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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

Why don't we just build the experience machine if features of our nature are burdens to be discarded at the earliest opportunity? It is not obvious that a life devoid of any hardship should be the ultimate goal of technology. Some of you are way too quick to discard core aspects of humanity out of some bastardized concept of the good.

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Not sure if I should respond, but are we really debating if preventing someone from experiencing the risks and pain involved in pregnancy and childbirth is a bastardized concept of “good”? Should we remove the option for women to receive epidurals, lest they get to miss out on a “core” aspect of humanity?

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 not just some miserable medical procedure. The entire event is a pair bonding activity for the parents and child. Deleting that because it makes you uncomfortable is unwise.

How anyone can describe the non exhaustive lists below as “uncomfortable” is beyond me.

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/...

Yeah, life is hard. Tough shit.

Should one move to Somalia if they value the hard-ness of life?

Perhaps, if you value being a mercenary.

I'm gonna guess that you're not someone who can personally get pregnant, or else you might be signing a different tune on this one, lol.

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...)

My daughter was born via c-section. I'm well aware of the complications. Childbirth is not "remarkably dangerous", this is a modernist haranguing of women that is meant to scare them. It's a natural process, and like any natural process sometimes things go wrong or not perfectly. That doesn't mean the process is worthless and we should get rid of it.

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.

>Should we remove the option for women to receive epidurals

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.

> getting rid of all the discomfort associated with childbirth is good.

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37316056

Narrowly focusing on the potential complications of childbirth is missing the bigger picture. Taking pregnancy out of the human experience significantly changes the human experience. Such a change is not without consequences and shouldn't be done lightly, and certainly not due to "burdens and risks".

Everything humans do is due to “burdens and risks”, with the explicit goal of changing the human experience.

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.

There's a difference between incidental experiences and features that are definitive of what it means to be human. The process of pregnancy is definitive, infant mortality is not. Just because we have eliminated one class of experiences to good effect does not commit us to an unquestioning march of "progress".

The issue is that a lot of people, primarily technologists in my estimation, just don't like the human experience all that much. They'd like to do away with it as much as possible and replace it with a sanitized and mechanical experience instead.

These are arbitrary distinctions.

Not too long ago, malnutrition, hunger, and losing a few young family members to infections was “definitive” too.

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