Sure, that’s the MVP. But we all know where it’s going.
I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, just pointing out the technology won’t stop there.
I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, just pointing out the technology won’t stop there.
It’s the first step toward commoditizing human life, in a way that isn’t dependent on some Marxist analysis of capitalism. Maybe some think that’s fine, and that having designer children is “good”.
[1] https://malegislature.gov/Bills/193/HD3822
[2] https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-...
[3] https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/infographic
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/mar/28/cross-b...
I'm glad that the people in power have everyone's best interests at heart /s
1. Prisoners owe a debt to society, that’s certainly one way to repay it, provided it’s voluntary. Same reason I’d support voluntary prison labor.
4. You could argue being a sex worker is far more exploitive of women. I think it’s not our place to say they can’t do that, as long as it’s voluntary.
Frankly it seems unethical to do otherwise if it’s an option.
Because we're a generation of snowflakes and I'd recommend to get a better set of friends you can talk freely about stuff.
People are so scared of being branded racist or nazi that common sense goes out of the door.
You're performing eugenics or selective breeding when you select a partner to have children with.
People with different ethnic backgrounds will have different characteristic and of course you want to maximise the chances of success for your kids.
Balancing them out (often by mixing races) and granting both parents advantages to the kids is the optimal solution.
For example, I got strong hairs from my dad and a dark skin from my mom so I'm not bald like relatives on my mom side and I can stand in the sun for way longer than my dad could.
What's wrong with that? I'd say we're genetically predisposed for doing that already, without access to information. Eg. I always liked blonde pale girls who are the polar opposite of myself
You can pick the sex of your kid too with IVF to the extent that if you have male and female embryos successfully extracted and frozen you can choose which ones to use.
What other kinds of pain and risk do you think people should be subject to?
FYI, evolution does not care about the wellbeing of the individual, nor is there any inherent reason the mechanism that evolution comes up with should be held up as the ideal.
Childbirth is remarkably dangerous, even under current medical standards. Even a successful natural birth tends to bring a whole host of complications afterwards, and it's not unreasonable to want to avoid that.
Let me be uncharitable here: do you really think a mom would love her baby any less just because she rip open her entire perineum in the process of pushing that baby out? (If so, I guess I have bad news for C-section babies...)
I'm pointing out that the same phenomenon where "parents" of children born via surrogacy feel less of an attachment to their child would be present in the AWT situation.
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/labor-delivery/topic...
The above list does not even include hemorrhoids that require a hemorrhoidectomy or retained placenta, both which require an operation where the mother has to go under anesthesia.
https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/...
This is an example of how the concept of the good has been bastardized, the idea that if a little bit of X is good, a lot of X necessarily is better. No, that it is good to get rid of the excruciating pain associated with childbirth does not imply getting rid of all the discomfort associated with childbirth is good. Our concept of good has been totally untethered from anything concrete; it has become nothing more than an abstract quantity to be optimized to maximum effect. But we don't stop to ask ourselves if getting rid of core human experiences is what we should be aiming for.
>evolution does not care about the wellbeing of the individual
Evolution doesn't care about the well being of the individual, but the individual has been optimized to find well being in the kinds of environments our ancestors evolved in. These environments included pains, hardship, pathogens, risk, uncertainty, etc. Using technology to decouple our lived experience from anything resembling the natural environments we evolved in can and will have detrimental side-effects. Technology is great in that it can potentially let everyone have the chance at a meaningful and fulfilled life. But we've gone so far beyond that, and we're seeing the results in the various diseases of modern life. We need to rethink our approach.
If you are framing the process of childbirth as discomfort, we will simply have to agree to disagree. Discomfort is stubbing your toe, or sleeping in an uncomfortable position and getting a frozen neck.
See the lists from this comment:
Without progress, the human experience involves a ton of maternal and infant mortality. And obviously everything has consequences, good and bad. These are not reasons to freeze the process of birthing a child to a specific point in time.
Not too long ago, malnutrition, hunger, and losing a few young family members to infections was “definitive” too.
It's also the first step toward other things...like solar exploration and maybe extra-solar exploration.
I don't know why you need to make things up, then try to argue about it. Seems like a waste of time.
That's not what I said. Technology is not a singular set of advancements to the next. As usual, nothing but bad faith responses. Good luck with whatever.
Designing kids and/or producing (for capitalistic purposes) them seems orthogonal to artificial wombs to me: that requires other things besides merely a couple who ask a hospital to fertilize their egg with their sperm and place it in a device.
One concern is that standardized use of this would seriously risk making humans go extinct in the future.
If we completely remove the selection constraint that humans are able to reproduce, over time functionality bugs will creep into that area. If, at any point in the future, society collapses to the point where we are no longer able to build these machines, we may no longer be able to reproduce and will simply die off.
Maintaining this constraint on humans seems prudent. If and when we can manipulate genetics well enough to fix the issue in the actual human organism in a way that is not fragile, then that would be fine.
I'm interested in reading more about this trend. But whatever the data, it does not sound "natural" to take that phenomenon and apply a mechanical solution to the problem. Taken to its logical conclusion, human reproduction becomes dependent on the availability of these mechanical interventions. That sounds like a really bad idea, at least to me.
>Designing kids and/or producing (for capitalistic purposes) them seems orthogonal to artificial wombs to me: that requires other things besides merely a couple who ask a hospital to fertilize their egg with their sperm and place it in a device.
It may sound that way, but needing a woman to gestate the new human is a barrier to this activity. Celebrities and the uber-wealthy, in some cases, already essentially rent the reproductive systems of ostensibly willing women for this purpose. Having an artificial means do to this would remove that barrier and significantly expand the market, so one proceeds from the other.
My wife has wide hips but our daughter couldn’t make her way through and needed a c-section. Maybe she could have made it after another 18 hours of labor, or maybe not.
Artificial wombs would certainly change the economics of surrogacy, but it's also a bit of a slippery slope to think it would commoditize it. It doesn't change most of what we know about IVF and likely keeps the same (relatively high) costs, it maybe just disrupts the labor market for surrogacy. (Which today from what I hear is an extremely expensive market prone to shortages.)