Human trials of artificial wombs could start soon
nature.com
nature.com
Is this an attempt to nullify all existing laws that use the word "fetus"?
>Artificial womb technology and the significance of birth: why gestatelings are not newborns (or fetuses)[2]
In this abstract[3], she argues that a new classification is needed to determine what can and can't be done with each "entity", because it will impact the freedoms of women. How does a fetus in an artificial womb impact the freedoms of a woman?
1. https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/#publicat... 2. https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/11/728 3. https://academic.oup.com/medlaw/article/28/1/93/5510054?logi...
There are common sense crossovers between a baby inside her mother and a baby in side her artificial womb.
An embryo is an embryo, regardless of whether it is in a mother's body, in an artificial womb, or in a freezer.
A fetus is a fetus whether it is in a biological mother's natural womb, in a surrogate mother's natural womb, or in an artificial womb.
Birth is when the fetus exists the womb and presumably starts to breathe on its own. This can be vaginal delivery, caesarian section, or delivery from an artificial womb.
Humans are humans, regardless of whether they were delivered vaginally, through caesarian section, or were delivered from an artificial womb.
I hope we do not go back to the days of legalized slavery. The USA still has scars from a war that mostly ended slavery. The UK took until 2015 to finish paying off the debt incurred from compensating slave owners when they freed the slaves.
Now of the uncomfortable topic of abortion. I remember an L. Neil Smith book where a woman found herself unintentionally pregnant, and had the baby taken out and stored frozen for a few decades until she was ready to become a mother, then she had the baby incubated in as artificial womb. In a world with that level of technology, where unplanned babies could be incubated in artificial wombs and easily adopted, abortion would serve one of several purposes:
1. Eliminate severely deformed or genetically defective people from society. (I wonder if genetic engineering will raise our collective IQs and athleticism until one day everyone in this conversation would be aborted for being too stupid or too weak to live?)
2. When all the people who want to adopt are overloaded with kids, when all foster care facilities are overflowing, and and the government does not want to raise kids in group homes, eliminating the excess children could be a final solution. I wonder what the long-term economics would be when AIs can raise children very cheaply. Would the children be cheap to raise and very productive, or would they be useless eaters overpopulating a crowded planet? I think contraception is a kinder solution. I would not put it past some authoritarian regime to demand they get to decide what unborn babies are incubated and which are aborted for the purpose of eugenics.
3. Maybe someone just wants to kill a kid? I see posts about wanting to get pregnant to have an abortion for the joy of killing a child on social media, but I have a hard time taking them seriously. I have known people who would take part in a human sacrifice for the fun of it if it was legal. I don't talk to them any more.
I typed this wall of text, and never mentioned clone armies. I'm a failure.
TLDR: it's not as simple as just "fetus", but there is much disagreement around when a developing clump of cells becomes protected under the law.
Further to this, there could be agreements that there would be an annual "service" of the child, with it being a requirement to have some ongoing medical treatment or gene therapy, that might be written into the terms of service.
If any of that, at what point would the child 'own itself'? Does it ever? Will there be lifetime contracts?
In the end, all these issues can be solved through the legal system, and I'm fairly certain that a court won't allow slight-of-hand or deception to create widespread de facto slavery.
Prisoners are defacto slaves.
HB1 are defacto slaves.
Outsourcing is defacto slavery.
Working for the same wage everywhere,that barely affords you food and roof with no chance to improve your fate, is slavery. Slavery is all around you.
Its just that the word is not used.
Perhaps "de facto slavery" was a poor word choice. That said, slavery as we traditionally understand it means you are entirely dehumanized; in essence, you are property.
The examples you provide certainly are challenging, to put it lightly, but they are not slavery itself. Though the closest, prisoners still have human rights. HB1s have human rights, and they also chose to live and work the US of their own free will. Outsourcing exploits access to cheap labor in a global market, which will serve to eliminate extreme poverty by providing work opportunities, though we also know that such opportunities have come at the expense of human rights by our Western standards, which, to my understanding, is typically caused by poor top-level oversight of local management. The issue of wages is a largely Western phenomenon where, for better or for worse, people are unwilling to make significant lifestyle changes (e.g., moving somewhere new) for a better wage, a wage that hundreds of millions of people around the world would love to have.
The word "slavery" isn't used in those cases because it's a false equivalence. Yes, there are countless ways in which humans attempt to control each other, but bonafide slavery isn't it.
To return to the point, the status of legal personhood provides certain rights. What if it's legal for a clump of Homo sapiens cells to grow into something that never meets the threshold for attainment of legal personhood? I believe that clump of cells may, in certain places, be considered property, which is truly chattel slavery.
Why on earth do people make this huge leap? This is (fortunately) not a problem for existing premature babies whose incubation is finished off outside the womb. Is this because the US lacks a human rights framework for understanding rights?
Where is the person/not boundary?
I won't be very surprised if such an entity is actually created by a vlogger sometime before the end of 2030.
Why not?
Is an artificial womb not a womb?
I wonder what the downstream effects will be when a company offers BaaS (Babies as a Service). Seems studying the present-day cloud may serve as an effective foil.
I really wish that human language was strongly typed. You shouldn't be allowed to hijack a word for your own political ends. But to even suggest that the original concept or article deserves it's own distinct word puts you at risk of being accused of some thought crime. Why? Because that makes the incoming bait-and-switch easier to spot. The warping of the word is a magic spell, designed to manipulate reality.
Edit: misspellings and ramblings
According to my one true definition of "strongly typed" it already is--how dare you try to hijack those words. /s
I've seen the term "strongly typed" refer to so many different features that it lost any meaning to me. Wikipedia seems to agree, saying that's it's more of a marketing term.
Actually you could argue that we have indeed created a strongly typed dialect of English which is legalese. So a version that is very precise but to complex and verbose for most people and most spheres in life
Imagine if new policy had to be compiled with current statute book monorepo? It would get a hard "nope" in many cases. Not only could it prevent bad legislation, it could be used to point at existing "bad policy" that blocks good legislation.
Imagine if each country had a laundry list of known bugs in it's laws? I mean, you'd want to know, wouldn't you? At the moment we need to wait until somebody tests a law before we realize it's unenforceable or unfair
Natural.
Communist.
Chemicals.
Fascist.
Quantum.
I don’t think “strongly typed” even makes sense in reference to human language, except in the sense of grammar where words can only be used in the place where a the particular part of speech they are is called for, in which case formal writing is pretty close (though it responds to linguistic drift that results from informal language not being “strongly typed”.)
What I think you mean is you wish that definitions of words were precise and fixed and that adherence to strict and literal use according to those precise, fixed definitions was universal and compulsory.
Which, well, would be convenient for some things but really bad for others, and in any case is irrelevant because there is no way for it to happen.
> But to even suggest that the original concept or article deserves it’s own distinct word puts you at risk of being accused of some thought crime.
Does it? People make suggestions like that all the time, and while they are often disputed, its rarely about anything like “thought crime”.
Available for media contact about:
Ethics: Abortion
Law & Crime: Abortion
English Law: Abortion
Gender and law: Abortion
Ethics: Reproductive Technologies
Law & Crime: Reproductive Technologies
That sentence really deflated me
It makes me ashamed to call myself a scientist in world where others claiming the same status show such a stunted, parochial outlook.
Haven't we just lived through this with AI, and now face a rude reckoning? Surely the "distant future" in this case is about 10 years, making such dismissive, offhand remarks pure political deflection.
It's always "worth discussing" the implications of your work. Having the courage to use sceptical imagination, and even express doubts about how your work might be misused, is surely an essential characteristic of a worthy researcher.
Yet I am dismayed to read so many negative, borderline paranoid comments. And to hear the glib remarks of researchers and their PR spokespeople caught in the corporate power dance.
We have such a deep problem with ethics in technology. I think it is bound to the epoch, and arises mainly in the era of massive power inequality, monopoly, poor education and massively distorted communications. As a result, there's general scientific hubris in the air, and the descent of the West into corporate crypto-fascism is making wonderful scientific advances only look threatening (robots, AI, genetics...). These are Frankensteinian times.
Now the first thing we think about when a brilliant new technology emerges is "how will the rich, powerful and malevolent misuse this to further enslave people?"
That can't be healthy, but unfortunately it's become a necessary scepticism. Scientists need to (wo)man up and learn to talk about this stuff.
Another interesting question (filosophically, biologically and morally) is if artificial wombs could break the boundaries of human pregnancy. Currently is subject to the capability of the body of the mother to sustain a successful parturition without bursting (sorry for the ugly mental image but is like that). The babies can't grow indefinitely inside the mother.
Artificial wombs don't have this constrain. Could this machines extend it for a whole space travel of 1 year, or 1,5 years, or even more, so this children are much more apt to fend for themselves when born? nobody knows.
It ends on a good note compared to most stories of this nature where the AI self-terminates because the kids now adults are ready to the job further.
This, plus the recent news of the "model" fetus and the old news of CRISPR, means we're in for some interesting times.
Khan!Khaaaan!!
https://youtu.be/wRnSnfiUI54?feature=shared
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/chinas-testing-biol...
And HOLY FORD! What a BRAVE NEW WORLD!
Together with artificial wombs, this would liberate us from one of the heavies tyrannies nature (and evolution) have placed on us. But it could be worse, I guess. We could be like praying mantises…
The second is theoretically, it still is not possible to "design" a baby. In biology, things are very different from pure engineering. The ways stuff gets discovered is like this: if you have a big clockwork machine, you increase signal to a gear, you notice the machine do X, you say that gear is associated with X function. Then you go to another gear, do it again, and try to map out everything in the machine and their function. Cool. Now the problem is you don't know interactions between gears. So you try to change 2 gears that both associated with X. Turn out when you do that, the result is not just X but XYD get changed. Then when you try 3 gears at the same time, turns out it changes XMA function. Worse, in another supposedly identical machine, changing gear X actually causes Y change because of a previously unknown gear that is a switch for gear X to affect either X or Y and that switch depends on some obscure environment parameters...
In short, biology is too complex and the way we are probing it is still too primitive and it takes a long time to even figure out what go where. We can try poking around to optimize one thing but it always causes unintended effects, mostly lethal. So the ethics boards are even less likely to approve a project like this.
Just as an example: CRISPR system. We know about nucleases and these enzymes and stuff for decades. But to make it something reliable enough to be used took so long this thing only became big recently. Biology is very slow and very tedious. It won't be like writing a software and wait 10min for it to compile. Experiments can take years to run and come out with nothing because a stupid mistake was made somewhere along the way.
If developed nations don't allow stuff like this, once the techniques get good enough, I can foresee some company setting up in another country with low regulation and offering services there. People with enough money just need to fly there for a few weeks, get their embryo treated and implanted, then fly home.
Which is fine, its not like genetic monocultures have ever produced problems.
Meanwhile the disadvantaged masses of wild slaves in their slums will profit from the exploratory teams of transnational bio-corps, looking for interesting new traits and specimens. Some will be elevated as winners of the 'lottery'.
Like some of the poor formerly free roaming mustangs in the west, now mostly coralled in. Can't have them disturb our cattle, can't we?
/imagine braying laughter here...
Care to explain why doing what we have done to make you exist in this planet earth should STOP at the exact same generation than you were born?
Sounds narcissitic, you were born to stop people being born. Think about it
probably because getting hyper-humans means getting rid of some humanity
I like the idea of having kids but not interested in marriage
Imagine Musk getting a hold of this - he would be churning out duplicates of himself by the dozens.
He has a rather insane fixation on human population growth akin to the shady eugenics movement of the 60's.