In her recent New Atlantis article titled “Sam Altman Doesn’t Want to Be Your A.I. King—But He Might Be Anyway,” Louise Liebeskind recounts an interview with ABC in which Altman, the thirtysomething CEO of OpenAI, is presented with his own statements that artificial intelligence could eliminate millions of jobs, increase misinformation and racial bias, and issue in unimaginable destruction. Altman responds:
“I think it can do the opposite of all of those things too. Properly done, it is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, that’s true. We can make much better ones…. Would you push a button to stop this if it meant we are no longer able to cure all diseases? Would you push a button to stop this if it meant we couldn’t educate every child in the world super well?”
[The interviewer] counters, “Would you push a button to stop this if it meant there was a five percent chance it would be the end of the world?”
“I would push a button to slow it down.”
Liebeskind mulls that answer over and wryly remarks:
Creating artificial intelligence, slowing it down; destroying the world, saving the world. Whatever the problem, Altman imagines a button he can push to solve it.
As Liebeskind suggests, this is a naïve and unsatisfying take on human action in the world, alarmingly so. I’ll come back to that later. But first, it may or may not surprise you that Altman also figures in a different recent storyline, this one more proximate to my theme.
Altman is among the prominent donors to the tech startup Conception Biosciences, founded in 2018 by Matt Krisiloff, a former colleague of Altman’s at the startup incubator Y Combinator. Both men worked for OpenAI. They also dated for a time. Conception Biosciences is working on the next wave of reproductive technologies, called “in vitro gametogenesis,” or IVG, in part to enable gay men to obtain genetically related offspring, with the help of a woman willing to hire out her womb.[1]
Krisiloff’s co-founder at Conception Biosciences, reproduction scientist Pablo Hurtado, is another gay man with a personal stake in the endeavor. He told NPR: “There is something intrinsic, sharing a life that is half me and half my husband. I don’t have the capacity right now, and I am devoting my life to trying to change that.”
IVG exploits the transformative technique of induced pluripotency developed in Japan in 2007 and 2008 to transform somatic cells—skin or blood cells, for example—into pluripotent stem cells, which are then coaxed into developing into egg cells, or oocytes. At the animal stage, scientists have achieved proof-of-concept that IVG can yield viable gametes and viable, fertile offspring. It is thought to be a matter of time until this scientific marvel is translated to the human domain, at which point the ready supply of manufactured oocytes would not only facilitate the reproductive projects of two men who want a baby, but would also render the process of in vitro fertilization less invasive for women of childbearing age, who by choosing to create IVG oocytes would not need to go through the risk and discomfort of taking superovulatory drugs to optimize the collection of their own oocytes. Indeed, if widely available, IVG would make the notion of “childbearing age” obsolete: the in vitro production of oocytes would open IVF up for menopausal or perimenopausal women, who retain a natural capability to gestate a child but not to conceive one. By making it possible to produce a great many eggs from a single subject, IVG would also pave the way for more genetic selection. Once IVG is perfected for the production of sperm cells from induced pluripotent stem cells, it will become possible for a man or a woman to serve as the gamete donor for both the paternal and the maternal gametes. The whole mind-bending endeavor testifies to the powerful human drive to have genetically-related offspring. Interestingly, some have expressed concern that the dogged pursuit of genetic offspring undermines precisely the hard-won social and legal “progress” in defining family apart from the bonds of biological relatedness, so as, for example, to justify legal recognition of the nonbiological children of same-sex couples.[2]
The pedagogical value of procreation is fractured beyond recognition when a couple rents a surrogate’s womb, depriving the commissioning couple not only of the gradual development of affective bonds but of their own bodies’ testimony to the kind of service and the kind of authority by which this new person is meant to grow.
While IVG is still in the animal research stage, Hurtado predicts that IVG will be revolutionizing fertility medicine within a decade. The normalization of such revolutionary reproductive technologies takes to the next level the confusion and fragmentation of familial relations, parental rights, children’s rights, and the relation between the family and the state already introduced by the reproductive technologies practiced since the late 1970s, and the feminist, homosexual, and trans activism that colludes with these trends.[3]
Ironically, this ongoing experiment with fertility appears to be leading to the obsolescence of parenthood, and in the face of current developments it seems worthwhile to consider what parenthood in fact is and what we stand to squander in departing so ambitiously from its natural form.
A passage from the 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus sheds light on this question. John Paul II addresses the insufficiency of looking at the human being as homo economicus, a cog in the wheel of economic productivity. He goes on to write:
Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes towards the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death. At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. (CA, 24)
The human being is not to be understood as an isolated individual striving to preserve and enhance his material existence. He is a member of a community, and a particular community at that: one with its own language and history and a traditional way, cultivated over generations, of passing through the common, ineluctable features of human existence. It’s no accident that the experiences John Paul II names—birth, love, work, death—deeply implicate the body. Yet there is no trace of materialism here. To the contrary: in facing these fundamental, embodied experiences, and in developing customs that domesticate them and give form to our freedom, communities take a stance toward the meaning of existence and the mystery of the Source of that existence. A deep, worthy, and free bearing of our own embodiedness is the path by which we transcend the merely material.
Parenthood is not just a biological event, the generation of a new member of the species homo sapiens. The reason for this, philosopher Robert Spaemann suggests, is that
the person does not begin, where nature ends; nor spirit begin, where biology ends. . . . [C]ulture does not first begin, where nature ends. In fact, the word “cultura” originally means agriculture or wine growing, and therefore the refinement, not the annihilation of nature. Generation, birth, sexuality, eating, drinking, dying—all these are biological processes. But what is human about them does not begin on the other side of these processes, rather it realizes itself in them.
What I would like to consider, in view of these statements about the inextricability of body and soul, nature and personhood, body and freedom, is the relation between the transmission of life and education, the parental task of initiating their child into a cultured appropriation of what it is to be human. The capacity of parents to educate their children into authentic freedom is one of the things that seems to be particularly imperiled by the ever-broader application of reproductive technologies.
In order to see why, we might take a moment to characterize education. Continuing with Spaemann, we find that education “is not a process we undertake in order to achieve a set goal. There is no special activity that we can identify as ‘educating.’ Education is rather a side effect, which comes about while someone is doing all kinds of other things.”[4]
It is
a side effect of human interaction with children, of our living with them. We can only allow children to participate in what fulfills us ourselves, what is truly real to us. . . . This is why the self-formation of the educator is so important. One cannot in the end be “trained” to be an educator, one must already be someone oneself, one must have already become someone. One must be able to live in order to be able to teach how to live.[5]
Education emerges from a shared life. It is not primarily the transmission of information or the teaching of skills, though a shared life will certainly also involve these. Spaemann is not throwing pedagogy out the window. The truest pedagogy is simply far more immediate and interior than we typically imagine, and it involves entering patiently and discerningly into the common and constitutive experiences John Paul II alludes to.
Spaemann’s characterization of education as a side effect of sharing life mirrors in an important way the character of generativity and seems to disclose a link between generativity and education. Now, I would hesitate to call the child a “side effect” of his parents’ union, because in fact he is the crowning of the marriage and a personal symbol of that union. Nonetheless, there is something significant about the indirectness, givenness, and receptivity that characterizes both the work of education and the act of generation. The fruit of a child is not exactly the object of the spouses’ act, which is simply their union. They really do bear a generative power, but it is a power of a peculiar sort. Their conjugal embrace is no guarantee that a child will come, and if he does, his conception will take place at a later time, shrouded and imperceptible. No matter how eagerly desired and awaited, he will be a surprise. The peculiar form of power that procreation is, passes through a certain poverty: all the spouses have to offer are the loaves and fishes of their mortal bodies and their imperfect love. And however freely they entered into marriage, however freely they enter into the act of generative union, a child will be the fruit of their bodies, not a product of their agency. They will be the true sources of this new person, and yet they will in fact have been taken up into a giving of what they do not themselves dispose over, being itself. The path of fruitfulness itself engenders dispositions of patience, humility, and stewardship. It could be said that the parents are educated by the form of their own generativity, that the very character of conceiving is a capacitation to educate, because it is a deeper induction into the reality that all of their power is participated, and that it, along with their child and everything else, is a gift. Their fruitfulness, as Fr. Antonio López has written, is filial.[6]
All of this is true simply in the conceiving of a child, and gestation continues the logic.
“The first months of the child’s presence in the womb,” John Paul II says, “bring about a particular bond which already possesses an educational significance of its own. The mother, even before giving birth, does not only give shape to the child’s body, but also, in an indirect way, to the child’s whole personality.”[7]
The pope points out a certain reciprocity here, for the child also influences—perhaps we could say, teaches—the mother. The asymmetry of motherhood and fatherhood is here most evident, and John Paul II finds the father’s acknowledgement that his wife’s pregnancy is a gift, and his free participation in the relation between mother and child from the outside, to be decisive not only for the trajectory of the child’s post-birth education, but also for his own. “In many ways,” it is said in Mulieris dignitatem, “he has to learn his own ‘fatherhood’ from the mother.”[8]
That calling gestation “education” strains credulity for some is an indication of how much our understanding of ourselves as embodied persons has been defined by the hyper-analytical scientific knowledge that serves now as the measure of knowledge simpliciter. We spontaneously imagine our bodies as anatomized, which is basically to imagine them dead. We imagine ourselves as containers of functional-manipulable parts, and there are hordes of experts to advise us on the best strategies of manipulation to optimize the working of these parts. In the wake of the influences of our materialistic, functionalistic scientific disciplines and the technologies they have given rise to, both for good and for ill, we have work to do to reimagine our bodies as they actually are: as personal—as whole and alive and communicative of an order of love, even in anticipation of our free acts,[9]
just as an expectant mother’s body communicates presence and security to her unborn child in ways that precede, elicit, and are brought to greater fullness in all her intentional acts of loving care.
Philosopher of biology Stephen Talbott offers an intriguing criticism of the analytical tendencies that dominate the sciences and shape our outlook on both our bodies and our souls:
Analysis is an essential direction of movement in all scientific cognition. But if it is not counterbalanced by an opposite movement, then we can never say anything about what is there—what is presenting itself as this particular thing of this particular sort. We can speak only of the elements it consists of. But this hardly helps, since we can say nothing about these elements in their own right, but must refer instead to what they consist of. We have no place to stop and say, “Behold this.” By itself alone, the method is a way of never having to face anything.[10]
Particularly suggestive here is Talbott’s final assertion that a one-sidedly analytical method of knowing disinclines us to face things. His usage, facing things, means here to give things their due as whole subjects with a consistency and integrity that ought to command a kind of reverence. It seems to me that there’s another meaning to Talbott’s claim, a related and significant one. The ability to “face things” also has to do with fortitude, the ability to act vis-à-vis what cannot be changed or solved.
Returning to poor Sam Altman, his buttons encapsulate a certain disposition toward the world that to some extent shapes and tempts us all, which is that everything can be changed and “solved” if only we try hard enough. Whether we’re speaking of the reinterpretation and enactment of knowledge as soulless and ultimately manipulable, as in A.I., or of the reinterpretation and enactment of human embodiedness as soulless and ultimately manipulable, as in reproductive technologies, this disposition tends toward a merely transitive, horizontal sort of agency, an initiative that cleverly produces effects in the world without much willingness to suffer the world’s truth. To the contrary, the purpose of technologies like IVG, as of the more modestly revolutionary IVF, is precisely to circumvent this truth, as though it were possible to outrun or outfox Creation in the long run.
By contrast, what I would like to draw attention to is the different stance toward action and suffering that procreation tacitly inculcates, capacitating “progenitors” for parenthood and for human maturity more generally. The pattern of procreation invites each family member to learn the form of creatureliness according to his or her own role and thus to engage with the world in truth. The philosopher Maurice Blondel chose the image of marriage to describe authentic human action as deriving wholly from the human will and wholly from the divine will in a “secret nuptial” that overcomes Kant’s aporia of autonomy and heteronomy.[11]
Even Nietzsche recognized the paradigmatic character of pregnancy for human action, noting the reverence and care engendered by the “beloved unknown.” Pregnancy discloses the fitting relationship between ourselves and every achievement of deed or thought inasmuch as it teaches us that there is more than merely our own willing and creating at work.[12]
Although it is true that authentic authority loves to delegate, and thereby to give others the dignity of being authoritative subjects, certain responsibilities are incommunicable. The pedagogical value of procreation is fractured beyond recognition when a couple rents a surrogate’s womb, depriving the commissioning couple not only of the gradual development of affective bonds but of their own bodies’ testimony to the kind of service and the kind of authority by which this new person is meant to grow. This is taken to a further extreme when the commissioning couple is of the same sex and their relationship cannot represent the tapestry of immanence and transcendence that true spouses weave about their child in and through their sexual differentiation. When we subvert the natural form of generation, the parents, or “parents,” are hobbled in assuming the authority that they must exercise and that their child needs. Will this little one himself develop the capacity to exercise an office, within a family or beyond it: to be bound by and liberated into a received form, whose power is stewardship and service? Not for nothing has it been said that the future of civilization passes through the family.[13]
[1] For more on IVG, see Emily Witt’s “The Future of Fertility,” The New Yorker (April 17, 2023). See also this December 19, 2022, interview with Matt Krisiloff.
[2] Witt, “The Future of Fertility.”
[3] For reference, one in 50 American children is now conceived via in vitro fertilization, and reproductive technology constitutes a $23 billion industry worldwide. For further detail, see Jeff Shafer, “Producing the ‘Global Baby’”, Humanum Review.
[4] Robert Spaemann, “Education as an Introduction to Reality,” in A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person, ed. and trans. D. C. Schindler and Jeanne Heffernan Schindler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 111.
[5] Ibid., 113.
[6] Fr. Antonio López, “Towards an Understanding of Fruitfulness,” Nova et Vetera vol. 6, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 801–28.
[7] John Paul II, Letter to Families (1994), 16.
[8] John Paul II, Mulieris dignitatem (1988), 18.
[9] See John Paul II, Veritatis splendor (1993), 48, which expounds upon the Church’s teaching on the unity of the human person, “whose rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of his body.”
[10] Stephen L. Talbott, “A More Child-Like Science,” The New Atlantis (Winter 2004).
[11] Maurice Blondel, Action
(1893).
[12] See Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (1st ed.,1881), 522.
[13] John Paul II, Familiaris consortio (1981), 86.
