Jeff Koons’ Venus figure from Barcelona’s MOCO Museum. You can see me with my phone trapped in her belly.
There is a persistent fear of societal erasure that permeates contemporary social and cultural criticism. South Korea, Taiwan, Italy, and Eastern Europe all have very low birthrates and face the reality of drastic change or erasure in the next fifty or so years. Even the leaden National Security Strategy (NSS) document of the Trump administration outright proclaims there is a “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe due to low birthrates and immigration. In the United States there is worry over young people not being interested in sex, and birthrates, while not as low as in other countries, have not been at replacement rate for more than a decade. Among working-class whites in America, young women often just find their male counterparts not good husband or father material. The same is true of college-educated women, who increasingly outnumber their slacker male counterparts
Some commentators reflect that what is needed is a religious revival that somehow reverses the liberation of women and gets them back to raising children in a celebration of God’s aims. Less dreamy policy ideas include paying couples for children and eliminating the economic barriers to working women who have children.
There is, of course, an inherent racism built into some of these fears; the thought is that American or Japan or Italy are losing something important if waves of immigrants gradually come to dominate the civilizations. The decline and fall of Western civilization is driven not by the LA punk scene but by this nebulous replacement idea driven by some kind of global elite (often with antisemitic overtones). It will take decades and decades for this replacement, though, which means the conspirators must breed new champions of the faith in order to keep the light burning. It’s always hard to maintain a cabal.
We can expect something a bit different, however. When immigrants become enmeshed in societies where women have opportunities to do meaningful work in order to sustain industry, science, governance, healthcare, and education, it’s likely that they will transform the traditions that drove high birthrates among their ancestors in order to succeed in their new hybrid civilizations. Birthrate reductions just slow-roll from generation to generation in this scenario. There is no erasure but there is replacement because otherwise there is just no one to do the work.
The historical changes that drive women away from childbirth and childrearing include everything from economic opportunities to birth control technologies, but at the core is the role of education in creating the bounty of attitudes and opportunities that support deliberation of action rather than forcing women into being instrumentalized containers for family propagation. That is unlikely to change.
What alternatives are there? I propose that artificial intelligence and robotic systems might provide the needed fix. Women choose sperm donors from a menu and artificial wombs gestate children. Robotic childcare takes over the heavy labor of daily nourishing and early education. Mommy just gets to enjoy the children when she’s around and provide coordinating input for the decisions of the robots. There are many positives to this scheme, including that the robots never tire and can do all the little educational things that are nearly impossible for most parents, like early exposure to many human languages, music and math education using consistent methodologies, and extensive recall of facts by being directly connected to worldwide information systems. These would not be “wire mothers” but consistent emulations of human compassion and caring.
There is a creepiness about it at the edges, with perhaps a bit of guilt that some kind of personal sacrifice is essential to the modern narrative of childrearing, but it is little different from aristocracies that pushed children to wet nurses, tutors, and boarding schools. And aristocratic freedom from want or need is one potential outcome of a machine intelligence-imbued future.
And there you have, finally, immaculate conceptions, births, and beings.