Hi, I really appreciate your independent thinking. I strongly suspect that the main reason people are not choosing to have more kids is because of the raising kids portion, not the pregnancy portion. At least that's my reason for not having more kids.  If this (the difficulty of raising kids, rather than birthing them) is the main bottleneck for most families, then I suspect the best ways to boost fertility would be mostly policy things along the lines of:

• Less strict zoning laws --> more abundant, cheaper housing so young couples can more easily afford to live in larger houses, sooner.
• Reducing the large amount of redistribution we currently do towards seniors (they are some of the richest demographics in world history!) and directing more towards young people -- better yet targeted towards encouraging children (childcare subsidies, more and better schools, direct "baby bonus" payments, weird income incentives like they do in Hungary, etc)
• Especially for places like Korea, trying reduce spending more and more on individual children (eg by hiring private tutors, making kids study 24/7 as part of a stressful, intense competition to get into the best schools)
• Random little ways of making life more amenable for families with children, eg less-strict car seat laws, passing free-range-child laws to reduce false-positive CPS investigations and other sources of hostility towards child-rearing, etc.
• For more on these kinds of things, Zvi Moshowitz's has a good series of posts on fertility-related policy issues

I think it's also possible that the very best lever for increasing fertility would be to boost marriages rather than the birth rate among married couples, since there is some good evidence toward this conclusion.

On artificial wombs as a technology: I do not have any information unfortunately (other than anecdotes). I would also suggest checking outside academia if you have not done so yet. And if anyone is doing this "for pets" as a way to make progress faster before transitioning to people. 

Out of personal interest, though, I am highly interested in knowing what the main bottlenecks and timelines are for artificial wombs. This is because it would contribute towards reversing species extinction, and I would inform my estimates to how far away that technology is. Please share what you learn, I would appreciate it!

In general if you are seeing an obvious lack of rigor everywhere you look, then you can greatly improve the information environment by doing your own shallow research and sharing what you find. I think this itself would be a great service. (even without doing a full delphi forecast)

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:

• the empowerment of women — increased access to education and increased labor market participation
• declining rates of child mortality
• rising costs of bringing up children, with the decline of child labor

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.

One potentially negative effect would be if fertility is over-rated as a driver of why older people have fewer children - e.g. if parental energy is also a significant effect. If this is the case, people might delay having children in the expectation how using artificial wombs, but then lack the energy to manage multiple kids later on. Alternatively, if the arrival of artificial wombs causes people to delay having children, the temporary reduction in births could contribute to the de-normalisation of parenthood, which could reduce longer term desired fertility.

I doubt the magnitude of these effects are sufficient to fully reverse the sign though.

• 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.

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 :)