mOTHER MACHINE
2024
The predicted future reveals the obsolescence of sex, at least as a reproduction method. Transhumanist discourses clash against Bioconservative ethics, while biotechnological breakthroughs find new ways to enhance, select and cure the human body even before its conception. New biotechniques are re-imaging human making, and machines are being appointed as human makers — or simply, we are donating to machines such capabilities. Perhaps the destitution of our reproductive function to a central power could be one of the only — many — means for humanity to better itself within its society. Maybe the famous line "YOU ARE BUGS" from the fictional alien hijacking operation ( 三体 ) should be changed to sound like a piece of advice rather than a threat from an advanced alien race. "YOU SHOULD BE BUGS" to be specific "YOU SHOULD BE ANTS". The modern days Charles Darwin — Edward Wilson — 7 years after the monumental work of The Ants, in an interview declared:
"What I like to say is that Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species. Why doesn't it work in humans? Because we have reproductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring. The great success of the social insects is that the success of the individual genes are invested in the success of the colony as a whole, and especially in the reproduction of the queen, and thus through her the reproduction of new colonies. This was I think one of the main contributions of the idea of kin-selection. We now understand quite well why most species of social insects have sterile workers, and therefore can have communist-like systems. In which the colony is all, the individual is only a part of the colony, and the success of the whole community is what counts far above the success of the individual. The behavior of the individual social insect evolved with reference to what it contributes to the community, whereas the genetic fitness of a human being depends on how well it can individually use the society. We have become insect-like only by extreme contractual arrangements."
Potentially, the Exowombs, better known as Artificial wombs, through the headlines of major newspapers in recent years, might be the start of the centralisation of reproduction and the start of a new society — composed of bodies not anymore divided by being born from different others but allied as being born from the common same — biologically forced to contribute to the good of the whole and abandon individuality. Repurposing the means of reproduction will inevitably repurpose our society, ultimately reassessing our species' objectives.
A curse disguised as a blessing.
A dreadful nightmare.
