Open Minds Inc. 05.02.2022 03:00:09
Chinese researchers build AI system that manages foetuses until birth -
South China Morning Post - 31-01-2022
There are three parts to this system: A robot nanny that attends to the embryos needs, the artificial womb and a computer (AI) that gathers data on the embryos and lets the robot or the scientist know if there are any issues. Currently they have a system that is testing the system out with mice.
"The artificial womb, or “long-term embryo culture device”, is a container where they have mouse embryos growing in a line of cubes filled with nutritious fluids, says the team led by professor Sun Haixuan at the Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, a subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Earlier, the development process of each embryo had to be observed, documented and adjusted manually – a labour-intensive task that became unsustainable as the scale of the research increased.
The robotic system or “nanny” now created can monitor the embryos in unprecedented detail, as it moves up and down the line around the clock, the research paper says.
AI technology helps the machine detect the smallest signs of change on the embryos and fine-tune the carbon dioxide, nutrition and environmental inputs.
The system can even rank the embryos by health and development potential. When an embryo develops a major defect or dies, the machine would alert a technician to remove it from the womblike receptacle."
This "baby making" tech was purposely researched due to China's births decline.
They are looking at building a legal framework because the article says: "once the law allows the use of such technology."
So it's not a matter of "if" but "when".
If the Chinese are doing it, the West is doing it too (or have they already done it? Area 51 anybody? Science and Tech at any cost wasn't just a nazi thing.).
Birth decline aside, the article also says:
"The same technology could eliminate the need for a woman to carry her baby, allowing the fetus to grow more safely and efficiently outside her body, the paper says."
If a woman would be given the choice to bear a child or to have a machine "manage it" for her, would she? Being pregnant might come with it's struggles but surely no woman would outsource pregnancy if she didn't have to?
Also, babies start to learn while in the womb by feeling their mums' heartbeat and stress levels, they can hear their mums' voice and other people's voices, they already absorb the tone and accent of the voice before they are born. This is why
babies cry with an accent.
If this goes ahead, pod babies would likely have psychological issues from birth... Are they "breeding" humanity out of us?
You will eat ze bugs, you will live in a pod and you will be born in one too. We are all Neo.