Since the Second World War, family life in the west has been undermined - deliberately or not - by many social and cultural changes: the growth of never-married people in cities; acceptance of low birth-rate lifestyles; women prioritising work, with fewer babies, and having them later; cultural denigration of fathers; promotion of state responsibility for children, and so on.
These changes are driven by technology as much as culture, or ideology, or politics. Technology changes the environment that people live in, and new social relations and structures come into being. So it is not much of a stretch to predict that technological innovations will continue to change reproduction and family life. Some recent innovations include baby mice with two mothers and no father; gene editing babies using CRISPR; womb transplants to "open up pregnancy to all sexes"; and artificial wombs, for animals and humans. There is plenty more, in development or ready for deployment, to erase the boundary between technology and reproductive biology.
Science Fiction was the main way of considering these developments, mainly as horrific, transgressive fantasies, and it is daunting to have to consider stories like these as plausible futures. Dystopias like Brave New World and The Matrix feature in vitro births as the norm. The Handmaid's Tail and The Children of Men portrayed a catastrophic collapse of normal fertility. They are horrifying because they deny intense established expectations and impulses, which are amongst the strongest we have. They are part of our very flesh; and are in many ways stronger than what we like to think of as our personalities. The most effective explanation for why biological things are the way that they are is Darwinian evolution. It explains why living as families and raising children is as compelling as it is, and, when it goes well, as satisfying as it is. If there is no wealth but life, this is the wealth. This is what "life chances" means.
This is not science fiction any longer. It seems clear that the forces shaping life on earth are not contained by nation states, and there are few if any democratic constraints on them. In other words, there are no effective constraints on the development of these technologies. Together these cultural and technological changes could well make living as a family unviable, and replace it with reproductive arrangements that have nothing to do with family ties.
The last generation that can remember a world before television has gone. The last generation that can remember life before the internet will be gone in a few decades. The last generation that will be able to remember live births and living in families will be here soon, or is here already.
Yuval Noah Harari, World Economic Forum 2018
"We are probably among the last generations of Homo Sapiens, because in the coming generations, we will learn how to engineer bodies and brain and minds.
Now, how exactly will the future masters of the planet look like? This will be decided by the people who own the data. Now, why is data so important? It's important because we've reached the point when we can hack not just computers, we can hack human beings and other organisms. Now, what do you need in order to hack a human being? You need two things: you need a lot of computing power, and you need a lot of data, especially biometric data.
But control of data might enable human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because when you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it.
All of life, for four billion years - dinosaurs, amoebas, tomatoes, humans - All of life was subject to the laws of natural selection, and to the laws of organic biochemistry. But this is now about to change. Science is now replacing evolution by natural section by evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds; but Our intelligent design. And the intelligent design of our clouds - the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud - these are the new driving forces of evolution. And in the same time, science may enable life, after being confined for four billion years, to the limited realm of organic compounds, science may enable life to break out into the inorganic realm. "
"Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have this, you know, this soul, or spirit, they have free will, and nobody knows what's happening inside me, so whatever I choose, whether in the election, or whether in the supermarket, this is my free will, that's Over.
Today we have the technology to hack human beings on a massive scale. Everything is being digitalised, everything is being monitored; In this time of crisis, you have to follow science. It's often said that you should never allow a good crisis to go to waste, because a crisis is an opportunity to also do good reforms that in normal times people will never agree to. But in a crisis, you see, we have no choice, so let's do it.... the vaccine will help us, of course, it will make things more manageable.
Surveillance: people could look back in a hundred years, and identify the coronovirus as the moment when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially surveillance under the skin, which I think is maybe the most important development of the twenty-first century is the ability to go under the skin, and collect biometric data, analyse it, and understand people better than they understand themselves. This, I believe, is maybe the most important event of the twenty-first century."
An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep — and humans could be next
The world's first artificial womb for humans - BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/health-50056405
Chinese scientists build robot nanny to care for babies in artificial womb
https://news.yahoo.com/chinese-scientists-build-robot-nanny-173024709.html