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Here's an article that appeared on Yahoo last month:
https://www.yahoo.com/now/solution-musks-fear-population-collapse-153649721.html
First, notice the title: "A Solution To Musk's Fear Of Population Collapse?". The wording is deliberate: "Musk's Fear Of Population Collapse" to attribute the concern specifically to Elon Musk, because presumably nobody else shares that concern, and you don't want your friends to think you agree with Elon Musk, do you?
Nevertheless, science has a solution: "Artificial Womb Facility Could Grow 30,000 Babies A Year."
As it happened, this story popped up on my Pocket reader (thank you, Big Tech) just after I'd finished reading 'The Slows' by Gail HarEven (Yaacov Jeffrey Green, tr.), anthologized in the collection "Zion's Fiction" (Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lotem, eds.).
In the story, the Slows are a population of humans who have resisted adopting AOG (Accelerated Offspring Growth) - a technology that produces fully-grown humans in a matter of months - and insist on bearing and raising children the old-fashioned way. The male narrator, who has taken an interst in the Slows, expresses revulsion at their way of life (which is presumably typical of his world) but also betrays suppressed feelings of attraction towards the Slow women, despite the "swollen protrusions on their chests and the general swelling of their bodies."
The short film adaptation differs from the print original in a few details (the "outsider" journalist is a woman in the screen version) but it is very good, and it's faithful to the essentials of the story. There's a wonderful scene (at 10:24) where the Slow woman playfully tosses an apple to the journalist - knowing that the other woman will be unable to catch it, never having developed those reflexes from playing catch as a child, since she never had a childhood.
There are some things we learn only by touch. There are some things we learn only from experience. There are some things we learn only from forming and sustaining an intimate bond with another human being - a parent, a child, a mate.
The dystopian future of yesterday's science fiction is the terrible reality of today's news. We are living in a world where a clique of socially stunted psychopaths have used their control of technology and infrastructure to brainwash us into hating the very things that make us human: our childhoods, our sensations, our passions, our bodies with their swellings and their protrusions, our very lives.
Scientific progress may indeed happen very fast, as the human intellect gains new understandings of the processes of the universe. But human growth must happen at its own pace: the long way, the hard way, the Slow way.
The Slows by Gail HarEven in The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/04/the-slows
The Slows - short film on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/396730547
https://www.yahoo.com/now/solution-musks-fear-population-collapse-153649721.html
First, notice the title: "A Solution To Musk's Fear Of Population Collapse?". The wording is deliberate: "Musk's Fear Of Population Collapse" to attribute the concern specifically to Elon Musk, because presumably nobody else shares that concern, and you don't want your friends to think you agree with Elon Musk, do you?
Nevertheless, science has a solution: "Artificial Womb Facility Could Grow 30,000 Babies A Year."
As it happened, this story popped up on my Pocket reader (thank you, Big Tech) just after I'd finished reading 'The Slows' by Gail HarEven (Yaacov Jeffrey Green, tr.), anthologized in the collection "Zion's Fiction" (Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lotem, eds.).
In the story, the Slows are a population of humans who have resisted adopting AOG (Accelerated Offspring Growth) - a technology that produces fully-grown humans in a matter of months - and insist on bearing and raising children the old-fashioned way. The male narrator, who has taken an interst in the Slows, expresses revulsion at their way of life (which is presumably typical of his world) but also betrays suppressed feelings of attraction towards the Slow women, despite the "swollen protrusions on their chests and the general swelling of their bodies."
The short film adaptation differs from the print original in a few details (the "outsider" journalist is a woman in the screen version) but it is very good, and it's faithful to the essentials of the story. There's a wonderful scene (at 10:24) where the Slow woman playfully tosses an apple to the journalist - knowing that the other woman will be unable to catch it, never having developed those reflexes from playing catch as a child, since she never had a childhood.
There are some things we learn only by touch. There are some things we learn only from experience. There are some things we learn only from forming and sustaining an intimate bond with another human being - a parent, a child, a mate.
The dystopian future of yesterday's science fiction is the terrible reality of today's news. We are living in a world where a clique of socially stunted psychopaths have used their control of technology and infrastructure to brainwash us into hating the very things that make us human: our childhoods, our sensations, our passions, our bodies with their swellings and their protrusions, our very lives.
Scientific progress may indeed happen very fast, as the human intellect gains new understandings of the processes of the universe. But human growth must happen at its own pace: the long way, the hard way, the Slow way.
The Slows by Gail HarEven in The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/04/the-slows
The Slows - short film on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/396730547
