Easy to conceive, difficult to deliver
The chatter about a synthetic womb to make childbirth cheaper and easy shows that Silicon Valley cannot provide all the answers
It is time to talk about sex.
As we trundle towards new horizons with technological innovations here on the Earth and plans are afoot to set up colonies in space, some people are getting worried about the sliding fertility rates on our planet.
The lack of population growth got even Elon Musk worried. He tweeted about it, saying the falling global population rate is worrisome. The Tesla electric car boss, whose long-term ambitions include colonies on Mars, may have been more troubled by how that could affect his plans.
“If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars,” he said in the tweet.
One thing about Silicone Valley tycoons is their confidence. Brashness, if you prefer that word. But they never shy away from problems. They develop tech solutions for everything, whether it is plausible or not. Pushing the envelope has been the nature of science and technology. And it continues.
Soon after Musk (@elonmusk) posed this question to his 72 million Twitter followers, Ethereum cryptocurrency founder Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) tweeted out his suggestion for the looming problem: synthetic wombs that will make child delivery easier and also solve gender pay disparity which is a hot button issue in the Silicon Valley.
Studies have shown that women’s earnings decline after a pregnancy break, whereas parenthood does not affect men. Allegations of gender discrimination have swirled around in almost every hi-tech company in the Silicone Valley.
Buterin did generate anger among a sizeable section of his 3.2 million Twitter followers, but he also found some measure of support, including from some heavyweights in the tech world.
“We should be investing in technology that makes having kids much faster/easier/cheaper/more accessible Synthetic wombs, etc.” tweeted Sahil Lavingia, (@shl) founder of @gumrod – an e-commerce company – who has a quarter-of-a-million followers.
Some notable women from the world of technology also joined on both sides of the argument. Sonal Chokshi (@smc90), one of the brightest with an outstanding track record in Silicon Valley, said this:
The current procreation is something humans have been doing for “kajillion years” and “it should be as “I-can’t-believe-we-once-did-it-that-way” as anything else.
Another cyberworld star, Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), also tweeted out his view, saying the opposition and claims of tinkering with the nature claims were there when scientists were trying out artificial insemination methods (anyone remember the term “test-tube baby”?).
“Millions of families for whom IVF was the only chance to have a child are glad they did,” went his tweet.
It is not that some whiz kid sitting in a garage and tinkering with a prototype of a synthetic womb that will take care of all procreation affairs next year while men and women continue with their life unaffected by long pregnancy, delivery, pre-, and post-natal issues.
It is just a seed, an idea, pushing the envelope. When young brainy guys put their heads together, they do that. Such out-of-the-box thinking is what propels innovations.
But the thing is, someone has to tell them that the consummation of global issues and technology need not always result in a viable answer.
A quick scan of the achievements of Silicon Valley will show the wrong side also weighing heavily, leading to cybercrime, conspiracy theories, and internal turmoil in some countries.
Technology’s problem is that its proponents cannot always predict all the problems it will encounter, as the communication revolution had shown when it became weapons in some hands.
So, when ideas that alter fundamental activities are mooted, it needs a well-rounded discussion about its pros and cons instead of just a group of well-heeled people brainstorming on it.
As author and technology writer Charlie Warzel says in his newsletter, the philosophy of Steve Jobs that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them is a good argument, but not always foolproof.
“Where this idea runs into trouble, though, is when the Builders are so focused on building that they misunderstand the problem they’re trying to solve. They are so interested in pushing the boundaries of the possible that they make illogical leaps,” he says.
The tech world has a problem with gender parity in salaries. However, attributing it solely to women’s pregnancy and child-bearing role is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
In a world where everything is measured in terms of money it generates, the value gets skewed when it comes to services like child-rearing and maternity care. It prompted a top economist in China, Ren Zeping, to moot the idea of printing two trillion yuan (US$314 billion) to set up a fertility fund.
The fund is for granting cash rewards to families, tax breaks for new parents, and more government-backed childcare facilities. Ren, who has 3.5 million followers on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, startled not only his followers with the suggestion but also alarmed the Communist Party officials who hate any such idea being discussed in public without their approval. So, they promptly banned him from social media.
So be it the capitalist West or Communist China, the problem of dwindling childbirths is something that looms on the horizon. Given the lack of incentives and safety net for new mothers, this could thwart ambitious plans many have set for the future.
In countries like Japan, it has already started to have a telling effect, while the world’s most populous nation, China, is slated to have a labour shortage in a couple of decades. India, poised to overtake China as the most populous nation by 2027, has also reported a fall in the fertility rate in 2021.
The rise in education and income level of women has made a sizeable section of them, especially in developed countries, question their traditional child-bearing role. So, even in poorer regions, especially in Asia, women rebel against being chained to domestic duties and treated as baby-making machines.
That is the issue to be solved to fix this problem, though it is unlikely to have a smooth passage as it will weaken the structure of many male-dominated societies.
Can technological advancement help here? It has to be explored, bearing in mind that some of the fanciful tech ideas had disappeared before without a trace.
Before the 1893 World Fair in Chicago at the height of the industrial revolution, people were asked to write essays about their vision of life 100 years later. Mary Elizabeth Lease, an activist who championed equality for women, wrote that by 1993 humans would have changed their eating habits and survive by taking a few pills that would give them all the needed energy and protein. That, she had written then, would free women from their kitchen duties.
This idea did make an appearance in 1994 in a women’s club in Missouri that organised the Year 2000 dinner, according to BBC.
A variety of meal pills were served: tutti-frutti pills, a brown pill for the meat course, and a miniature chocolate pellet for dessert. The ladies in attendance were, no doubt, content to “play future” until reality came back to bite them. Records show that after the pills, they all sat down to coffee and plates of sandwiches.
All the best to the idea of the synthetic womb, then.
Dear Hari,
Enjoyed reading ' Easy to conceive, difficult to deliver.'
Babu