Event Date
What is the future of reproduction? Are we removing the role of the human in reproduction altogether?
Join FRI to hear what feminist technoscientist and community birth doula Ashley Teodorson, PhD, has to say about this.
The situation: today embryos can come with stat cards. Robots can run IVF entirely in machines. Scientists can gestate lambs in plastic bags and laboratories are on the verge of growing gametes from simple skin or blood cells. The sci-fi-future of silica and lanthanides is almost upon us.
With AGI on the horizon, we wonder whether our squishy flesh can keep up.
Each tool noted above — polygenic risk testing, AI IVF, in vitro gametogenesis and ectogenesis — is sold as a fix for something real: infertility, disease, pregnancy’s dangers. Run them in a loop, as Nick Bostrom imagined, with iterated embryo selection, and you get a story of reproduction almost completely divorced from the evolutionary process that has produced life for all of human history — no sex, no womb, no waiting, and a child built to spec, embodying from her very beginnings, values and traits assigned by the tech-bro-funded Silicon Valley startups that coded her. The reproduction of the human becomes the production of the posthuman, made by algorithms and machines.
Dr. Teodorson reads this process as a full spectrum community birth doula of almost 20 years and a feminist technoscientist. What she finds leans more than a little toward a kind of eugenics without a state, run on venture capital and the vocabulary of choice.
She argues that the weight of outsourcing the reproduction of humanity to the machine is enormous. The history is plain: first we fetishize these interventions, then we normalize them, and then they become compulsory. The question is, will we wake up in time to ask who authorized all these transactions before it's too late?
This talk is co-sponsored by the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute, the Department of Science & Technology Studies, and the Center for Artificial Intelligence & Experimental Futures (CAIEF).
Speaker Biography
Ash Teodorson (she/her) has a PhD in Performance Studies with designated emphases in Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Theory and Research and Studies in Performance and Practice.
Dr. Teodorson’s work emerges from a nearly 20 year practice as a full spectrum community birth doula and career staff member at the UC Davis Women’s Resources and Research Center.
Her research is on sex and reproduction and their historical and contemporary relationships to biotechnology, surveillance and artificial intelligence. Of particular interest is the forthcoming wave of science fictionesque technological interventions into the project of human reproduction, which move us ever further into the landscape of silica and lanthanides where we are compelled to ask the question— what comes next for humanity in the face of AGI and machinic dominance?
Topics of interest: sex, reproduction, AI, AGI, Silicon Valley startups, venture capital, gene editing, fascism, eugenics, authoritarianism, revolution, radical feminism, gender equity, community organizing.