Online socialists a couple years ago were already demanding free uterine replicators for all: “Full Surrogacy Now” by Sophie Lewis, Verso Books in 2019.
I wonder how many of the people angry about the concept as proposed by Silicon Valley guys were in favor of this book at the time.
As a mental exercise I try to imagine how my med student self would perceive my current practice. 20 years (around where I am now) is just about right to make it feel like a completely different era. I think I'd feel like a museum piece after 40.
I'm in a tech-heavy specialty so it's especially noticable, especially since I intentionally tried to learn a few "legacy" techniques from very senior practitioners when I first trained. Unfortunately, people seem more unhappy than ever despite medical tech having so many ingredients to meet your futurism criteria (probably due to frustration in the delivery systems evolving far too slowly).
Regarding your comments on surrogacy ("Who would begrudge my friend this? And even if she were able to bear a second child herself, who would begrudge her the opportunity to outsource it?") I think you underestimate the amount of judgement and social pressure associated with "elective" birth technology already. There's a lot of negativity around choosing C sections, choosing epidurals, choosing to formula feed. Even if it weren't so expensive I think surrogacy would remain uncommon because of the cultural narratives about sacrifice and being a good mother.
“We don’t talk much about this ‘violence’; it’s one of our last remaining taboos.”
This is SO true. It’s crazy how many pregnancies are categorized as “high risk,” and how many different things can go wrong with pregnancy and childbirth. Because of complications in the third trimester, my wife lost her vision and is permanently blind. And, if we wanted more kids, we wouldn’t be able to have them.
And there are millions of stories on that same spectrum.
To someone who thinks that proposals like these are some kind of Silicon Valley circlejerk, I say (to use a phrase I hate): your privilege is showing.
What about all the research where the environment and actions (and immune system) factors that affect the child? The part where the $100K/surrogate story is a lot less "nice" is where the parents stick all manner of highly invasive/micromanagement requirements on the surrogate. It is womb and surrogate enslavement for a year, just with pay.
Furthermore, a robot womb is certain to reveal all manner of mother/child dependencies which are impossible to discern now, much as robot drivers are discovering driver/driver, driver/pedestrian and driver/object in path relationships are not so simple.
As for the 10 changes: how many are positive?
Phone maps: helpless people. No cell service or phone battery dead plus basic navigation skills proven to decline without use.
Google pics and google = what need for basic education, common sense, the ability to research and think when you can just google it.
Social media enables social control, and starting a new life is closely related.
Boredom and loneliness: seriously? I don't think anyone believes social contact is greater today than in the past. Facebook posts don't count as "social", they're just spamming the people you are connected with (which are <> the people you know)
Porn - entertainment but hardly a "good", especially given how ubiquitous porn affects how people view each other and themselves.
The only good mentioned is chicken pox, and even then BFD. Getting chicken pox was never a big deal.
Fair enough, although shingles isn't life-threatening to my knowledge. I also wonder just how many people get shingles. But your base point is correct.
What enables phone maps also enables accurate weather forecasting, and therefore better agriculture planning and better disaster warning systems. More food production, less hunger. Better disaster prep, fewer death. Also enables many tools for search and rescue. On the other hand, more accurate bombing and killing too.
Google saves so much effort on research that you can teach research earlier rather than later, with whole libraries worth of books digitized and ready to be dig through. It also helps obscure research communities attract more interest, and enable more international cross-culture research.
For example, OSINT is a new research community borne out of Twitter using Google, enabled also by GPS, abundance of phone cameras, and social network. With only public information, they’ve tracked the movement of troops and missiles across Russia to the Ukraine border during the current tension.
If better weather forecasting or agriculture planning were listed, I would have agreed. However, what you state abovei is 100% wrong - phone navigation is because of GPS - which has nothing whatsoever to do with weather forecasting or agriculture planning. Unless you mean satellites - which also weren't mentioned.
Nor is your assertion that Google's digitization of books enables better research. I would bet 90%+ of people use Google not to do research for stuff that is in books, but is to look for something on a web site or Wikipedia. International cross culture research? What a joke. The internet is unquestionably a vast majority English.
OSINT - more nonsense. OSINT is a cyber security/hacker technique. Your example is further nonsense given the reality of misinformation due to intel agency injection which has been clearly documented in your example.
GPS is satellites! It also only provides you with accurate times. The rest of the navigation, such as mapping the time readings to a coordinate on the map, knowing where the roads are, and which roads to take, is thanks to a combination of satellite imagery, algorithms, and human labor.
Let’s not invent numbers. 90% is an outrageous underestimate of people who don’t do research. Even in EU, only 4 in a thousand people are employed researchers. We’re lucky if people who do any meaningful research reach even 0.1% of the population. But that’s besides the point.
Google Scholar is widely used and appreciated in the researcher communities. It has gained several competitors, which testify to its utility.
Granted, if you are not in the relative communities, you would not know or care about them much. I have presented examples not to convince you, but to have the alternatives on record for more curious minds. The world will become weirder whether we like it or not.
While it is enjoyable to see you keep trying to change the goalposts: the reality is that the article talked about phone navigation as one of its 10 reasons why technology is great.
Phone navigation is not GPS only - you can navigate by turn by turn directions, for example, from one address to another. That's just mapping.
And GPS isn't satellites only either. Actual phone GPS involves use of both wifi and cell tower data.
Nor is your "researcher community" the least bit relevant. I use the internet to combat cyber crime - does this mean that the net is positive? Nor is the researcher community a significant portion of the population - an issue which you utterly failed to address.
So nice try, you simply aren't successfully defending the original article which is presumably what you are trying to do.
An interesting implication of artificial wombs is that their availability voids the "my body, my choice" argument for abortion. Personally, I support legal abortion because I don't think fetuses have a level of cognitive development sufficient to justify a right to life, but apparently this isn't a winning argument, because "my body, my choice" dominates public discourse.
If a fetus can be pulled out of a womb in a minimally invasive procedure and put into an incubator, then this puts women with undesired pregnancies in the same place many men are now: They don't want the responsibility of having children, but can't appeal to the right to bodily autonomy to justify killing a fetus, especially if the other parent wants to keep it.
Where do we go from here? If a woman gets pregnant and doesn't want to have the baby but the father does, does he have the right to recover the fetus for incubation? If so, does the mother have to pay child support?
Will the public continue to tolerate the killing of fetuses when artificial incubation is an option? If not, what happens to all the babies being put up for adoption?
Artificial wombs have much potential for good, but also the potential to set off a huge clustersnuggle if they come before birth control reliable enough and idiot-proof enough to reduce unwanted pregnancies by an order of magnitude.
Maybe in your neck of the woods. But in the parts of the country with the worst unplanned-pregnancy rates, it's conservative cultural opposition to birth control and sex ed.
I have no problem with artificial wombs. But regarding the robot nannies, I think this one is solving the wrong problem. We need to make people able to afford to spend more time with their kids, this is the true definition of progress. Robot nannies only fix the side effect, and it doesn’t make the parents or the children happier. It just enables them to make good money.
We need both! People have a range of different preferences. Some people can't imagine how any form of work outside the home could possibly be as fulfilling as spending time with their kids. Others love their kids but need time off from parenting to talk to adults and advance their out-of-the-home careers. Both of these preferences are legitimate and a free society would let people take full advantage of either.
It would be interesting to compare the numbers from the 1960s with the numbers from a more traditional village or "urban village" environment, where people would have had extended family and close friends sharing a lot more of the responsibilities.
People recoiled in revulsion when euthanasia was introduced.
People recoiled in revulsion at surrogacy.
And they still recoil in revulsion at abortion.
Incidentally, the criticisms always run along similar lines: it's an unnatural or synthetic activity.
But the mind boggling range of unnatural things that we do will exhaust comment sections. It is not natural to live very long or to wear clothes or to peer at glass screens for hours, ...
Whether something is or isn't natural should therefore cease to be a legitimate line of argument.
We can debate legal, economic, political, societal, and health ramifications. Natural doesn't cut it as a consideration.
I am curious as to how many people posting here have children, and if so, more than one. This is not to slight or belittle anyone. I think there is a lot of overlooking the burden of child-rearing which is much more substantial than many stop and think about.
Being pregnant is very taxing on any woman but people overlook just how challenging raising a single child (let alone multiple children) is. There are huge opportunity costs for mothers and fathers and unless these are understood or willful incurred we will struggle to raise birth rates.
Raising children costs people the one commodity they can never earn back—time. A lot of people don’t want to sacrifice their time for children. I am not sure artificial wombs can ameliorate that mindset.
Sure, but I think being pregnant is mostly just shitty while raising kids is incredible and shitty at the same time. Wife is currently pregnant with our third and after a first tri of being nauseated, is now suffering from headaches, heart burn, and has no energy. Would love to throw money at that problem!
I am all for making pregnancy less painful and taxing. I just think that making pregnancy and childbirth easier or even pain free entirely does not change the fundamental calculus that having children costs adults their time—especially in the prime years of their lives.
People are fundamentally selfish with their time and I think that as leisure becomes increasingly sophisticated and enjoyable then raising kids appears to many to be a losing proposition. Hence the “greying” of most developed countries.
As you know, raising children is hard work and requires huge sacrifices—even for those who are financially well-off. The reason being that money cannot also convert into time saved, especially as it pertains to raising children.
I’ve been saying that the pro-life movement should fully embrace artificial wombs. Then you could terminate the pregnancy without termination the life. A woman wouldn’t be forced to carry to term but the baby would still live. It will be interesting to who opposes this, on the left because maybe they feel that somehow this still violates the woman’s right to choose (???) and on the right because maybe it was about legislating morality after all.
Women should still retain the right to bodily autonomy-which means refusing the transfer to an artificial womb. (If the technology were ever to get to that stage, this is all highly speculative).
Another unmentioned reaction is that artificial wombs don’t address the fundamental cultural issue of people not wanting to have children.
Birth rates fall in all developed societies, despite the material circumstances for having children being better than ever before. Adding artificial wombs may unlock childbearing for some new groups and relieve involved pains to other. That may very well be a good thing in itself, just as C-sections are. But for reverting falling birth rates, is the answer really better material circumstances? What about other cultural factors and our outlook on the world and its future?
There are a lot of people who would really like to be able to plan children, though.
Is something like this really all that unreasonable:
"I want to have two children, two years apart, when I'm 35 and 37. That gives me sufficient time to be established in my career so parental leave won't damage my career path too badly, but also ensures that they reach adulthood before I reach retirement." (This isn't me personally - but I know people who would say that)
The problem with something like that is that if you have any difficulty getting pregnant at 35 and you need fertility services (IVF or whatever) then you're liable to be 40 by the time you get pregnant (typically, you get told to try naturally for a year or two and then they try various other things before IVF, and even IVF takes a few cycles on average). And then you almost certainly decide not to have the second child, because pregnancy and parenthood in your forties is a completely different story from your mid-thirties.
I know so many people in that sort of situation.
Being able to put an appointment in your diary and be sure you will conceive on the day you want to will enable a lot more people to have children, or to have one extra child.
I have seen zero people talk about the affects this would have on the maternal bond and family dynamics. I think this would be disastrous for children and their upbringing. People are vain and narcissistic enough as it is nowadays, we *really* don't need this.
My father was never pregnant with me, but he loves me just as much as my mother and our family is healthy and happy. What good would additional pregnancy have done us?
Oh, not at all. My mother took advantage of tons of relatively recent and highly unnatural medical technology which vastly increased the odds that she and I would both survive childbirth. Normal, sure, but that just means everyone else is doing it too.
So am I. Why do you expect changes to the womb environment to have an effect on the child's relationship with their mother? How would the fetus tell the difference? What essential childhood experience are they missing out on by not being pushed out of a birth canal?
That would make a lot more sense! I definitely wouldn't be an early adopter of a robot nanny, even though they sound like a great help to single or disabled parents.
Still, any time someone complains about how "people are already narcissistic these days", they utterly lose me. No matter how pretty you dress it up, that's still just rank "good-ole-days-ism", and no amount of lipstick will ever make me want to kiss that ugly pig.
There's no magic epidemic of narcissism or whatever else, just an epidemic of people who engage in the magical thinking that said narcissism is the real root of various social problems for which science gives us a cornucopia of more reasonable and reality-based explanations.
I've been thinking about a similar thing, on a much smaller scale. Imagine someone time traveling from the 80s to today à la Back to the Future. First they would be horrifically disappointed by the lack of hoverboards. Then disgusted by the monstrosities we have, for some reason, decided to call hoverboards. Then they'd get settled into the idea that aside from the whole computing revolution you discuss, we're materially not much different from how we were then. And then they would see someone riding what appears to be a regular longboard uphill, and their brain would just break.
I'm only 21, but it's still a trippy sight to see.
Noah, love this! Please do more on living standards/futurism. Particularly curious about your thoughts on the "kitchen test" and when the end of the great stagnation will finally significantly upgrade our kitchens or reduce the burdens of doing laundry, shuttling kids, or cleaning the house. Perhaps they have? My iphone 8 to 13 upgrade is great but doesn't help with physical chores!
There already is. I’m assuming you are too young to remember.
1. Microwaves. I remember when a microwave was a deal. This lead to ready prepared meals. Now taken for granted.
2. Trader Joe’s style prepared meals. These sort of things didn’t exist 20 years ago.
3. Takeout. Uber eats. Outsourcing.
All future kitchen revolutions will be this.
Laundry might go this way in the future. Laundry services. But it’s a ways off.
Shuttling kids. This will be done by automated driving. Driverless taxis will never be a thing. People are too nasty. Instead people will own less personal vehicles. One vehicle can do the tasks of all three instead of wasting time sitting in parking lots.
Physical tasks are very complicated. We underestimate how much dexterity we have as humans.
Good points! Is there some sort of econ law as to why gains now domestically come from hired services instead of tech/goods?
Sure microwaves were cool and all but from 1970-2020 all else we got were stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. Pressure cookers and air fryers?
Compare to 1890-1940 with plumbing, electricity, refrigeration, gas stoves, etc. Is progress slower now because we picked the low-hanging fruit or can we expect similar impressive gains once great stagnation is truly gone?
The next breakthrough won’t be until we have robots AND AI that can handle such small delicate random tasks. I’m not sure that we will ever be at that point honestly. Or if we are…. We are at the point of self-aware AI who might decide they don’t want to peel shrimp and add just the right amount of salt for your Mother in Laws tastes.
Online socialists a couple years ago were already demanding free uterine replicators for all: “Full Surrogacy Now” by Sophie Lewis, Verso Books in 2019.
I wonder how many of the people angry about the concept as proposed by Silicon Valley guys were in favor of this book at the time.
Oh whoa. That's really interesting!! Didn't know that one!
Full Surrogacy now is not really about that. Have you read it?
Wait until they find out that this makes abortion illegal under *Casey*!
As a mental exercise I try to imagine how my med student self would perceive my current practice. 20 years (around where I am now) is just about right to make it feel like a completely different era. I think I'd feel like a museum piece after 40.
I'm in a tech-heavy specialty so it's especially noticable, especially since I intentionally tried to learn a few "legacy" techniques from very senior practitioners when I first trained. Unfortunately, people seem more unhappy than ever despite medical tech having so many ingredients to meet your futurism criteria (probably due to frustration in the delivery systems evolving far too slowly).
Regarding your comments on surrogacy ("Who would begrudge my friend this? And even if she were able to bear a second child herself, who would begrudge her the opportunity to outsource it?") I think you underestimate the amount of judgement and social pressure associated with "elective" birth technology already. There's a lot of negativity around choosing C sections, choosing epidurals, choosing to formula feed. Even if it weren't so expensive I think surrogacy would remain uncommon because of the cultural narratives about sacrifice and being a good mother.
> There's a lot of negativity around choosing C sections, choosing epidurals, choosing to formula feed.
Get better friends.
“We don’t talk much about this ‘violence’; it’s one of our last remaining taboos.”
This is SO true. It’s crazy how many pregnancies are categorized as “high risk,” and how many different things can go wrong with pregnancy and childbirth. Because of complications in the third trimester, my wife lost her vision and is permanently blind. And, if we wanted more kids, we wouldn’t be able to have them.
And there are millions of stories on that same spectrum.
To someone who thinks that proposals like these are some kind of Silicon Valley circlejerk, I say (to use a phrase I hate): your privilege is showing.
Such a great read!
Another technotopian cri du coeur.
What about all the research where the environment and actions (and immune system) factors that affect the child? The part where the $100K/surrogate story is a lot less "nice" is where the parents stick all manner of highly invasive/micromanagement requirements on the surrogate. It is womb and surrogate enslavement for a year, just with pay.
Furthermore, a robot womb is certain to reveal all manner of mother/child dependencies which are impossible to discern now, much as robot drivers are discovering driver/driver, driver/pedestrian and driver/object in path relationships are not so simple.
As for the 10 changes: how many are positive?
Phone maps: helpless people. No cell service or phone battery dead plus basic navigation skills proven to decline without use.
Google pics and google = what need for basic education, common sense, the ability to research and think when you can just google it.
Social media enables social control, and starting a new life is closely related.
Boredom and loneliness: seriously? I don't think anyone believes social contact is greater today than in the past. Facebook posts don't count as "social", they're just spamming the people you are connected with (which are <> the people you know)
Porn - entertainment but hardly a "good", especially given how ubiquitous porn affects how people view each other and themselves.
The only good mentioned is chicken pox, and even then BFD. Getting chicken pox was never a big deal.
Not getting chicken pox is a big deal because it also means never getting shingles
Fair enough, although shingles isn't life-threatening to my knowledge. I also wonder just how many people get shingles. But your base point is correct.
Me and both my brother in laws and my mother
And 15 years on still post hermetic neuralgia with abdominal muscle atrophy. Get vaxxed if you've ever had chicken pox.
What enables phone maps also enables accurate weather forecasting, and therefore better agriculture planning and better disaster warning systems. More food production, less hunger. Better disaster prep, fewer death. Also enables many tools for search and rescue. On the other hand, more accurate bombing and killing too.
Google saves so much effort on research that you can teach research earlier rather than later, with whole libraries worth of books digitized and ready to be dig through. It also helps obscure research communities attract more interest, and enable more international cross-culture research.
For example, OSINT is a new research community borne out of Twitter using Google, enabled also by GPS, abundance of phone cameras, and social network. With only public information, they’ve tracked the movement of troops and missiles across Russia to the Ukraine border during the current tension.
If better weather forecasting or agriculture planning were listed, I would have agreed. However, what you state abovei is 100% wrong - phone navigation is because of GPS - which has nothing whatsoever to do with weather forecasting or agriculture planning. Unless you mean satellites - which also weren't mentioned.
Nor is your assertion that Google's digitization of books enables better research. I would bet 90%+ of people use Google not to do research for stuff that is in books, but is to look for something on a web site or Wikipedia. International cross culture research? What a joke. The internet is unquestionably a vast majority English.
OSINT - more nonsense. OSINT is a cyber security/hacker technique. Your example is further nonsense given the reality of misinformation due to intel agency injection which has been clearly documented in your example.
Fail.
GPS is satellites! It also only provides you with accurate times. The rest of the navigation, such as mapping the time readings to a coordinate on the map, knowing where the roads are, and which roads to take, is thanks to a combination of satellite imagery, algorithms, and human labor.
Let’s not invent numbers. 90% is an outrageous underestimate of people who don’t do research. Even in EU, only 4 in a thousand people are employed researchers. We’re lucky if people who do any meaningful research reach even 0.1% of the population. But that’s besides the point.
Google Scholar is widely used and appreciated in the researcher communities. It has gained several competitors, which testify to its utility.
Granted, if you are not in the relative communities, you would not know or care about them much. I have presented examples not to convince you, but to have the alternatives on record for more curious minds. The world will become weirder whether we like it or not.
While it is enjoyable to see you keep trying to change the goalposts: the reality is that the article talked about phone navigation as one of its 10 reasons why technology is great.
Phone navigation is not GPS only - you can navigate by turn by turn directions, for example, from one address to another. That's just mapping.
And GPS isn't satellites only either. Actual phone GPS involves use of both wifi and cell tower data.
Nor is your "researcher community" the least bit relevant. I use the internet to combat cyber crime - does this mean that the net is positive? Nor is the researcher community a significant portion of the population - an issue which you utterly failed to address.
So nice try, you simply aren't successfully defending the original article which is presumably what you are trying to do.
An interesting implication of artificial wombs is that their availability voids the "my body, my choice" argument for abortion. Personally, I support legal abortion because I don't think fetuses have a level of cognitive development sufficient to justify a right to life, but apparently this isn't a winning argument, because "my body, my choice" dominates public discourse.
If a fetus can be pulled out of a womb in a minimally invasive procedure and put into an incubator, then this puts women with undesired pregnancies in the same place many men are now: They don't want the responsibility of having children, but can't appeal to the right to bodily autonomy to justify killing a fetus, especially if the other parent wants to keep it.
Where do we go from here? If a woman gets pregnant and doesn't want to have the baby but the father does, does he have the right to recover the fetus for incubation? If so, does the mother have to pay child support?
Will the public continue to tolerate the killing of fetuses when artificial incubation is an option? If not, what happens to all the babies being put up for adoption?
Artificial wombs have much potential for good, but also the potential to set off a huge clustersnuggle if they come before birth control reliable enough and idiot-proof enough to reduce unwanted pregnancies by an order of magnitude.
Birth control is already reliable and idiot-proof. Uptake is the problem, not tech.
A lot of the uptake issue is with doctors today who refuse to give women birth control, especially long term birth control.
Maybe in your neck of the woods. But in the parts of the country with the worst unplanned-pregnancy rates, it's conservative cultural opposition to birth control and sex ed.
I think this is an "and" - why else would those doctors be saying no?
I have no problem with artificial wombs. But regarding the robot nannies, I think this one is solving the wrong problem. We need to make people able to afford to spend more time with their kids, this is the true definition of progress. Robot nannies only fix the side effect, and it doesn’t make the parents or the children happier. It just enables them to make good money.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic!
We need both! People have a range of different preferences. Some people can't imagine how any form of work outside the home could possibly be as fulfilling as spending time with their kids. Others love their kids but need time off from parenting to talk to adults and advance their out-of-the-home careers. Both of these preferences are legitimate and a free society would let people take full advantage of either.
Agree!
It would be interesting to compare the numbers from the 1960s with the numbers from a more traditional village or "urban village" environment, where people would have had extended family and close friends sharing a lot more of the responsibilities.
I agree on the trend in parenting dedication, but is there any data to back it up?
Wonderful piece.
People recoiled in revulsion when euthanasia was introduced.
People recoiled in revulsion at surrogacy.
And they still recoil in revulsion at abortion.
Incidentally, the criticisms always run along similar lines: it's an unnatural or synthetic activity.
But the mind boggling range of unnatural things that we do will exhaust comment sections. It is not natural to live very long or to wear clothes or to peer at glass screens for hours, ...
Whether something is or isn't natural should therefore cease to be a legitimate line of argument.
We can debate legal, economic, political, societal, and health ramifications. Natural doesn't cut it as a consideration.
Yup. I often say: “You know what’s unnatural? Blood transfusions. You know what’s natural? Snake venom.”
That's some vintage dark humour
I am curious as to how many people posting here have children, and if so, more than one. This is not to slight or belittle anyone. I think there is a lot of overlooking the burden of child-rearing which is much more substantial than many stop and think about.
Being pregnant is very taxing on any woman but people overlook just how challenging raising a single child (let alone multiple children) is. There are huge opportunity costs for mothers and fathers and unless these are understood or willful incurred we will struggle to raise birth rates.
Raising children costs people the one commodity they can never earn back—time. A lot of people don’t want to sacrifice their time for children. I am not sure artificial wombs can ameliorate that mindset.
Sure, but I think being pregnant is mostly just shitty while raising kids is incredible and shitty at the same time. Wife is currently pregnant with our third and after a first tri of being nauseated, is now suffering from headaches, heart burn, and has no energy. Would love to throw money at that problem!
Vizey,
I am all for making pregnancy less painful and taxing. I just think that making pregnancy and childbirth easier or even pain free entirely does not change the fundamental calculus that having children costs adults their time—especially in the prime years of their lives.
People are fundamentally selfish with their time and I think that as leisure becomes increasingly sophisticated and enjoyable then raising kids appears to many to be a losing proposition. Hence the “greying” of most developed countries.
As you know, raising children is hard work and requires huge sacrifices—even for those who are financially well-off. The reason being that money cannot also convert into time saved, especially as it pertains to raising children.
Totally agree, it'd only be a marginal improvement in the kid-having experience. Kids are a ton of work. I would highly recommend it though!
I’ve been saying that the pro-life movement should fully embrace artificial wombs. Then you could terminate the pregnancy without termination the life. A woman wouldn’t be forced to carry to term but the baby would still live. It will be interesting to who opposes this, on the left because maybe they feel that somehow this still violates the woman’s right to choose (???) and on the right because maybe it was about legislating morality after all.
Women should still retain the right to bodily autonomy-which means refusing the transfer to an artificial womb. (If the technology were ever to get to that stage, this is all highly speculative).
Who raises the baby then?
The same person who raises babies put up for adoption by parents who take the approved pro-life steps.
There is a waiting for adoption especially for infants.
Another unmentioned reaction is that artificial wombs don’t address the fundamental cultural issue of people not wanting to have children.
Birth rates fall in all developed societies, despite the material circumstances for having children being better than ever before. Adding artificial wombs may unlock childbearing for some new groups and relieve involved pains to other. That may very well be a good thing in itself, just as C-sections are. But for reverting falling birth rates, is the answer really better material circumstances? What about other cultural factors and our outlook on the world and its future?
There are a lot of people who would really like to be able to plan children, though.
Is something like this really all that unreasonable:
"I want to have two children, two years apart, when I'm 35 and 37. That gives me sufficient time to be established in my career so parental leave won't damage my career path too badly, but also ensures that they reach adulthood before I reach retirement." (This isn't me personally - but I know people who would say that)
The problem with something like that is that if you have any difficulty getting pregnant at 35 and you need fertility services (IVF or whatever) then you're liable to be 40 by the time you get pregnant (typically, you get told to try naturally for a year or two and then they try various other things before IVF, and even IVF takes a few cycles on average). And then you almost certainly decide not to have the second child, because pregnancy and parenthood in your forties is a completely different story from your mid-thirties.
I know so many people in that sort of situation.
Being able to put an appointment in your diary and be sure you will conceive on the day you want to will enable a lot more people to have children, or to have one extra child.
I have seen zero people talk about the affects this would have on the maternal bond and family dynamics. I think this would be disastrous for children and their upbringing. People are vain and narcissistic enough as it is nowadays, we *really* don't need this.
My father was never pregnant with me, but he loves me just as much as my mother and our family is healthy and happy. What good would additional pregnancy have done us?
Of course not. But you just described the normal, natural process...
Oh, not at all. My mother took advantage of tons of relatively recent and highly unnatural medical technology which vastly increased the odds that she and I would both survive childbirth. Normal, sure, but that just means everyone else is doing it too.
I would think that bonding with your mother generally happens *after* being born, not before.
Put the artificial womb inside the woman's body.
I'm still laughing at this.
A+
I'm referring to the gestation period.
So am I. Why do you expect changes to the womb environment to have an effect on the child's relationship with their mother? How would the fetus tell the difference? What essential childhood experience are they missing out on by not being pushed out of a birth canal?
Wow. And up until a few seconds ago, I thought the neo-Malthusian guy had the worst comment on this thread.
Is he possibly talking about the robot nannies rather than the artificial wombs?
That would make a lot more sense! I definitely wouldn't be an early adopter of a robot nanny, even though they sound like a great help to single or disabled parents.
Still, any time someone complains about how "people are already narcissistic these days", they utterly lose me. No matter how pretty you dress it up, that's still just rank "good-ole-days-ism", and no amount of lipstick will ever make me want to kiss that ugly pig.
There's no magic epidemic of narcissism or whatever else, just an epidemic of people who engage in the magical thinking that said narcissism is the real root of various social problems for which science gives us a cornucopia of more reasonable and reality-based explanations.
Rates of embryonic growth correlate with rates of aging. Artificial wombs open the door to lengthening both.
I've been thinking about a similar thing, on a much smaller scale. Imagine someone time traveling from the 80s to today à la Back to the Future. First they would be horrifically disappointed by the lack of hoverboards. Then disgusted by the monstrosities we have, for some reason, decided to call hoverboards. Then they'd get settled into the idea that aside from the whole computing revolution you discuss, we're materially not much different from how we were then. And then they would see someone riding what appears to be a regular longboard uphill, and their brain would just break.
I'm only 21, but it's still a trippy sight to see.
Noah, love this! Please do more on living standards/futurism. Particularly curious about your thoughts on the "kitchen test" and when the end of the great stagnation will finally significantly upgrade our kitchens or reduce the burdens of doing laundry, shuttling kids, or cleaning the house. Perhaps they have? My iphone 8 to 13 upgrade is great but doesn't help with physical chores!
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/the-kitchen-test.html
There already is. I’m assuming you are too young to remember.
1. Microwaves. I remember when a microwave was a deal. This lead to ready prepared meals. Now taken for granted.
2. Trader Joe’s style prepared meals. These sort of things didn’t exist 20 years ago.
3. Takeout. Uber eats. Outsourcing.
All future kitchen revolutions will be this.
Laundry might go this way in the future. Laundry services. But it’s a ways off.
Shuttling kids. This will be done by automated driving. Driverless taxis will never be a thing. People are too nasty. Instead people will own less personal vehicles. One vehicle can do the tasks of all three instead of wasting time sitting in parking lots.
Physical tasks are very complicated. We underestimate how much dexterity we have as humans.
Good points! Is there some sort of econ law as to why gains now domestically come from hired services instead of tech/goods?
Sure microwaves were cool and all but from 1970-2020 all else we got were stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. Pressure cookers and air fryers?
Compare to 1890-1940 with plumbing, electricity, refrigeration, gas stoves, etc. Is progress slower now because we picked the low-hanging fruit or can we expect similar impressive gains once great stagnation is truly gone?
Low hanging fruit.
The next breakthrough won’t be until we have robots AND AI that can handle such small delicate random tasks. I’m not sure that we will ever be at that point honestly. Or if we are…. We are at the point of self-aware AI who might decide they don’t want to peel shrimp and add just the right amount of salt for your Mother in Laws tastes.