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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

What would happen though is eventually humans would lose the ability to naturally produce children.

I've seen this in a bunch of movies but it just occurred to me that this may eventually happen to humanity. Birthing children is dangerous for the mother and child, and if given the choice many women may decide to have one "grown" instead.

That's a situation we already face. There's a line of humans who can only reproduce with IVF.

That's not a situation "we" as a culture/civilization/species face, it's a situation they face. The rest of us are perfectly capable of doing what our bodies are designed to do without doctors and scientists and other forms of assistance.

IVF babies aren't guaranteed to be infertile, they just have a slightly higher chance of it (because of selection bias in the parents).

My wife and I might well have babies via IVF because she can't get pregnant while on chemotherapy - but that doesn't mean we carry any infertility genes. She just had the bad luck to have some cells mutate into cancer.

What is "naturally?" At some point in technological progress, we need to build machines to have children. But go a bit further along the line, and maybe we'd find the human body automatically building the machine that builds the human body—in effect, laying eggs.

> At some point in technological progress, we need to build machines to have children

Why?

To outbreed the bad guys.

Er, sorry, I just meant that as "at some [early] point along the timeline of the possible developments in biomedical technology, the world would look like one where—at least early adopters—would need a machine to make children." I didn't mean to imply that there's some sort of imperative to go toward that point.

There will be enough poor people that can't afford to have their children grown who will still be able to get pregnant.

But the continuation of the human "species" as a single entity would then assume/require class miscegenation to re-constrain the DNA from the in vitro-grown humans every few generations.

Otherwise, you'd now have two diverging human species, who might eventually not even be able to interbreed.

> Otherwise, you'd now have two diverging human species, who might eventually not even be able to interbreed.

It's a possible outcome in a few centuries. We might get one human species that would call themselves robot-overlords, those would be born in artificial wombs have artificially enhanced brains and have very prominent positions on Earth. The plebs would sleep on the stairs and drink their soylent green.

In any reasonably competent universe the costs would head towards zero.

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