Institutional Families (Post-Artificial-Womb Family Units)
It should not be surprising that a technophilic cultivar obsessed with reproduction would be bullish not just on polygenic risk score selection, but in vitro gametogenesis (IVG, the creation of thousands of egg cells from other cells) and artificial wombs as well. Our “descendant worship” metaphysical understanding of reality means that, despite persecution we may face for our actions, we have a theological mandate to both use and advance the technology. Heck, from our cultural perspective, to not develop and use such technology is to stagnate as a species and, stagnation is one of the highest orders of sin.
I, Malcolm, grew up with a room full of lab-grade medical equipment. One of my favorite possessions was a well-worn copy of Carolina Science, an encyclopedia-size catalog for buying lab equipment that arrived at my house annually and yielded endless functional treasures. We will do our best to ensure our kids have access to this same kind of equipment so they can build out and become intimately comfortable with the technology they will need to efficaciously reproduce. While it is easy to forget in a globalized, ultra-connected, laissez-faire society, we run the risk of being cut off from any technology we cannot independently personally build and execute.
An example to illustrate our point: After writing this chapter but before publication, we found out that an article about our family’s use of polygenic risk score selection[[118]](#_ftn118) may have caused some pretty horrifying backlash: Other parents trying, like us, to get polygenic risk scores for their embryos reported to us that one of the companies we had used for data stopped processing genomic data from embryos and removed several (quite important) polygenic risk scores related to mental traits from their database. This hammered home to us how important it is to keep a certain amount of technical capacity in-house.
Leveraging developments in reproductive technology, many social ills can be resolved and fascinating new cultural models will become unlocked. Imagine a world in which women didn’t have to gestate their own children (or pay other women willing to do it). We already live in a society in which single women without babies out-earn men.[[119]](#_ftn119) If we can prevent childbirth from knocking women out of their careers, we will be that much closer to gender parity among professionals who become parents (while couples can already choose how childcare burdens are shouldered independent of sex, it’s inevitable that most mothers suffer at least moderate work-related time and productivity losses in pregnancy and childbirth).
Beyond female advancement in the workplace, consider what this technology could do for LGBT groups. The problem of low LGBT birth rates could be erased in less than a generation, allowing their cultures to be durably protected. What’s more, with IVG, same-sex couples could have kids 100% genetically related to both partners (e.g., you could turn one gay man’s cells into an egg and have his partner fertilize it), whereas now they’re obligated to either adopt or use a donor egg and have each kid only genetically related to one partner. With an artificial womb, gay parents would not even need a surrogate. Crazier still, polycules of more than two people would be able to have kids that are 100% theirs (it is theoretically possible to make a child with 47 biological parents via chromosome selection).
We could address issues of inequality by granting access to this technology to anyone who wanted it. In addition, we could remove, or at least dramatically lower, rates of maladies like depression and anxiety—such can even be done with existing technology (as soon as IVG is widely available).
But all of that is thinking small. The future unlocked by advances in reproductive technology is far more vast.
Some Houses within the Index will be able to totally rethink what it means to be a family. They will be able to create Institutional Families, organizations that produce, educate, and empower humans at scale (e.g., an institution would be the primary unit of the family producing large numbers of intentionally designed children). While we don’t advocate for the development of institutional families in our House, the Index does open the door to cultivars that may.
If the institution does a good job raising these kids, providing them with a good life and a good culture, descendants of these families will be motivated to give back to the organization after coming of age. Entire cultural traditions and ways of being human could be built around this practice. For example, you could artificially introduce genetic variation into the children the institution produces, modifying its seed genomes to favor genetic material associated with those members who, as adults, reinvest the most value back into the organization. To put it another way, those who contribute more to the organization in terms of resources will also contribute more of their genetic uniqueness to future kids produced by the factory. In addition, the institution could be run by an AI modeled on all living family members, creating a monarchy-democracy hybrid.
Now you might be thinking: “That’s monstrous. How dare you!”
Reactions like this are driven by a lack of imagination. While a family like this is horrifying in terms of how much it deviates from present social norms, it is nothing compared to what we expect to be competing against.
A more insidious iteration of an Institutional Family might genetically engineer its kids to need a specific protein only an associated company can produce and sell that protein to them at an exorbitant price. This may sound like science fiction, but it could be done with existing technology, as knocking out proteins with CRISPR is way easier than improving them (it is much less technologically difficult to break something than it is to improve it—almost every university has labs doing this for mice; this is how we make disease models).
Even just using IVG (which is just out of our reach at the time of this book’s publication) and existing polygenic risk score technology, a company could select populations of embryos for specific roles, like enjoying child rearing or hard math work, to specialize kids for specific roles in the company. An amoral actor may also be motivated to sterilize the individuals their organization produces to ensure they don’t have split focus and select against rebellious traits to ensure those produced don’t fight back. That last point is why we believe we have a good shot at outcompeting these groups—so long as we don’t slow down.
Someone will eventually build out this technology. The more advanced this tech gets, the more dangerous it becomes. Malicious actors will be able to build viruses that kill all humans who lack certain genetic markers they plant in people (e.g., they could create a virus that kills specific ethnic groups or everyone that wasn’t made in one of their factories). If you ban the development of transhumanist breeding and genetic engineering tech in certain nations (e.g., let’s say the European Union totally outlaws such technology) you just leave those nations defenseless.
China’s population is expected to halve within 45 years.[[120]](#_ftn120) As scary as this reproductive tech is, you had better hope they are working on it because if they aren’t, their only solution to policy interventions that have failed to motivate women to voluntarily have kids is to force them to have kids. With birth rates falling at their current pace, banning work on artificial wombs makes the world described in A Handmaid’s Tale an inevitability—and a close one at that.
Ultimately, A Handmaid’s Tale paints a world in which women used for breeding are treated more humanely than they realistically would be in real life. Once you remove someone’s agency over things like pregnancy, you are not just going to let them walk about in society—they would be way too much of a risk. It seems much more likely that disempowered women would be kept in specialized facilities similar to factory farms and forgotten about by society.
Humans are very good at ignoring the horrors that “must” exist to maintain our comfort. Anyone who has the slightest interest in protecting women’s rights—or human rights—should be praying every day for the quick development of inexpensive artificial wombs (if you want to fund this development, contact us—we have connections secretly working on it).
An ideological war between differing philosophies on how and why the technology is used will eventually occur (unless an AI kills us all first) and it will be between those who want to produce humans at scale to augment human flourishing and those who want to manufacture humans in a bid to consolidate power, amass resources, or otherwise exploit captive audiences. Those who refuse to touch the technology are unlikely to have the expertise needed to intervene. When you hobble people like us who would like to leverage this technology to reduce inequality, empower diverse groups, and contribute to human flourishing, you make it dramatically more likely that bad actors win.