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Tech bros seem to believe that artificial wombs are better than the real thing
by Mary Harrington
Elon and his sixth baby, XHO–WQFD98H212
Have we reached Peak Everything? The great and the good are beginning to realise, nervously, that the illusion of never-ending growth can’t be sustained forever just by printing money. “Quantitative easing” has been deployed with staggering free-handedness since the Great Crash to ward off the unsettling prospect of the whole carousel crashing down. That accelerated again during the pandemic: City AM reported that one fifth of the entire world supply of US dollars was created in 2020 alone.
But a growing chorus of voices and economic papers now warns that a cycle of low fertility will drive not just faltering improvements in living standards but a vicious cycle of decline. In 2020, staggering global declines were reported in fertility rates, and these trends have worsened over the course of the pandemic.
Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is the latest to weigh in on our civilisational duty to have more babies. Musk, himself the father of six sons, is perhaps America’s foremost tech-optimist, driving the SpaceX project that’s launched numerous recent rockets and a stated ambition to colonise other planets.
From Musk’s ‘Believe in the future!’ perspective, the stubborn trend towards human reproductive…
