An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep

(Eventually, I realise this technology is not there yet).

Foothold technologies like this generally improve over time.

Not to mention the influence of everything else that the mother provides (hormone levels, immune system, ...).

I mean there are people that research whether c-sections vs. natural birth has a measurable impact on human children (and believe it has), for example. In that context, this would seem like a big diffrence.

And unlike things like sounds and mechanics these are things that are quite poorly understood. How humans develop their immune systems, get autoimmune diseases and allergies etc is tricky stuff. What this will do is at least help figure out what comes from where, because you can use identical twin animals where one is born naturally and one artificially.

Why not genetically engineer them to not have a brain? No brain, no chance it might suffer. The bare minimum of neurons needed for staying alive — pump heart, breathe, digest food — is tiny compared to a mamillian brain.

Because of course a one month old baby is ready to work, right?

Sorry, but humans are social animals. We don't come ready-to-use; it takes a lot of training (about 9-18 months for basic language alone). Worse, we're born — by the standards of most mammals — prematurely: if we weren't, the maternal death rate would be unsustainable (big skulls don't pass easily through gaps in the mother's pelvis). Our immune systems are primed by the mother via colostrum ("first milk") after delivery: we can't walk for months, we don't even have full bowel control for a year or two. And then there's socialization and interaction and play and all the other panoply of human developmental requirements — which you might think are unimportant, but a quick look at the history of Romania's Ceaucescu-era orphanages and their survivors (the Ceaucescu dictatorship banned abortions) will give you a grisly tour of the failure modes.

The least-bad outcome of your proposal is that it would enable parents to rapidly raise a family with 2-20 children without inflicting direct physical damage on the female population (but don't underestimate the exigencies of raising children as a full-time job, specially on that scale). But it's not a colony-in-a-can gadget that will making planetary (or interstellar) colonization easy; someone's got to be there first, to prepare a safe and healthy environment for the kids to grow up in.

(If you say "yes but AI!" then I submit that you don't have any clear idea what you're asking for or you're a believer in the singularity, aka the rapture of the nerds.)

The fetus may be listening to the outside environment or hearing his or her mother talk, but if this was a prerequisite to the "specialness" of humans/primates you are referring to, then we would see significant differences in the immediate post-natal behaviour of congenitally deaf children. I haven't searched the literature for this topic, but I personally have never seen that mentioned.

An easier explanation is that these are genetically encoded. The ducks are a good example. Ducks hatched from eggs that are artificially incubated seem to have the same core instincts as those hatched from natural incubation.

That said, there are still important forms of communication between mother and child: chemicals. An extreme example is the disastrous and tragic affect of alcohol on fetal development.

Craig Venter already did that with a bacterial. He synthesized the entire genome, then inserted it a cell. I assume that cell already had the other machinery (translation enzymes, etc).

In parallel example, we have not managed to find an artificial replacement for egg shells which is required for avian embryos to develop. Some techniques do exist, but none of the them were able to ensure survival past the first 2 weeks. Considering that humans have been breeding chicken for centuries, there is still plenty we don't know about our favourite bird, let alone fellow humans.

Awesome who cares about animals if we can help humans.

And yeah downvote me because I do not embrace this unhuman future.