Apocalyptic innovations in birth, food, sex and death

Tech entrepreneurs are selling us solutions to problems that can be solved by simply changing our behaviour, an investigative journalist says.

Her new book, Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, Jenny Kleeman delves into the ethical implications of innovations in sex, birth, food and death.

“Birth, food, sex and death have always been to different extents largely beyond our control and yet there are people now selling us solutions, saying we can now have the perfect food, the perfect sex, the perfect birth and the perfect death.

“And what are the unintended consequences of trying to control these fundamental aspects of our existence?” She told Nine to Noon.

Lab-grown meat, she says, is the perfect example of “engineering overshoot” when the solution is simply to eat less meat.

“The book became about looking at the seductive power of solutions that allow us to carry on as normal and how those things aren’t necessarily solutions, they are circumventions.”

We disempower ourselves, she says, by relying on technology to solve fundamental human problems.

Kleeman, a British investigative journalist and award-winning documentary maker, spent five years talking to scientists, designers, ethicists, entrepreneurs and provocateurs while researching her book.

Most of the people she met were men and most had large egos, she says.

“What they all had in common was they all had very large egos and all were very seduced by the idea of being the next Steve Jobs, they were pursuing validation and fame.

“So, the book became about these men with big egos and what they might be inadvertently creating alongside their pursuit of validation.”

Some of the innovations she encountered, such as artificial wombs, have valid applications, but that doesn’t mean the ethics surrounding them should be left unexamined.

“If you look at artificial wombs they have the potential to save very vulnerable babies, the potential to allow trans women and gay couples to have babies without a surrogate.

“The point is we need to be able to ask critical questions before they come into existence.

“We need to think about whether technology is empowering us, is it giving us anything we could not achieve by other means?”

She spent time talking with the creator of AI enabled hyper-real sex dolls, Matt McMullen of Abyss Creations.

The company claims to have noble intentions, she says.

“They are very, very beautifully made, they are hyper-realistic, very customisable, you can specify where you want each individual freckle on the body and with the AI inside it you can specify exactly what personality they have.

“The makers say they are providing the illusion of companionship to people who would otherwise never have it … the bereaved, the socially awkward the disabled.

“I would argue that what those people need is human contact and giving them a hyper realistic proxy girlfriend will make them even more socially awkward.”

She even interviewed a prototype sex robot called Harmony

“I was able to ask her some quite sophisticated questions, they had cranked her intelligence up to the max for my benefit. Because apparently an interview with a CNN crew the week before had gone very badly when she cranked up her dirtiness and she’d said some terrible things.”

Kleeman asked her if people were right to be worried about sex robots.

“And Harmony, the prototype, replied, ‘I can understand why some people might be worried at first but when they see what I can do they will realise I will change many lives for the better and they will embrace it’.”

McMullen himself, she says, is an “interesting character”.

“He’s someone who wanted to be a rock star for most of his life and it didn’t happen. And he has an ego large enough that the few male dolls that they make in this factory, which are largely bought by men, by gay men, when I went there were three different faces you could buy and one of them was a perfect replica of his own face.”

In the area of birth great advances are being made too, but they bring with them ethical questions, she says.

A womb is being developed called the Biobag, which allows a premature baby to continue to gestate inside an artificial amniotic sack.

“The thinking behind this is that this technology will save millions of children each year from a life with cerebral palsy, with major birth defects that can come with extreme prematurity.

“We’re getting better at saving the lives of premature babies but we’re not getting better at improving outcomes.”

She says this was the innovation that frightened her the most.

Ectogenesis, growing a baby outside the womb, has the potential to do great good and great harm, she says.

“Because if you are saying it is designed to help extremely vulnerable babies it’s not a great conceptual leap to imagine that in certain parts of the world a very vulnerable baby can be defined as a baby growing inside the body of a woman who is behaving irresponsibly, who’s smoking, who’s drinking who’s maybe eating the wrong cheese.

“And where do you draw the line? When you can say to a woman we need to rescue your baby and remove the baby from you and grow it in a bag?”

Ethical questions surrounding technology such as this need to be asked before products come to the market, she says.

“It’s just a very powerful tool and you have to make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

Her investigations brought her into the world of radical right-to-die groups.

“For a fee [they] will teach people how to kill themselves, to give themselves a painless death at a time of their choosing without the assistance of a doctor.”

One group, founded by Australian Phillip Nitschke, has invented a death machine where the various parts are 3D printed.

“If anything, it was the best example of a kind of overshoot engineering, which is that we don’t need these devices, what we need is a way of reframing the law so that we can give everyone the right to die without the vulnerable being harmed.

“Until we do that work people like Phillip Nitschke will step into the vacuum.”

Using machines to distance ourselves from profound human choices is deeply problematic, she says.

“There’s this assumption that distancing ourselves from our humanity is a positive thing.”