One of the big issues here is that we won't know if artificial wombs create developmental problems until like 40 years after they have begun to be used on a large scale.
https://twitter.com/primalpoly/status/1484190837496025089
Suppose there are 1,000 conditions we "care about" and the average condition impacts 1% of births in the real world and 5% in artificial wombs, and that there's no way to ID the condition while in the womb.
Suppose conditions manifest on average at age 20, normally distributed.
We would need *at least* 10,000 conceptions aged to age 20 or so just to identify *half* of the conditions.
That is to say, by the time we knew the problem, we'd already have thousands and thousands of people experiencing it.
That is to say, by the time we knew the problem, we'd already have thousands and thousands of people experiencing it.
The problems people imagine at first are like clear biological issues.
But what if it turns out that there are subtler things? What if not having the same human bonding just leads to much-angrier-adults?
But what if it turns out that there are subtler things? What if not having the same human bonding just leads to much-angrier-adults?
Many people like an analogue of surrogacy, but they have nothing in common. First, surrogacy still involves a huge amount of fetal conditioning that we barely understand at all, and which an AW would change in ways we can't even measure or imagine.
Second, surrogacy is expensive. One can easily imagine AWs being cheap eventually. This matters because one can obviously foresee various social agents (egotistical rich folks, certain states, maybe some other social organizations) deciding they'd like 2,000 babies. or 2 million.
We have absolutely no idea what happens to parent child bonding in that situation....
.... except the closest analogue is large royal harems where fathers had little role with most kids, and even mothers were often detached from their kids.
.... except the closest analogue is large royal harems where fathers had little role with most kids, and even mothers were often detached from their kids.
And what we know about large royal harems is the kids often ended up in fractious civil wars and murderous infighting.
We can also see the case of Romanian pronatalism to understand the long-lasting terrible effects of suddenly making it "too cheap" to have kids. In Romania, this was via coercion: but very cheap AWs could achieve the same thing!
One can easily imagine cheap AWs enabling people to initiate lots of conceptions without being deeply invested in them. Maybe they ultimately decide to abort (one imagines huge abortion rates with AWs), but at a sufficiently low price, abandoning to the state is plausible.
We can easily imagine, and indeed see a plausible path to, vastly greater numbers of young children being wards of the state, which has extremely adverse outcomes for kids, and that's assuming the gestation itself doesn't cause problems!
But while normally I hate "precautionary principle" type gobbledygook, I think it's warranted here, since we literally can't know effects until it's waaaay too late, and the possible effects include very large amounts of misery among survivors and possibly large amounts of death.
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