Iman Hitli

5/5 (1)

Artificial intelligence seems to found its way in a broad range of fields. Although, this magnificent technology has surprised me earlier with its limitless abilities, I would have never guessed that it would have been able to merge with human reproduction. Artificial intelligence may disrupt one of the most natural facets of life: surrogacy and pregnancy. This means that there may be a new way to breed babies without the horrendous pain that pregnancy brings.

This new way of “producing” babies is still a concept and carries the name “artificial womb”. It is an incubator shaped like an egg with a transparent shell, which can be operated from home. The incubator allows the to-be parents to feed the fetus through a tube and communicate with it using a microphone (Tamburro, 2017). The video below will give you a little impression of the artificial womb.

This concept is not being brought to market yet and it’s said that the required technology is far from becoming a reality (Tamburro, 2017). Nevertheless, an artificial womb for animals has been designed. It successfully kept a lamb fetus in the conditions to grow in a so called biobag, that could potentially be used as incubation for human babies in the future. Despite the rage it may create in society it would be helpful to support babies that had been born prematurely. For a premature born baby a chance of survival is 15% at 23 weeks, 55% at 24 weeks and 80% at 25 weeks. An artificial womb could be helpful as an extensive time in an external womb” (Devlin, 2017).

In my opinion an artificial incubator in order to give premature born babies a better chance at life would be incredible. But I do think that artificial intelligence must not interfere with the earlier phases of reproduction. There is something mysterious about the natural and biological way of reproduction, which creates a strong bond between the parents and the unborn baby. Research has indicated that the interaction with parents has a positive impact on the development in premature infants. In addition, researchers state that a baby in an artificial womb will not benefit from the maternal influences of labor, placental influence of hormones and biochemical signals (Yuko, 2017).

Science creeps more in to replicating the parts and functions of the human body. It surely may be beneficial for the premature babies, but shouldn’t there be a border between what machines should and shouldn’t be able to do? Have researches taken it too far with this conceptual womb? And how much humanity will be left if humans won’t even reproduce the ‘old-fashioned’ way?

References:

Devlin, H. (2017). Artificial womb for premature babies successful in animal trials. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/25/artificial-womb-for-premature-babies-successful-in-animal-trials-biobag

Tamburro, P. (2017). This Artificial Womb Concept Lets You Grow a Baby in Your House. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from http://www.craveonline.com/design/1286627-artificial-womb-concept-lets-grow-baby-house

Yuko, E. (2017). Weighing the Ethics of Artificial Wombs. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/artificial-wombs-ethics.html

5/5 (3)

After the Wall Street crash of 1929 and 2008 Wall Street workers received a lot of hatred. Some people still blame them for the horrific damages caused by these crashes. Those are probably the people who will feel engaged with the disruption of the financial industry. Why you ask? Well, that’s because artificial intelligence is on the move of taking over the jobs of Wall Street traders. Many of the financial giants are switching to AI-driven systems. For instance, Goldman Sachs employed 600 equity traders in 2000. Nowadays they only have two equity traders with automated trading machines handling the main operations (Byrnes, 2017).

As mentioned before this disruption is caused by AI-driven systems. These systems are better forecasters of market trends than humans are. Consequently, the trades the systems make are better. AI trading software is able to learn a lot about the world through data. The machine uses books, tweets, news reports financial data, earning numbers, international monetary policy and anything that might help the software understand global trends as input. With this large amount of data it’s able to make predictions about stocks, bonds, commodities and other financial instruments (Maney, 2017).

The accessibility to billion pieces of data along with the ability of machines to analyze patterns, makes AI a great fit in this field (Satariano, 2017). It’s well-known that humans makes mistakes. The major cause of the 2008 crash was the fact that nobody recognized the sign of trouble concerning the crashes, while the indications where around for quite some time (Letter, 2017). This shows the limitation or ignorance of the human workers. There where the human is limited with biases and sensitivities, the AI-driven system is further developed. The system is continually improving and perfecting its predictions by watching all recent data and always learning (Maney, 2017). This may mean that (real-time) patterns of trouble may be discovered and recognized in an early phase.

With this disruption in the financial industry the following question arose my mind: could AI truly prevent another Wall Street crash? I would answer this question with a simple but strong yes! What do you think?

References:
Byrnes, N. (2017). As Goldman Embraces Automation, Even the Masters of the Universe Are Threatened. Retrieved September 20, 2017, from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603431/as-goldman-embraces-automation-even-the-masters-of-the-universe-are-threatened/
Maney, K (2017). Goldman Sacked: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Wall Street. Retrieved September 20, 2017, from http://www.newsweek.com/2017/03/10/how-artificial-intelligence-transform-wall-street-560637.html
Satariano, A. (2017). Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes On Wall Street With AI Trader. Retrieved September 20, 2017, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-06/silicon-valley-hedge-fund-takes-on-wall-street-with-ai-trader
Letter, L. (2017). What investors haven’t learned from the 2008 financial crisis. Retrieved September 20, 2017, from https://born2invest.com/articles/investors-havent-learned-2008-financial-crisis/

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