The shape of things to come – from artificial wombs to suicide coffins

It wasn’t until half way through Jenny Kleeman’s Sex Robots and Vegan Meat that I was able to put my finger on why it was making me uncomfortable. Sometimes you read a book where the author’s mindset is so alien to your own that you feel almost as though you’re translating from a foreign language; this was one of those times. But on page 143 I found the Rosetta Stone.

Kleeman was talking about vegan meat — cultured steaks and burgers developed in a laboratory. She had met various scientists and entrepreneurs who were trying to make it happen (including some, it should be admitted, who come across as spivs and carnival barkers). And then she said: ‘Vegan meat depends on a pessimistic view of human beings: the belief that we are incapable of changing the way we eat.’ Instead, we should, as humanity, lose our taste for meat altogether.

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That was when I realised why the whole book felt bizarre. To me, lab-grown meat represents an optimistic view: that we can still have things we like (meat) at hugely reduced costs (of animal suffering and environmental damage) seems to me a positive. But Kleeman thinks giving people what they want is harmful. Instead, she says, we should try to change our attitudes so that we don’t want those things.

The book focuses on four areas of technology: sex robots, lab-grown meat, artificial wombs and on-demand euthanasia machines. They are all, Kleeman says, on the horizon, and all have the capacity to transform human society.

That said, I think two of them at least are further off than she thinks. The sex robots chapter is mainly concerned with sex dolls, while showcasing a few laughable attempts at making some of them AI-enabled; the challenges of making AI good enough to achieve human conversation, or robotics advanced enough to make a humanoid robot that can walk around in a busy environment, are left largely unaddressed.