TL;DR I’m finishing my bioengineering PhD next year and trying to decide whether to dedicate my career to building artificial wombs. However, the tractability of this problem is unclear: everyone has a strong opinion on the timelines for when this will arrive, but most of these lack any semblance of rigorous thinking.
Why Artificial Wombs?
I’m massively concerned about population collapse due to declining birth rates. I believe this may be one of the most significant challenges of my lifetime (I’m in my late-20s). I’ve been evaluating career paths I could pursue to help address this issue, ranging from policy roles to accelerating automation to address labor shortages. While these are all valid approaches, for this article I specifically want to focus on artificial wombs.
I’ve used the ITN framework (importance, tractability, neglectedness) to evaluate my options. Artificial womb technology stood out for two reasons:
Scale of impact: Many women, especially in places like Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the developed world, choose not to have children as their fertility windows do not line up with their career plans. Artificial wombs would extend this window. Also, artificial wombs could meaningfully improve health pregnancy-related health outcomes. 300,000 women die globally each year from pregnancy complications, and a third of US infant deaths relate to prematurity. Artificial wombs could dramatically reduce both.
Neglectedness: Through conversations I’ve had with experts over the past couple of weeks, I’ve identified only ~10 labs working on this (3 US, 2 Europe, 2 Australia, 2 China, 1 Korea). A researcher from Vitara Biomedical—the most credible team in the space—described most other efforts as “largely for show”, not demonstrating any real innovation.
The Tractability Question
The missing piece is tractability. If this technology won’t be human-ready until 2167, it’s not something I want to commit my life to working on. But existing forecasts seem deeply flawed—almost all of the comments in the main Metaculus prediction (2044 for first human birth) cite pop-science articles and even references to debunked claims of Japanese researchers growing embryos in an artificial uterus that will arrive by 2028.
My Proposed Solution: Delphi Forecast
I’m planning to conduct a Delphi forecast. For those unfamiliar: you gather experts, ask them to predict and justify their timelines, share aggregated results anonymously, then let them update based on others’ reasoning and information. This iterative process typically produces more accurate forecasts than individual predictions.
Where I Need Your Input
Before I invest significant time in the Delphi forecast (or an even greater investment in pursuing artificial wombs as a career path), I want to reality-check a couple of things:
1. Is building artificial wombs actually high impact?
Am I overestimating the importance of this technology? Some considerations I’m I have uncertainty about:
Are there negative second-order negative effects I’m not considering?
Is the counterfactual impact high enough given parallel work being done to reduce pregnancy complications?
2. Is a Delphi forecast the right approach?
I chose this method because of how early-stage the field is, with researchers having access to the esoteric information relevant to evaluating the technical maturity of relevant tech. I’m open to being wrong about this choice. Potential concerns:
Do experts typically have meaningful insight into timelines for such a speculative technology?
Should I be using a different forecasting method entirely?
Final Thoughts
I really want my evaluative process to be robust: it will determine whether I spend the next decade of my career (at least) on this problem. I’d appreciate your takes on the two questions above. I don’t want to spend my life working on the wrong thing.
Bluntness in the comments is encouraged.
My main concern is that the arrival of AGI completely changes the situation in some unexpected way.
e.g. in the recent 80k podcast on fertility, Rob Wiblin opines that the fertility crash would be a global priority if not for AI likely replacing human labor soon and obviating the need for countries to have large human populations. There could be other effects.
My guess is that due to advanced AI, both artificial wombs and immortality will be technically feasible in the next 40 years, as well as other crazy healthcare tech. This is not an uncommon view
Before anything like a Delphi forecast it seems better to informally interview a couple of experts, and then write your own quick report on what the technical barriers are to artificial wombs. This way you can incorporate this into the structure of any forecasting exercise, e.g. by asking experts to forecast when each of hurdles X, Y, and Z will be solved, whereupon you can do things like identifying where the level of agreement is highest and lowest, as well as consistency checks against the overall forecast.
Most infant mortality still happens in the developing world, due to much more basic factors like tropical diseases. So if the goal is reducing infant mortality globally, you won’t be addressing most of the problem, and for maternal mortality, the tech will need to be so mature that it’s affordable for the average person in low-income countries, as well as culturally accepted.
“Rob Wiblin opines that the fertility crash would be a global priority if not for AI likely replacing human labor soon and obviating the need for countries to have large human populations”
This is a case where it really matters whether you are giving an extremely high chance that AGI is coming within 20-30 years, or merely a decently high chance. If you think the chance is like 75%, and the claim that conditional on no AGI, low fertility would be a big problem is correct, then the problem is only cut by 4x, which is compatible with it still being large and worth working on. Really, you need to get above 97-8% before it starts looking clear that low fertility is not worth worrying about, if we assume that conditional on no AGI it will be a big problem.
Hi medinot—thanks a lot for writing this up and contributing to the forum!
I never heard of artificial wombs before other than the “The Pod Generation” movie and I think the idea is cool.
What I would love to see when you are making such a big decision as whether you should dedicate your career to it is a Theory of Change (have you heard about this?) to make your assumptions about why this would be impactful more explicit.
Spontaneous questions that arise for me are: what are the concrete harms with population collapse? How will research be conducted to find the effects of artificial wombs on the children born from them? How will the economics of this technology look like (and could it give rise to inequality)? Are there more benefits to artificial wombs that we don’t think of?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Not comfortable answering your second question :)
In response to your first question, I’m pretty concerned that artificial wombs would not be very high impact from a population perspective.
If artificial wombs were very expensive, I suspect only very wealthy people would make use of them, and it would not solve the fertility crisis.
If artificial wombs were very cheap, I suspect the average person would have barely any more children. This is because the primary drivers for the current fertility crisis seem to also motivate people to want to have less children in general.
According to Our World in Data, the primary drivers of the fertility crisis are:
It seems like the first and second trend will continue for the foreseeable future, and the third trend will continue in the near-time but reverse in the long-term. Notably, the first trend has to do with women’s ability to make their own decisions. It seems that, in general, if women can choose how many children to have, they usually only have two or three.
Additionally, according a recent 80,000 Hours interview (which was with a non-expert), one of the major drivers of the fertility crisis is simply that people have more interesting things to do with their time than having children. This trend also seems like it will only continue.
I also suspect that if artificial wombs were very cheap, some fanatical religious groups would have extraordinarily large amounts of offspring, which could be generally harmful to the long-term future.
On the other hand though, I suspect that if there were great widespread economic prosperity and people were no longer required to work (such as could be the case if AGI comes about), the average person may have far more children, which, from a total view of population ethics, would be very beneficial.