By David Futrelle
Like a lot of his fellow Nazis, The Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin is worried about the declining white birth rate — and the prospect of being “outbred” by people of darker hues. As he sees it, the main bottleneck has been what he sees as the “unregulated” white woman, unwilling to have babies in sufficient quantities and also not particularly interested in dating Nazis like him.
But Anglin is now convinced that both of these problems have been solved by SCIENCE — the sex problem by sexbots and the white baby problem by artificial wombs.
He seems most excited by the former. In a recent post on the Stormer, Anglin hails the development of sexbots that can hold a converstation with their owners — if by “conversation” you mean that these robots can respond with prefab comments to certain questions, like an AI-enhanced Chatty Cathy doll.
But this is more than enough for Anglin, who sees these rudimentary conversation skills as being more advanced than the conversational skills of actual human women. “[H]uman females cannot have conversations,” he asserts, before dropping a bit of copypasta: “All they know is McDonald’s, charge their phone, twerk, be bisexual, eat hot chip & lie.”
With sex and conversation taken care of, all that’s left to worry about is the baby making, and Anglin is convinced that recent experiments with sheep prove that artificial human wombs are not only possible but could soon be widely available.
“We will have sex with the robots, and we will grow our children in plastic bags,” he writes.
They’ve already done this with a sheep, you see.
A sheep is a mammal, so all of the dynamics for doing it with a human are already there.
The sex robots will also be better mothers than any human female could ever hope to be.
Basically, we’ve solved our white reproduction problem. Now we just need to implement the program.
Yeah, good luck with that.
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Who’s going to pay for that? I guarantee the US will not.
In theory UNICEF is supposed to care for the protection of children, in practice it does not have the plans or resources to track all children.
Regardless of what Andrew thinks, artificial wombs for humans are nowhere near ready so the specific ethical planning they require is not an immediate concern (though it would still be good to do more to fight human trafficking).
I would love if a uterine replicator had been available to spare my sis-in-law’s pregnancy losses. (I was thrilled to be “Auntie Vicky,” but Mr. Parasol asked that I not refer to him as Uncle Mr. Parasol, because he’d already grieved over two previous losses … and he turned out to be wiser than I.)
I would hate it if uterine replicators were used for human trafficking. Given what my own country has permitted re refugee children, I am very pessimistic.
There will never be vat-grown humans, for a wide variety of reasons, none of which have anything to do with ethics. For starters, it’s not at all clear that it’s even possible to grow a biologically functional adult multicellular animal in a vat; the technical problems are legion. Next, even if you got something the size and shape of an adult (human or anything else really), you’d be 15-20 years into the process by then, and the resulting breathing chunk of meat still wouldn’t be a person, because it never had any socialization, never learned to use its own body, never learned language, etc. At best you’re looking at another 10-20 years of what amounts to complex rehab before your creation can do anything useful or understand what you want. So the whole idea is completely useless as a source of labour, free or otherwise.
As far as organs go, we’re vastly closer to being able to just grow the necessary organs directly, in a matter of weeks, without any hassle about removing them from one body before putting them into another.
TL;DR: Discussing the ethical implications of vat-grown humans has all the real-world meaning of discussing the ethical implications of telepathy.
In addition to be a far away prospect, there’s also little reasons to study the matter given the dearth of actual reasons to have an uterine replicator for human in the first place.
It’s useful to couples that don’t have a working uterus, do still have working gametes, don’t or can’t adopt, and don’t have access to a surrogate. Certainly seem very specific.
It’s similar to how we don’t do much research on human cloning : it’s.not just that it cause ethical problem, it’s also, and in my opinion mainly, that there is not a compelling use case.
A uterine replicator is a whole other thing, unrelated to the idea of vat-grown adults. There’s a very good reason to develop one for humans, which is that pregnancy comes with a myriad of health complications which are frankly better avoided.
It would also be useful for saving premature babies, potentially, which would be huge. Don’t underestimate the willingness of people to work to save premature babies.
@PoM
This is probably what we are closest to being able to do, seeing as that’s what we’ve been able to do with sheep. Yes, I know sheep are not human, but this is still probably a much closer goal now that it’s been done in a mammal compared to having an artificial womb for the full term, which hasn’t been done.
O/T: Looks like Graham Linehan is also a hypocrite about his position on sex work. He ran a livestream earlier with a tab in the background of the booking site for a brothel. I am not shaming sex workers or the people who visit brothels, but 1. Graham is a SWERF who campaigns against the rights of sex workers and 2. I feel sorry for anyone who has to be intimate with him.
Are “pro-life” people all over research into uterine replicators: encouraging it, funding it, conducting it etc?
@Moggie
I doubt it, something something sanctity of life. Plus, they really just want to oppress women and this would make it much harder.
@Dalillama:
Indeed, such a thing would be the biggest liberator of women since The Pill, if not even bigger. It’s not MGTOWs and Nazis who should be looking forward to it, it’s feminists.
I seem to recall running across a few pro-lifers who liked the idea of uterine replicators. They wanted them to be used in lieu of an abortion- i.e. taking the fertilized zygote/fetus out and putting it in the facsimile to develop. I don’t know if that’s a common mindset among those folks, though.
And then what happens after the baby is decanted? Who takes care of it? That doesn’t solve the major problem that causes abortion, which is that women don’t necessarily have the resources to have a(nother) child. It just alleviates the physical effects and risks of pregnancy, which isn’t nothing but isn’t the major reason why women choose abortion.
Thought we talked too much. Get your facts straight, misogynists.
Or not “straight,” that’s cool too. Well, I’ve got the bisexual part, but I’m not a big McDo’s or spicy chips fan, am pathetic at twerking, a bad liar, and my phone cord isn’t working that well at the moment. 1/6 only. Very Sad.
@surplus : the pill wasn’t a big liberator for women. The articial uterii won’t be either.
Pill is a slightly more convenient way to control pregnancy, but the actually important point is allowing women to control their body, not the way to control it. Romans did it by eating natural abortives, and drove a plant to extinction that way ; while the pill is better (less risky in particular), it’s only a small incremental step up. Arguably more important among technical advance is the reduction in death by childbirth.
Same thing for an uterine replicator. Sure, it’s convenient. What is a lot better ? Actually accepting that women can choose to have childrens and a career at the same time. Not singling out people that take a part time because they want more time for their children (or their passions in general, albeit it’s not women-specific). It’s not much better to hear “you need to use that technological gizmo or stop your career” than to hear “you need to choose between child and career”. Especially since it will only push the problem down the line if women (and men for that matter) still are stigmatized for taking time to care of their childs.
In general, technology isn’t a big deal for woman dignity. It’s like saying women will be freed from domestic task by dishwashers and vacuum cleaner, it don’t solve the problem as much as make it easier to ignore.
Presumably, the woman who had sex is responsible for caring for the kid, same position as the majority of pro-lifers hold.
Pro-lifers aren’t interested in solving the problems that cause abortion, they’re interested in removing agency from women. And having the ability to decant a zygote would remove the “my body my choice” argument from pro-choicers, which is probably why they’re in favor of it, for the people I encountered.
I have to wonder if it occurs to Andrew Anglin, that even with sex bots and artificial wombs, women will still have to be involved. I mean until they find a way for a sex bot with an artificial womb to produce human eggs, it won’t be possible for a sex bot to get pregnant.
Also while the ability to have a child without having to actually carry them to term yourself might encourage some women to have children, it won’t encourage every single woman to have them. Off course Mr. Anglin doesn’t care what women want does he? Thankfully we have a little thing called “the law,” in this country.
@Ohlmann
I don’t know about elsewhere, but in America the pill made it possible for far more women to have sex without worrying about pregnancy, enabling the free love movement. It wouldn’t have happened without the pill, and it also caused a lot of major cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. So it was liberating for women and led to many changes.
@Criticaldragon1177
I don’t think he’s thought that through, he doesn’t seem to think much.
Plus, I’m going to go ahead and assume that the pregnant person’s consent to this procedure is not a factor. If I were to seek out an abortion, I would not be willing to have the embryo removed and put in an artificial womb instead. I’m betting a lot of other people feel the same as I.
@WWTH
This is now starting to sound like the plot of a weird horror film. An evil doctor takes aborted fetuses and brings them to term in an artificial womb to build an army to rise up against civilization…
I’m sure babies gestated in plastic vats and raised by steel sexbots will turn out to be every bit as psychologically healthy as the Harlow monkeys raised by wire dolls.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure that sexbots would still be better parents than Nazis.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
Eh, not quite that bad. The only parts made of steel in current sexbots is their skeleton. The most of the rest of them is made of soft medical-grade silicone, which doesn’t feel exactly like skin, but supposedly some sex doll enthusiasts prefer to real skin.
Supposedly babies have issues with physical and psychological development if they’re deprived of reminders what breathing and heartbeat sound like (and this is suspected of being a major cause of crib death) but sexbot makers are working on those, plus body heat. Not because of anything to do with babies, but to make for a more “realistic experience”.
Of course there’s a danger of raising a generation of people who prefer sexbots to humans. Primates raised by other species are prone to being sexually attracted to the species who raised them rather than their own. Orangutans are especially notorious for this. There’s little reason to expect humans would be much different, unless sexbots were virtually indistinguishable from humans. And long before you get to that point, at least on the behavioral level, you’d be running into “slave race” issues.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
No, no, silly female person! You’re misunderstanding! What we’re talking about here is conversation. Serious, manly, deeply philosophical, important discussions, unlike silly female twittering about *checks The Little Misogynist’s Guide to Misogynating* weight loss, bonbons and shoe sizes!
(I was going to check Misogyny for Dummies, but it turns out that’s a category rather than a single book.)
@Naglfar
On the other hand, the liberation was somewhat limited, in that, as someone once said, the sexual revolution mostly meant that it was a lot easier to get laid but women were still doing the dishes. (Not that I’m disagreeing about the imoprtance of the pill; if nothing else, the number of women who didn’t get pregnant and thus have to drop out of school/university/work/life is probably uncountable. But a lot of its more profound societal effects took a while to percolate.)
@Policy of Madness
The only context I usually see “decanted” in involves wine. This makes for some really interesting visuals.
If there was a time to treat the Sontarans as a horrible warning, it’s now.