is one of them. Even for a healthy woman at an optimal age, the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous, yet our culture continues to encourage motherhood at a later age and fails to effectively support those who do make the choice to have children. A technological solution would be an easy out here, and if it were available then people would very likely take it, for better or worse.
> the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous
Friend just gave birth. I honestly don’t understand how anyone who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent design.
Everything about human birthing is a hack. The placenta. The rotation and cord and length of the process. The ridiculous frequency of stupid fuck-ups which often result in the death of a baby or the mother or both. Pregnancy strikes me as one of those processes proximate technology could absolutely do better than nature in 9/10 cases.
Apparently, the anomaly was also noted back in ancient Israel. The story of Adam and Eve is expressly presented as an explanation for why childbirth seems more like a punishment.
From Genesis 3:16, “To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.’”
We can put a man in the moon yet technology has been unable to create even a single baby. Something that even two of the dumbest high schoolers you can find can easily do.
We can send James Cameron to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and yet technology has been unable to create even a single star. Something that even 10^55 of the dumbest hydrogen atoms you can find can easily do.
"We can X yet technology has been unable to even Y" is one of the most famously repeatedly defeated positions in history. People have had to run marathons to keep those goal posts out of reach.
This sounds wrong to me. Cloning exists, IVF is a routine medical operation and now this headline. IVF is basically the science version of two teenagers going at it.
You still need the teenagers. IVF simply replaces the mechanical act of fertilization.
Taking that logic to its conclusion will mean you think technology can do nothing until we can make new universes. To quote Carl Sagan: "To make an apple pie you must first invent the universe". At what point do you agree that science can make babies? I think IVF counts, you don't. What is the treshold for you?
In the Vorkosigan Saga, the "uterine replicator" appears as a minor but persistent future-technology, where the main selling point is Not Dying To Your Stupid Biology, followed by convenience.
> "[The] debate that will fundamentally alter Barrayar's future is being carried on right now among their wives and daughters. To use it, or not to use it? Too late to keep it out, it's already here. The middle classes are picking it up in droves. Every mother who loves her daughter is pressing for it, to spare her the physical dangers of biological childbearing. They're fighting not the old men, who haven't got a clue, but an old guard of their sisters who say to their daughters, in effect, We had to suffer, so must you! Look around tonight, Mark. You're witnessing the last generation of men and women on Barrayar who will dance this dance in the old way."
-- Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold
Bujold also made an explicit point on several occasions in this book cycle that without this kind of tech, there's no true gender equality, because the burden of childbearing is just too much of a penalty.
> without this kind of tech, there's no true gender equality
Right, and partly to forestall any appeal-to-nature responses, I'll borrow from another top-favorite author, with emphasis added:
> The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
> The two wizards exchanged a glance. Vetinari was staring into the depths of his beer mug and they were glad that they did not know what he saw in there.
-- Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Interesting because it seems like a miracle to me
> it seems like a miracle to me
Conception, yes. Hell, many animal childbirths (and egg emergences), also yes.
Human childbirth? Obviously subject to personal taste, but I'm not seeing it. To approach its messiness we must look to some of the most inbred animals we've engineered, e.g. French bulldogs [1].
[1] https://www.frenchbulldogbreed.net/blog/can-french-bulldogs-...
> I honestly don’t understand how anyone who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent design.
One way to believe in intelligent design despite how awful human childbirth is compared to those for other animals -- is found in Genesis:
Humans decided they knew better than God about what is best for themselves so they didn't listen to His one and only (at the time) command. So He imposed some consequences, including "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children." Genesis 3:16.
That doesn’t seem fair, does men also get some "consequences"? Or did Eve listen less than Adam at that time? (I didn’t read the Genesis)
edit: found it. Adams gets to eat plants from the soils (instead of form the trees?) and will work hard to produce those plants.
Just before, the Serpens deceive the women by telling her eating the fruits not in the middle of the garden is ok. She was suspicious but the Serpens was very convincing (by lying) However when Eve told Adam to eat the fruit, he didn’t ask anything and did it. IMHO the man is more in fault here because he didn’t even try to understand why he should eat Eve fruits while god said no.
> To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%203&ver...
That's actually very clever. The person writing that passage was responding to an obvious criticism. How could an all-knowing all powerful being mess up the design of procreation so badly? Conveniently, we will write that up as a deliberate punishment.
That's so sadistic, that wasn't Satan?
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
QED.
I suspect you're right. But I've just last night finished Brave New World and what strikes me is production of children in that book almost entirely for the purpose of labour.
So, I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time. I don't have children nor intend to - so likely this is a very cold take that doesn't apply to most - but the cynic in me says we've so far focussed on reproduction as individuals and at a country level to maintain productivity and extend the health and wealth of their elders. Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?
I don't think much of the other proposed societal changes in BNW. They're a backdrop which Huxley uses to illustrate some aspects of human nature and to tell the rest of his story, but that's about it. We've had plenty of opportunity to move to the transient sexual model he outlines, for instance, and yet long-term relationships are still overwhelmingly the most popular choice.
I also don't believe people generally have children to fulfil a wider societal responsibility. As a parent myself, we had children mostly because we thought it would be nice to have children around. It has been much more than "nice," in a way that I could never really put into words. However, I can honestly say that the maintenance of my own health and wealth into old age has never been remotely a concern; if anything, I spend my time trying to find ways to insulate them from the consequences of an ageing society. I don't see those aspects of parenthood changing.
Societal pressures/responsibilities don't need to be consciously acknowledged by an individual for them to have an effect on that individuals' decision-making.
There are also societal pressures the other way. A lot of people do not have children because of the cost.
In the UK there has also been a cultural shift to regarding children as a lot of work - parents are under more pressure to do more and be perfect. That also deters people from having children.
Then there are those who argue that there are too many children so people should not have children.
There are pressures to have kids, of course, but its not clear to me that there is a net societal pressure towards having kids.
I had kids because I like having kids. Its fulfilling in a way nothing else is in most parents lives.
True. My anecdata is that I don't see even the echoes of these pressures/responsibilities in my own historical choices, and as a result I doubt their effect on others.
In my experience, social pressure to have children is such a ubiquitous experience that it's difficult for me to think it doesn't have an effect. I wonder how this might vary between men & women
I suspect it's enormously different between men and women, and of course inter-culturally. As a straight man living in Ireland, despite having extremely traditional catholic parents, I've faced literally zero pressure from family to have kids. My siblings (male and female) have both chosen to have kids (very closely together in time), and I enjoy being an uncle a great deal. But I don't have any interest whatsoever in parenting. I have some friends with kids - although they tend to fall off the radar if I'm honest, but haven't felt any pressure from them either.
Do you have kids? I find that my desire for children, and the ways in which I enjoy mine, are very “primitive” pleasures in the same way as my desires to eat or sleep are.
Maybe we eat because of social pressure, but obviously there is something deeper too.
You have to keep in mind the millions of years of evolution that surely managed to leave some instinct-level mechanisms to encourage having children.
Yes and it can be quite absurd and right on the nose.
While Putin feeds humans to the dogs of war, he will at the same time chide his countryfolk that they are not having enough children.
There is a softer version in the west where elders and the wealthy are 'concerned about birthrates' while at the same time squeezing their young on living costs(shelter+food).
>social pressure to have children is such a ubiquitous experience
One aspect of growing older that I eagerly can't wait for (unlike most others) is getting old enough that people will stop fucking pestering me about marriage and kids.
All those people can sincerely fuck off into their own bedrooms, pun intended.
Just about 20 years more of this noise...
Once society has accepted robot labour without rights and children without parents, the question quickly becomes is flesh or steel cheaper.
> I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work
If robots are doing all the work, my bet is humans won’t be dominating for too long
Then if robots take over, and they spare us, the driver for human reproduction (for them to reproduce us) might just be to have pets
yes, and we’ll love it.
>I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future
Leaving behind and continuing your legacy and heritage.
Personally I have no interest in pushing my blood, interests, and achievements and their endurement upon my hypothetical children, among many other reasons I have no interest in having children, but if someone wants to be that person then more power to them since it's none of my business.
>what the driver for reproduction will be
the people without such driver are naturally weeded out, so due to such weeding out the majority of the population always naturally consist of the people who have such a driver, it may be some crazy one in any given particular case, yet it is there.
>in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time.
and with artificial uterine it would mean that some people, the wealthy ones, would be able to have a hundred, or a thousand of children. Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.
>would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?
the people who wouldn't be able to afford it as having children would be less beneficial for society as you correctly noted and it will be more like a personal luxury/indulgence and thus would be treated accordingly - taxed, no child support help from government, etc
> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.
Time could be the great equalizer here. Spending time with your children is pretty universally accepted as beneficial, so we could make it mandatory for extrauterine births over some threshold. It could be structured such that the more extrauterine children you have, the more of your 24 hours per day must be spent with them. I’m intentionally hand-waving over specifics of what that would look like and enforcement, but I’m sure you can come up with ideas. The goal is: if you want to artificially have hundreds of extrauterine children, society will take from you all the time you could have spent building rockets and running companies.
Time isn’t a sufficient measure to serve as a proxy for quality parenting.
But it is a way to limit people to a fixed maximum number of children.
Say it's a requirement for an hour per day per child — no matter how many drugs Musk takes to stay awake, he can't have more than 24 kids.
But, lots of people have many kids thst they don't take care of. Genghis Khan is one such example, apocryphally having so many kids as to constitute 2% of the current Asian population having had him as an ancestor. So I don't quite get your point, there is no maximum.
The suggestion is to change the rules, so what people currently do is irrelevant.
Genghis Khan set the rules, which is why actually changing them would be very difficult.
The suggestion falls apart under any scrutiny, you can't force anyone to take care of their kids, if they want to, they will, and if they don't, they won't. Genghis Khan is more closer to our current ruleset than anyone currently is to this suggested rule set, he didn't set any rules, he was following the same rules as people currently do, as I mentioned in the previous sentence.
> The suggestion falls apart under any scrutiny, you can't force anyone to take care of their kids, if they want to, they will, and if they don't, they won't.
I can easily imagine a punishment of forced sterilisation for non-compliance. It wouldn't be the first time human society had that as a punishment.
I mean, if we're talking about totalitarian rather than democratic regimes, then sure, you can sterilize people who don't comply.
> democratic regimes
UK, 2015, due to the mother not being capable of looking after her kids: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31128969
Also, one of the main things that made it stop wasn't specifically democracy, but that eugenics became unacceptable, otherwise you'd have to explain why you think the US wasn't democratic until 1942: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_v._Oklahoma
Once you start getting into forced sterilization, that is when you will start losing many people on so called reforms, it is simply untenable, regardless of whether the government is truly democratic or not (and by democratic earlier I meant non-totalitarian, I should've been more accurate). That ruling by the UK is also not something I'd support, even if the courts ruled so.
You recon that forced sterilization for being unable to look after all your kids would be unpopular? Even for a maximum limit that's significantly higher than the number that most people would be capable of?
You have a higher regard for pubic opinion than me, if you think public opinion would prevent it — in the UK it's fairly easy to run into support for this as a penalty for various things that were already crimes, along with various other things that the speaker thought ought to be.
This was even (jokingly) suggested as a thing to be done to former prime minister Boris Johnson, due to his frequent affairs and unknown number of children.
I don't know about the UK but people would definitely be against it in the US, as it encroaches on what people perceive to be able to have as many kids as possible, regardless of whether they can support them or not. That's part of the big deal with the abortion debate as well.
>people would definitely be against it in the US
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilizat...
"More recently, California prisons are said to have authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010. The Center for Investigative Reporting reveals how the state paid doctors $147,460 to perform tubal ligations that former inmates say were done under coercion."
To the response below: if something happens in the open and systematically, and nobody punished for it that means people are supporting it. They may clutch their pearls and turn their noses away for show, yet they support it nevertheless.
Your link does not support the claim that people would not be against it, prisons do unethical things all the time that others may strongly oppose.
Ah come on: she wasn't sterilised for being unable to take care of her children, she was sterilised because both (a) pregnancy would endanger her health and (b) she lacked the capacity to rationally understand that (the article references her belief that she became pregnant because she ate a health food supplement). That's not the same thing at all.
> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.
I agree that is a very likely outcome. We've seen that behaviour before in history, e.g. the Ottoman Imperial Harem contained a minimum of several hundred women at its peak. We would almost certainly see it again. Remember, though, that those children still need to be cared for after birth, and that requires humans.
The main driver for that sort of thing was a system where production of heirs was seen as socially essential; this is now largely obsolete.
(Even then, the really extreme examples of polygamy were more about social status than practical concerns around succession; again, this is now largely obsolete in most societies.)
OT, and maybe, my words ain't effective, but talking to a young woman, i thought i'd talked to "supermom". She told me what she'd "left and quit just to be a good mommy for her daughter." I looked at her, "wearing glasses -too big, to 'be modern'", a warm pullover - knitted, masking upper arms and (her) middle. But than i saw her grabbing a cell-phone (daughter call incomming...), she became 'supermom'.
So if any, could remember that there were 'telephone boxes' ...changing clothes...
[Reports:Humor]
HINT: Action Comics #1 (published April 18, 1938).[1] Superman has been adapted to several other media...
(-;
[1] quoting: wikipedia
>Remember, though, that those children still need to be cared for after birth, and that requires humans.
I think AI and robots would make human involvement minimally necessary, be it basic physical care or education.
On the one hand, based on FSD, Musk would be one of the first people to attempt this, well before the AI was capable enough to do a good job.
On the other, super-rich people can already afford a lot of humans to assist with raising their kids. AI isn't strictly necessary for this, as seen with e.g. Genghis Khan.
But yeah, if the G and the I in AGI is good enough and general enough, then robots directed by it could do a good job of raising kids — but at some point, you have to ask what life is even for, why you're having kids at all if you don't want to be involved in raising them.
> a lot of humans to assist with raising their kids. AI isn't strictly necessary for this, as seen with e.g. Genghis Khan.
it willn't be just kids. It will be "designer babies". Cleaned-up DNA with imports from Mozart and Einstein DNAs, and countless other improvements and enhancements for higher IQ, stronger muscles, faster reaction, better health, etc and cyber-enhanced with Neuralink style connection from may be even before being born, etc. There would be not many humans who would be able even to just keep up, less serve as teachers and trainers to such kids.
> to be involved in raising them.
engineering them is also involvement.
> engineering them is also involvement.
Have you ever played video games with cheats enabled? Some of them are still fun, others feel pointless. If you want to treat your offspring as a machine to be engineered rather than raised, why bother with flesh in the first place, why not regard the AI itself as the offspring?
If a child were engineered as thoroughly as you suggest, the distance between them and their parents would necessarily be as severe as the distance between them and their potential human teachers.
But also there is a practical issue:
Musk specifically may well test such things on his own kids before the tech is actually ready, but any sensible person would want these interventions to have passed a full clinical trial before reaching their offspring. Such trials would necessarily lead to there being many humans with any one of those enhancements before all of them, making any gap much smaller in practice than you anticipate.
>to treat your offspring as a machine to be engineered rather than raised
raising is engineering, just very slow and with very limited results just because of the very limited toolset currently available. Look how parents using hormones and blockers, etc. - that is about max engineering available today and they do it because it benefits their children (i'm making pure engineering-wise point, and i'm not qualified nor have any intention to discuss whether it is really beneficial or not)
>why bother with flesh in the first place, why not regard the AI itself as the offspring?
The people replacing flesh children with AI would naturally be weeding their DNA out thus leading to the significant share of the population still preferring flesh ones.
>he distance between them and their parents would necessarily be as severe
parents want their kids to succeed, to do better than the parents. It is a biological imperative (as otherwise your DNA is weeded out by the one's who do get their children to do better, and thus those have been and will be the majority of the population). The first-gen immigrant parents working as say janitors and their college kids - huge difference and the parents are happy for it.
And don't forget that the parents here are themselves would already be the N-th generation of improvement, much ahead of the rest of the population.
>with any one of those enhancements before all of them
with any one, yet not all. Being a test subject for one feature is very different than having a package of those features.
>making any gap much smaller in practice than you anticipate.
in addition the test subjects may be prevented from propagating their DNA. (Cetaganda from the Vorkosigan saga :)
If you think humanity is a good thing, and you want it to continue indefinitely into the future, then reproduction is essential. If you do not think this, then you want Earth to be a dull rock, with no civilization and no intelligent species. It really is just that binary.
>Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?
They already made that choice, decades ago, and there's no evidence anyone is rethinking it. Fertility levels are sub-replacement.
I would guess that the negative consequences of widespread adoption of full gestation out of the womb would be much worse than the consequences of epidurals and C-sections. There's evidence that epidurals are actually worse for maternal mortality, since the epidural disrupts the natural birthing process, leading moms to need C-sections, which increase mortality. The moms I know have had better, less traumatic and painful, birthing experiences by working with coaches that help them understand and listen to their body through the process.
Being around those moms, especially my wife, it's fascinating to learn about how pregnancy is the foundation of mother-child bonding. So it's easy to see how artificial wombs would be much worse. I guess that's the point of Brave New World, how destructive the loss of that and other bonds is.
There is no longitudinal effect on "bonding". You are speaking like a religious zealot.
Such practices is why the Brave New World is a dystopia
Not the universal usage of a euphoria-inducing, pacifying drug covering large-scale psychological manipulation and inudstrialist domination of society? Brave New World is a dystopia because it shows a fully satiated and socially occupied doesn't care that it is being manipulated and repressed. You don't care about your caste,or the atrocities committed to others, or learning to better yourself because you take another hit of Soma and join an orgy.
Did we read the same book?
>Did we read the same book?
Yes, and the engineered factory humans is part of the dystopian point it makes. The dehumanization begins at that, it's not just the soma.
Which is also why the normally born people (in the wildling "reservation"), the regular aging, the regular pregancy, are also in the book as a antithesis to the dystopian society (but one which they can not belong as outsiders, like we can't be "natives", only LARP it).
I don't think we have to take a nearly century-old work of fiction's viewpoints seriously unless we want to. The book can argue that IVF or artificial gestation is horrific and we can in turn argue "well, I don't think that's true."
>I don't think we have to take a nearly century-old work of fiction's viewpoints seriously unless we want to.
I want to. And the book's age has nothing to do with whether it's points are valid or not.
Literature doesn't have an expiration date. And some ideas about what it means to be human aren't meant to be transient - though their adoption might be.
Generally speaking, when it comes to _Brave New World_, the answer is no - people did not read the same book: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2019.0046
Well it's definitely possible to have different takeaways from the same book. I can't remember what I took away as a high school student, but when I read it again in my late 30s (I think) it blew my mind a little bit because I had adopted a sort of libertarian view that anything that doesn't directly impede the happiness of someone else should be legal. Coming down to the idea that personal happiness is ultimately what I want (not just for myself; for everybody). Brave New World (which is almost 100 years old at this point) says, "OK, here is a world where everyone can be happy all the time. What do you think?" And as a reader, of course I'm on the side of John Savage. The Soma holiday and ignorance (bliss) is not what I'm after. And of course, without contrast against strife and unhappiness, how can there be happiness at all?
> You don't care about your caste,or the atrocities committed to others
Totally not our society!
But yeah this invention is a good thing
People were similarly apprehensive about IVF. Some contemporary takes about "test tube babies" were positively hysterical.
Fear of the unknown is strong in us, especially when it comes to our bodies. See also, anti-vaxxerism.
>People were similarly apprehensive about IVF
And rightly so. It's used as a patch for many social issues (like declining fertility and careerism).
Isn't the entire civilization about "patching issues"?
Outside rural Sahel or Afghanistan, the world has moved on to an industrial or post-industrial society, where it is no longer desirable to keep women illiterate and start having babies at 17, when the natural fertility is at its peak, then immediately employing small kids as goatherds.
IVF is a partial patch for increasing educational levels of the general population. I am fine with a more educated population.
>Isn't the entire civilization about "patching issues"?
Too general a statement to answer - if anything and everything can be considered a "patch".
The course of civilization solves some problems and creates others. Some of the issues it solves are huge wins. Other times, the problems can be way worse than what there was.
For example, if we accept, for argument's sake, that the AI doomers are right, and AI kills or enslaves us all, that would be an example of a civilization's patch being worse than the issue patched.
>IVF is a partial patch for increasing educational levels of the general population. I am fine with a more educated population.
If the alternative is decline and death, I'd chose life. Goat-herder sure beats office drones and depressed doom-scrollers, which is what we increasingly produce.
"Goat-herder sure beats office drones and depressed doom-scrollers, which is what we increasingly produce."
Do you speak from experience?
Goat-herding in a state of constant food-, water- and physical insecurity, with zero amenities or healthcare, might be enjoyable for some (though maybe less so at the age of five), but "sure beats" sounds like a hot take from the social media.
It is still possible to move to South Sudan or Niger and start a goatherding career there, but few office drones have walked the walk. Quite to the contrary, there is a significant outflow of economic migrants away from such conditions, into the richer parts of the world.
I think humans will eventually self-improve with genetic engineering -- e.g. shifting the median IQ up by 30 points, life extension, disease resistance, eliminating heritable conditions -- but the ethical and societal issues will take much longer to address than the technology. We could already do some of this.
I think some of the concern is reasonable and some isn't.
Have you ever had kids?
If you are not a birthing person, have you ever been with a birthing person for the duration of their pregnancy?
As in "it can be difficult"?
That's more "Brave New World" style shortcuts to hapiness and convenience...
It can be lethal
I will be amazed if a technology solution in biology can compete with 100 million years of evolution. Even children born via C-section are put at a measurable disadvantage due to micro biome stuff.
But that's possibly outweighed by the advantages implied by their mothers having the resources (personal or societal) to get their babies out safely for both themselves and said babies at later ages (mother and/or father have more advanced careers and financial stability) and despite their physical condition.
My kid (born when I, his mother, was 40) is a second generation C-section baby who, had my own mother (who had me at 35) been born in the 60s instead of the 40s, likely would have been a 3rd generation C-section baby. My mother was 10.5 lbs at birth and left my grandmother unable to have another child in her early 20s. Perhaps I can't eat crustaceans and have a stuffed nose for several weeks in the spring because I didn't get my mother's microbiome. I'll take that trade; my mother was then able and willing to go on to have my little brother.
I'll also wager that as a Western middle-class middle-aged professional who had my kid about a decade after I "should have" (can't plan everything!), my child's material circumstances and opportunities would be the envy 90-95% of his agemates worldwide. I'm definitely providing a better education than a semi-literate 17-year-old Afghani woman who could only have hers "the old fashioned way".
It’s fascinating that there are now babies that require c-sections for reasons you allude to.
It’s definitely possible to facilitate this type of genetic line in the context of wealth and abundances, but if it became the more than the norm, any war or famine would be devastating.
Sure, just trivialize the constraints of systemic barriers, political instability, and gender-based oppression that limit educational and reproductive choices for many Afghan women.
I agree that what's happened to Afghan women is a horror, and one I do what I can to prevent being implemented in any measure by the "but falling birthrates! Why won't young women have more baaaaabies?! Why do they wait so long?" crowd - including reminding folks why Caesarean sections aren't horrible, even ones like the one I didn't have to have, strictly speaking, but had a good chance of sparing me an injury I would have had a very hard time dealing with while caring for a newborn. I'm thankful that I live in a well-resourced country with near gender-equality in which I've always had a lot of choices, including the one that saved my life about a decade before I had my child - a choice that is being eroded in my home state.
(I've read about what life in urban Afghanistan was like for women in the 1960s and 1970s, so I'm well aware of how far we can fall, given the right religious nutjobs in charge. Franco's Spain freaks me out, too.)
> children born via C-section are put at a measurable disadvantage due to micro biome stuff.
[citation needed]
You may be amazed, but that doesn't make it implausible.
We already did beat evolution first with wheels, later with steam, then with jet engines, nuclear reactors, heart transplants, vaccines, exogenous steroids, etc.
Evolution hit a constraint with us, our increased brain size making childbirth unusually difficult for humans compared to other species; all of us are born premature by the standard of our nearest wild relatives, and have to be premature just so the mother doesn't die all the time, merely unusually often.
That way madness lies.
Growing children in a vat, to be bought and sold. That's what you're talking about. As a kid or young adult I never fully understood the Butlerian Jihad plot point of the DUNE universe, but as an adult and a father I certainly do now.
Growing children in a vat, and the personhood of those children, are two separate things. It's been entirely possible in recent history for naturally born children to be born to be bought and sold; whereas things like IVF have no effect on the personhood of the children so concieved.
Loosening the biological connection to parents and replacing it with a mechanical process means there isn't a first line defense against the buying and selling. In fact, the buying and selling is the first step since the activity is reduced to a monetary transaction. It's just slavery, with a veneer of charity around it for people who struggle to conceive naturally. OP argued that supporting this concept would become mainstream, and my point is that it won't, because you'd have to put people like me in prison for that to happen.
The surrogacy industry exists with the added bonus of exploiting women to be those vats.
After spending >$200k on surrogacy, I say: please bring on the baby vats.
After ex-utero pregnancy is achieved, the next step would be some form of recombinant human analogue breast milk synthesis. Beyond that, breast milk tailored to mom-babe pairs.
Yes, formula exists and has created billions of healthy children. However, breastfeeding is a signifiant commitment of blood, sweat and tears for many moms that want to do best by their babes.
At that point we can produce dairy milk for human consumption too.
I've been thinkingg about this for a while, that the way we're approaching growing artificial meat from stem cells is the wrong way to use this kind of technology.
Is anyone using this technology to grow chicken eggs and dairy milk in the lab for human consumption?
It will remain tricky to get subtle things like colour, taste, and the texture profile right for lab grown meat but will that hold the same for the output of a rtificially grown tissue like milk or eggs?
The company Perfect Day has a bio-reactor service that produces whey protein without the need for dairy cows. They've partnered with a couple of different companies to bring different vegan milk/ice cream products to market. It doesn't use stem cells though, I believe they bio-engineered fungal microbiota to create the process.
Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank. It would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and many others.
What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before they can be decanted? They will stack up over time since who wants someone else's baby when you can get your own so easily.
This will also be abused by some jacka## like Musk who wants to build a labor force for something distasteful. Imagine a Mars colonization effort with exclusively young people who were raised in a sealed environment and don't know anything that was not fed to them.
> What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before they can be decanted?
This is already a problem for children of single mothers who die during childbirth. I’m not saying we have a solution to that problem (we are far from one), but it’s at least not a new problem.
> Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank.
Heinlein also explored that possibility a bit in one of his juveniles — in the novel, the tank farms were called "creches."
>Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank. It would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and many others.
It would be a world where the Ghadafis and the Putins could breed armies of 100,000, a million, all raised in barracks and surveilled from birth. The critics would have no say, none of these children are theirs. The political enemies would become allies, just so they might have influence in where those armies are pointed. Entire crops of insect-people, superficially human, but psychologically tortured into compliance, outnumbering anyone who might want to put a stop to it. And don't get me wrong, I think the United States would do it too, even if it might need to hide it for awhile.
>Imagine a Mars colonization effort with
Imagine a Californian colonization effort with hundreds of thousands of psychopath soldiers exactly 15 yrs old, hopped up on roids, raised by a few hundred drill sargeants since they could hold their heads up, slowly marching through and getting rid of anyone who wasn't flagged as an elite.
The reason you don't have stormtroopers doing this now is because there are only a few hundred of them who would be willing to do that at any given point at time. But when you can literally multiple humans with machines, then their numbers could grow quickly and to absurd degree.
> Imagine a Californian colonization effort with hundreds of thousands of psychopath soldiers exactly 15 yrs old, hopped up on roids, raised by a few hundred drill sargeants since they could hold their heads up, slowly marching through and getting rid of anyone who wasn't flagged as an elite.
California is already colonized. What you're describing sounds more like some of the horrors of the DRC wars, which have seen the use of child soldiers. Moral horror is perfectly possible for those who wish to build it, without requiring any kind of artificial birth.
> a world where the Ghadafis and the Putins could breed armies of 100,000, a million, all raised in barracks and surveilled from birth. The critics would have no say, none of these children are theirs
You're describing peasant armies since time immemorial.
> reason you don't have stormtroopers doing this now is because there are only a few hundred of them who would be willing to do that at any given point at time
The reason is it's expensive to train and equip them. Human beings, particularly the ones used for cannon fodder, have historically been cheap.
> There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine environments is one of them.
It will be a huuuge time until extrauterine reproduction is viable even for mammals as small as mice. We barely understand pregnancy and its effects in humans as it is - IMHO it's barely ethical to research around pregnancy on mice, even less on "higher" levels of intelligence such as great apes. It's only a relatively recent discovery for example that fetal cells transfer via the placenta into the mother's organism [1], but it's only extremely recent that further discoveries into the mother-fetus interactions were studied [2].
Hell we're not yet sure if cloning humans actually works - it took a great deal of effort for sheep, and to this date we haven't even managed to work out the ethics for humans in gene-editing, just look at the controversy around He Jiankui [3].
Not saying it isn't worth the effort to hold a debate around human germ line research... but I think the time is premature, we should have it once we have proven it possible and safe in primates.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/
[2] https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/moms-ability-to-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_genome_editing_inci...
I don't believe healthy, social children can be born in this way within our lifetime. Babies start learning their mother tongue in the stomach while being out and about with their mother. There may also be hundreds of other things happening in the stomach that we don't know about, which are needed for healthy children
hopefully, the babies are not in the stomach :)
There are already prototypes of artificial wombs imitating natural womb environment (which might potentially be in the mother's home)
Source? I’ve never heard of babies learning English or French or whatever in utero. Or do you mean they get used to their mother’s voice?
> Source?
https://pressbooks.pub/psycholinguisticsfall2017section2/cha...
> I’ve never heard of babies learning English or French or whatever in utero.
Don’t expect a baby jumping out and saying “a lovely day to all. What are your further plans for the rest of the evening Mother?”
It is more like that structures in the baby’s brain get subtly influenced to better pay attention to certain sounds while paying less attention to others. This is the theory at least. There is some experimental evidence mentioned in the link, but i haven’t reviewed all of it.
Thanks! That's more "learning" that I had realized. Neat stuff.
Yes, but is it necessary? Does it make any difference? This isn’t an interactive learning process anyway, just put an audiobook player next to your BabyVat9000 for an equivalent result.
I think we just don't know.
well, I guess time will tell.
As I recall there’s some evidence they begin learning to recognize the phonemes commonly used in the mother’s language.
Putting a speaker in the incubation room is probably the easiest tweak in all this.
The voice actors from that loop will be quite effective in subsequent advertisements!
Baby's first words will be "This is Audible".
I'm fairly certain some baby's first words have already been "don't forget to like and subscribe!"
The headline inspires SCiFi stories of creating humans outside of the woman. But that is not at all what this story is about: eggs were brought to maturity level outside of the woman.
Currently eggs would be matured inside the mother with artificial hormones.
Now they can be removed before maturing and inflated after in a dish. Then fertilized. Then be injected back into the mother. Hormones are still used in the next step.
The article claims an 80% reduction in injections, but they must only be counting the injections prior to egg retrieval. After the 2 weeks of injections before the egg retrieval, there's another 8-10 weeks of intramuscular injections after the embryo transfer.
Still, this is a great development to lessen the entire ordeal for women undergoing IVF.
'With nearly half of the women in the US never reaching their maternity goals, there is an urgent need for innovation' - did they just describe having children like a KPI?
It is! If ~50% of the population feels unfulfilled because they haven’t been able to have the children they wanted, we should fix that. But clearly it would be better to look at the root cause than to rely on this specious invention.
If you look at the other "personal goals" comment in this subthread, which lists "buy house and get married" before children, I think you can see what the real barrier is.
Subjective well-being is a fascinating metric to chase because it always changes.
I agree. I think happiness and “well-being” are not actual realities. There is only the pursuit of happiness. And that pursuit can be manipulated for financial gain. I think the very best you can achieve is being a child or failing that contentedness and absence of suffering. Otherwise loss and grief will strip away any possibility of happiness. The only fleeting happiness/joy I often see in myself or other adults is in nostalgia - and that’s pure manipulation.
Might this just be you and the people you know, rather than some law of reality?
It certainly could be. There’s the old Greek myth of Pandora’s box - the last entity to emerge is ‘hope’. Is that the worst monster or greatest gift to humanity? I feel like I fall in the former camp. But that’s OK - I still move forward in life and engage in the pursuit of happiness.
When you talk to people who are successful in their personal lives, that's how they treat life goals. Sounds over-formal but that's life.
1. Get married
2. Buy house (by 30)
3. Have kid 1 by 32, to allow 2 year birth spacing for X children
etc.
People like to be wishy-washy and romantic about finding partners, settling down, having kids... but the people who end up where they want to be are usually far more intentional about it.
Many of our "heroes" speaking about having children the same way. Steve Jobs said having children was far more important than the work he did at Apple. While he's going in a different direction with it, Elon Musk has focused on a lot on declining birthrates and what that means.
I first read that very very differently with a word which is almost an anagram of Fertilo, which begins with 'fe' and ends with 'o'. I was very confused how what has been euphemistically described as "swallowing kids" would produce viable eggs.
It's okay, you can say "fellatio", we're adults here
> In the U.S., the company is preparing for Phase 3 trials.
That's that country where, if you do anything such that these eggs don't make it, you're an abortionist.
> Gameto is rapidly expanding the availability of Fertilo […] in key markets such as Australia, Japan, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru.
so, are those the key markets for expensive fertility treatments?
Or markets with lower burdens of entry (ie, regulations or religion-political opposition)