Would Artificial Wombs Solve the Depopulation Crisis?

26 thoughts on “Would Artificial Wombs Solve the Depopulation Crisis?”

1. So, I’ve got a moment for a more detailed response.

   What is the cause of the birth dearth?

   The fact that we have an instinct to have sex, and an instinct to raise children once they show up, but no specific instinct to actually force us to let the sex result in children, means that above a certain modest tech level, reproduction is optional as a matter of our basic drives. This doesn’t guarantee a birth dearth, it merely allowed for one.

   What really brought it on is the socialization of the benefits of having children. Not total, but to enough of a degree that having children looks economically irrational.

   Children were the original old age pension; You raised them, and if you lived to be old and feeble, they took care of you. Even before that they helped around the house.

   Old age pensions, mostly run through governments, have created the illusion that having children isn’t necessary for a comfortable old age. It’s an illusion because SOMEBODY has to have the children, still, it just no longer has to be the people who get the pensions.

   Most of these pensions are not properly funded, they’re just generational welfare programs disguised as pensions you pay into, and trivially rely on SOMEBODY having children to pay the taxes that will cover your pension, just as you paid the taxes to keep a previous generation comfortable in old age.

   But even the pensions that are properly funded implicitly rely on a next generation, because what good is the money if there are no workers to pay it to, no doctors to treat you, no farmers to raise the food?

   But government HAS socialized the benefits of having those children. So people ARE making individual economic decisions that they don’t need the children, and would benefit more from spending the money it takes to raise children in some other way.

   Reversing that decision won’t be cheap, it will require expenditures on the same scale as the socialized benefits, zeroing out not just the personal costs of raising children, but also the opportunity costs. No current government wants to spend THAT much money solving the problem, when they can instead just encourage immigration, even if it has to be illegal, to replace the missing children. And maybe do some social/ethnic engineering along the way.

   And it’s a trap, because democracies are incapable of long term investment; Any politician who attempts it gets outbid by one who offers immediate gratification. Why else are all the democracies running massive deficits?

   The expenditures necessary to resolve the birth dearth are subject to the same perverse calculus: The gains are a generation from now, the costs immediate. Ergo, no democracy can do it until the problem becomes too bad to ignore, and extreme measures become necessary.

   And governments will like those extreme measures, because they’ll provide fresh opportunities for Brave New World style social engineering….

   • Here’s a recap of my long comment the system swallowed:

     We need a solution to the real problem, that giving birth doesn’t look to women, specifically, like an economically rational choice. They’re treating it like a luxury good to be put off until you can easily afford it, (By which time it’s too late.) if not substituted by other luxury goods.

     Artificial wombs, even if free, would only solve part of the problem, because a lot of the cost of having children is opportunity cost; All the things you can’t do because you’re taking care of kids.

     To be sure, once you’re actually raising kids, you realize that doing so is a rewarding activity in itself, that gives your life meaning. But if you don’t BEAR the kids, you never learn that.

     So, we need to make bearing children look like an economically rational decision again.

     We can’t JUST directly subsidize bearing children, because the people most responsive to outright subsidies are the last people you want raising the next generation, people who will pass on highly destructive cultural traits. The Marching Morons was a warning, not a how to manual.

     I would suggest a truly major tax break. Like a lifetime 33% cumulative, lifetime tax deduction for every child you bear, applicable to joint tax returns for married couples. That’s the scale of what is needed.

     Additionally, regulatory obstacles to surrogate motherhood need to be lifted, this is probably cheaper than artificial wombs, and more ‘technologically’ mature.

     Finally, though it doesn’t scale, and certainly won’t help the 3rd world any, we should try to massively expand and promote the K-1 fiancee visa program, which currently only brings over in the mid five figures worth of women every year. At the moment we’re importing about 1.5 million men willing to break our laws every year, by deliberate failure to enforce immigration laws. But we aren’t short on sperm, we’re short on willing wombs. Why NOT import them, preferentially? And with them, import their pro-natal attitudes?

     Getting any of this done is going to be a real battle, because the birth dearth is self-accelerating, it’s causing more and more people to view child bearing as an expensive hobby, not an essential and beneficial activity. And voters do not like subsidizing hobbies.

2. Okay, since you continue to whine, here is a simple option that will provide financing and reproduction. Allow cloning and genetic modification. I’m ready to contribute to the population if it’s my genes. I don’t want to have a wife and give her half of my property in order to copy half of my genes. Nevertheless, I am ready to raise and educate my clone, with genetic modifications for greater health and intelligence, and complete the results of my labors for him. I think 80 percent of men will also agree to this.

3. Birthrate is no more a crisis than climate change is a crisis. Stop with this garbage SMH

4. Artificial wombs? Come on. We have reached one point in development and population went up for a long time. 8 billion is a lot. Now we will have some period of reduced growth or population will be reduced a bit sometime in the future. Society will adjust and then will have more stable curve. We won’t get extinct because of that. Psychopaths like trump or russian president are way more dangerous and damaging to society.

   We really don’t need whole planet to become giant metropolis, where people are everywhere and fight for resources.

   We will use robotic workforce, who’s work will contribute to pension funds,…

5. There is absolutely zero chance of birth rate recovery (in at least the U.S.) until every single issue cited in the linked post is addressed and suitably resolved:

   https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=250038

   The problem is not limited to the left. Much of the right is as delusional about these issues as the left, which is why nothing will be done in the foreseeable future on this matter.

6. Who’s going to raise these mass-produced children? Fertility isn’t an issue for most – it’s lack of will. I’m not raising some bag baby I didn’t ask for.

7. Artificial womb unless coupled with robot nannies won’t have much effect. Not anymore than already existing maternity benefits and cash bonuses that reduce career cost of pregnancy for women. The main disincentive is not difficulties of 9 months of pregnancy but long time and resources it takes to raise a child to adulthood at expense of consoomerism.

   Naive techno-optimist are wrong because Artificial womb and/or robot savior don’t reject basic maths of replacement level fertility. They might provide some boost and ease the pain of population decline by taking over some jobs but if we are to survive as biological beings then there is no alternative to start having 2.1 or more kids at some point.

8. The first issue will be very difficult to overcome. The chemistry going through the umbilical cord from mother to fetus is complex and is not even close to being understood. Mess it up and you create abnormalities in the developing fetus. Worse, animal experiments only get you part way down the road. What chemistry coming through the umbilical for development of our big brains is not going to be discovered through animal experiments.

   Needless to say, human experiments are exceedingly unethical, sufficiently so that even the Chinese are put off by the necessary research (the doctor who was jailed over the CRISPR engineering girls some years ago).

   If exowombs could be perfected, they would actually be ideal for pregnancy and would actually be superior to natural pregnancy. There is evidence that neurological development (both cognitive and executive function) is determined by growth factors, nutrients, enzymes, and other biochemicals coming through the umbilical. Optimize these and better kids will result. But due to the difficulties of the development process, this is a good 50 years off.

   In any case, I think you guys are way over-reacting. You are projecting trends 6 to 10 decades out. Forecasting trends this far out is a near impossibility.

9. IVF and artificial wombs just illustrate that there are technologies that would supplement natural childbearing if there was demand. The core question is just economics. If there was demand there would be supply.

   The lack of demand produced by the demographic shift is caused by the increasing cost burden of raising children. Eliminating that would raise demand. If the price went negative and having children increased women’s economic security and prosperity the birth rate could very likely be adjusted upward as needed.

   21st century market economics changed having children from an economic advantage to a burden. The same economic changes that will be needed to provide some version of UBI or UBWealth to deal with the elimination of the need for human labor – would compensate for the economic burden of child rearing by the fact the children would have income to compensate their parents from birth (or even before birth).

10. This — using artificial wombs — is a very bad idea. Does anyone even remember the book, “Brave New World”?!? You are seeing what was once science fiction slowly becoming science fact. Children conceived and brought to term in this manner will not turn out well. There is an ineffable connection that develops between the mother and child while growing in her womb, that is absolutely essential to the formation of an emotionally and mentally — if not also physically — healthy human being. We need to find a way to resolve this growing crisis whereby this idea becomes unnecessary and stays on the bookshelf of science fiction …

11. Cool, ‘there are only about 20 weeks in human development that needs to be filled’,
    completely true, my aunt she works in the premature birth section of one of our greatest hospitals in Antwerp here, after 20 some weeks, most prematures can survive outside the womb (lungs developed etc).I can assure you, this is a very labour intense process, they are already shortstaffed. Getting enough people for that is a time consuming practice at well, it can be done offcourse. Btw she loves the job and getting a Baby trough all this is one of the most giving jobs anyone can have, the parents also have to come there very often! Parents are needed!

    I once again stumble upon the robot side again, I think that this will greatly support our needs, I have 1 kid of my own now and soon one other, the really big problem is money, I guess we’ll see the same thing happening with robots as we saw with the Iphone, everyone wants one and eventually everyone gets one. This will greatly take the pressure of household tasks so parents can focus more on the human side of the family. Robots wont on its own solve the birthrate problem, they will be a solution to it.

    The only thing I always ask myself, what other problems will arise if we tackled this.

    I do not think that what Joe says ‘Immortality ( or at the very least 1000+ year life spans) also reduce depopulation crisis’ since this will be beneficial to only a select group of people first & also you run into other problems, what about pension? Working for 40 years to get a 960 years pension? Thats a lot to think about.

    People nowadays strife too much to perfection, you can see it in
    – the people not finding a lifepartner because of the entire washlist with demands they have for the other
    – out of control government spending
    – only wanting children after specific targets are met
    – etc etc

    We are really all too much pampered, I had the same, I wanted to have kids only after I bought my first house, had a good job, etc etc only to find out that when the moment came, my wife had a first stage cervix cancer and we were almost too late!
    Now she’s fine, and we have our little one, and honestly I’d only wish I’d had it earlier.

    So my view on this all, it’s only when our mindset changes that this will turnaround, and that time will probably come when we’ll start to see the devastation this might wreck as Brian showed us. Maybe governments should afficiate this problem more, however no-one really likes to listen to them.

12. Chinese scientists create AI nanny to look after embryos in artificial womb

    https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3165325/chinese-scientists-create-ai-nanny-look-after-babies-artificial

    “Researchers in Suzhou have developed an AI system able to monitor and take care of embryos as they grow into fetuses in the lab.”

    “Technology won’t be a problem for its future application, but legal and ethical concerns might, warns Beijing-based researcher.”

    Reading other articles, it seems that this tech is advancing rapidly.

    • Yes, this is what I’m talking about. The “assignment” was to find ways to boost fertility – though I disagree that’s a near or medium term problem anyway – not to create a utopia. It may even be more a dystopia, but with more humans! China has more engineers and scientists now; they will figure this out if the government decides it’s a crisis enough.

13. billions of robots + longevity

14. Thank you for focusing in on the artificial womb issue I have been commenting on for some time.
    A few updates and comments:
    There’s a new article in the NY Times, published 3/24/24, on IVF. Despite many obstacles well described in the article, IVF is now used for above 2% of all American births. Very briefly, those obstacles include:
    Cost – insurance does pay in some cases for this natural right of women to use this technology – single women & same-sex female couples too – though only after 6-12 months of supposedly trying naturally to conceive. The Times helpfully points out that couples fudge this number since insurance has no way of knowing what goes on in the bedroom. Undoubtedly, this is leading to what the Times headline implies: “Choosing to Skip Sex and Go Straight to I.V.F.” – https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/24/style/ivf-process-couples.html.
    The fact is, even with insurance, IVF remains very expensive – up to $23,000+/round of treatments per month – difficult physically with hormone shots, mood swings, possible short or long-term health consequences, and, for the older women who typically opt for this last-chance procedure, repeated attempts to conceive. Of course, all of this is BEFORE the difficulty and expense of pregnancy after successful implantation. For career women, pregnancy also involves time off work, and possible career stalling – studies show that the wage gap is mainly due to females missing work for pregnancy and child-rearing. With more women than men graduating from college now, the sex wage gap has mostly disappeared until women start having children.
    I’m well aware of the dystopian possibilities of womb-based babies, which is why I suggested it would happen first in a country like China, which is already semi-dystopian/authoritarian (e.g. communist). I’m not even saying artificial wombs would be a GOOD thing for society (e.g. the movie Gataca (1997) I referred to, already looking dated), just that it will be used in countries that take depopulation as an existential crisis and can’t/won’t attract enough immigrants, unlike America, which attracts so many there is always a robust faction trying to keep them out (without immigrants, American population would already be going down too).
    The Times articles points out: “At age 35, there is a 15 percent chance of conceiving naturally per month, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. At 40, that drops to 5 percent.” Given the cost, difficulties, and availability of IVF, such treatments will have trouble scaling to larger numbers of women, or even being sought by them in large enough numbers.
    Not so for artificial wombs, which, as others have pointed out, for better-or-worse, will be driven and paid for by state needs, eventually, when increased at scale.
    As the Romanian orphan “experiment” showed, having cold, detached, institutional upbringing, creates cold, detached, and possibly psychopathic children. This ought to be undesirable for any social or government viewpoint, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
    However, with increased healthy lifespans, particularly among the brightest, most productive women, there is plenty of time from 40-60 to raise children, either when they are most financially secure or at least with state supplements (governments do have to be careful not to pay unfit mothers just to have kids, who will then grow up to have bad habits like their parent(s), but that is a separate discussion), but very low odds of having children even at 40, or slightly older, even with IVF.
    Every major technology was expensive and had major obstacles to scale at first: Telephones, Electricity, Indoor lighting, Automobiles, Air travel, Personal computers, cellphones. But if the benefits were there, ways were found to scale them up for the mass public. I have no doubt artificial womb technology will scale accordingly too, though it may take a little longer because there is a natural alternative that will be preferred by many or most people. But governments look at long-term trends, and if it needs women to work in a shrinking population scenario, they’ll find ways to pay for it – assuming AI and robots don’t take enough labor that women are then free to have babies, and governments still find creating more humans preferable over replacing people with machines. The latter is a real possibility, and begs the question of what the “free market” is really for? If the free market values production above all else, it may produce more robots than people eventually, but that would be a perversion of it being to “satisfy human desires” since it won’t just be human desires then.
    Of course, extension in female fertility may eclipse artificial wombs, and women may start having babies in their 40s and 50s as easily as they do in their 20s and 30s. There is work already underway to make that possible: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/20/health/extending-fertility-aging-life-itself-wellness/index.html
    Maybe having children later in life will eliminate many of the things that might make artificial wombs an attractive alternative. There are too many variables to make a prediction now.
    There are many ways to arrest population decline and I have full confidence they will be found in time for the Next Big Future.

15. We need more than wombs to produce the next generation, we need parents. As the father of four I can testify that turning a newborn into a functioning adult is a lot of work. Well worth it in the end, but we can’t make anyone who isn’t willing, nay eager, do it.

16. “IF there is no massive cost reduction then the $100,000-200,000 cost per pregnancy is comparable to the levels of increased financial incentives that I estimate are needed to encourage women, surrogates and families to have the needed children.”

    Now, this is a key point. ALL approaches to reversing the birth dearth are expensive, because the birth dearth is a result of people making (short-term) economically rational decisions, and to undo it, you have to spend the money to make having children the short term economical decision.

    Unfortunately, one thing democracies are REALLY bad at is long term economic rationality. So things are going to get a lot worse before a real solution is attempted.

17. Natural wombs works better for now, so no need.

    The problem is that parenthood is a burden instead of a helping hand. Besides forming a family has turned into a mine field nowadays, by cultural circumstances.

    I don’t think this is gonna be a long term issue. Culture, like life species, is also under competency, similar to evolution pressure. The cultures that pushes for low birth ratio will end dying.

    Western countries has adopted trivial sex, massive divorce, women-men conflict, so… or somehow the culture evolve again to a new equilibrium with sane reproduction levels or their population will decrease soon, becoming a minority compare with more profilic cultures.
    Some muslim countries and ultra-orthodox jewish don’t seem to have this problem.

    The most profilic culture doesn’t need to win, but definitely, one that can’t reproduce enough is doomed to fail.

    Western countries needs to understand that this is a serious problem and fight to change whatever is needed, or it will disappear.

    I doubt artificial wombs could change anything. Just forgetting the technology problem and assuming you can do it with no problems and make it affordable, the culture problem remains.
    The main reason people don’t have a child is not because they can’t physically have one, but they don’t want it under the current environment and culture pressure.

18. Lots of duped minds don’t realize that these babies are going to born to a very bad start.

19. Absurd calculations. Similar to calculating the cost of space launches 20 years ago or calculating the cost of processors.
    The answer to the question why an artificial womb is much more important than incentives for couples. Because it completely decouples reproduction from social incentives. It turns a person into a product that can be reproduced in any required quantity by order of the state, without problems with parental rights, women’s rights or any such nonsense. Children become a collective product. Their upbringing and genetic code become a collective or corporate decision and begin to be determined by the needs of the state and the market. This is a direct path to human selection.

20. Womb bags alone aren’t enough. Same as the Pro-Life crowd, what happens from 0-6? Hell 0-18?

    The elephant in the womb-bag solution is automating child raising, because what people actually seem to want is obedient proto-taxpayer-slaves. They want the result without the work.

    Even if you separate the issue of women’s career life satisfaction from existential species replacement and properly valuing the actual labor costs of child rearing all included, you’re still left with how/who structures any robo-education of bag-babies.

    It’s functionally no different from automated child soldier manufacturing. The difference being at what point are robot soldiers going to be more cost effective. Or rewrite that as when will robot laborers be more cost-effective than meat popsicles.

    Will women go into debt to avoid pregnancy and still have a child? Surrogacy is that right now. Is the tradeoffs worthwhile for a greater percentage of the population? If career viability is based on years put in, then women are at a fundamental disadvantage and questions of either subsidy or compensation come up.

    The upfront work is still no different from conventional IVF though, which is an unpleasant experience at best. Or perhaps some would suggest government mandated egg extraction to level the playing field? Egg donation means citizenship!

21. Immortality ( or at the very least 1000+ year life spans) also reduce depopulation crisis

22. The first country to mass produce human beings in baby bags should be carpet bombed.

    Romania was the last Warsaw Pact government to topple – and the bloodiest. The dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was fond of taking orphans and isolating them in the most abysmal conditions so they would grow up sociopathic, amoral and loyal only to him. His vicious personal guard fought gleefully tooth and nail for the regime until the bitter end, long after the writing was on the wall.

    Given what corporations are already doing to us by privatizing our nutrition, medicine, education – even government itself – I don’t need Aldous Huxley warning me how industrial-produced babies in bags will turn out. The minute you replace humans in the process of making humans, we’re no longer human anymore. This is just not a point I will ever concede. The fate of the species depends on it.

    Every baby deserves a mother – and a father.

    • “The first country to mass produce human beings in baby bags should be carpet bombed.”

      but then you said

      “Every baby deserves a mother – and a father.”

      It’s going to be hard to have the latter if the do the further.

23. Many men will think:
    “Sex-bots and artificial wombs eliminate the NEED for women.”
    and for a lot of men this is true.

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