Dealing with the Frozen Embryonic Child

 So, the Catholic Church says it is immoral to allow these embryos to grow in the womb of a woman who is not their mother. After thirty years, their mothers and fathers may not even be alive.

If we tried to baptize them in their embryonic state, we would instantly kill them.

So, we've got unbaptized babies that are not allowed to grow up, a Peter Pan situation in real life. Is it REALLY moral to leave them in a frozen state for 30 years? REALLY? 

Yes, it was immoral to create them this way. But not giving these children a way forward to grow and become what they were meant to be... and remember, God allowed the fertilization to work, He ensouled these children because these embryos are EMBRYOS, not just fertilized eggs ... how is THAT moral?  

The Economics of Children

 "Family life is no longer a core aspiration of every person but becomes a “luxury"..." That is most assuredly not what is happening.

People are just making the best economic investments they can with the time they have. In a low-tech, agricultural society, children are a high value commodity item because workers are high-value commodities. You need workers to get the work done. Agricultural societies are marked by high levels of child labor.

For most of human existence, 5 through 15 year old children worked in the farms and fields. When industry and mining was invented 5-15 year old children worked those in the factories and the coal mines. Children were effectively indentured servants with a ten-year to fifteen-year return. But as the tasks children could do became automated, their economic value disappeared. Children could no longer earn a wage for the family. 

In a high-tech, post-industrial society, labor-saving machinery... wait for it... saves labor. As fewer people are needed to get work done, the value of the worker drops. The value of having children drops. It's not that children are a luxury, it's that children are no longer economically valuable. They don't start returning ROI at age 5, as they used to do.

Today, it takes 20 or even 30 years to start seeing return on investment, and the return no longer goes to the family that raised them but to the family they are themselves forming. So, each set of prospective parents sees that they will take a substantial loss on raising children and they... don't. 

If children were actually a luxury good, then rich people would have MORE children than poor people do. But that isn't what is happening. Malthus thought children were a luxury good. His original prediction was that rich people would have more children than the poor did. That turned out to be completely wrong. It is fascinating that people invoke Malthus without bothering to have read his theories. 

Now, it may observed that those in poverty tend to have more children than the rich. This is a direct result of the welfare state. Because welfare increases payments as a function of marital status and number of children, the welfare state has re-created the pre-industrial ROI children once provided, but it does so only for a particular segment of society instead of society as a whole.

The article linked above notes that Muslim and ultra-orthodox Jews still have large numbers of children, but this is largely due to the economic circumstances they find themselves in. Muslim-predominate countries tend to ether be primarily agricultural or derive their income from oil revenues. Both are essentially pre-industrial. Ultra-orthodox Jews are paid by donors (and sometimes even paid by the Israeli government) to study the Torah. That is, they get the equivalent of government welfare payments for sustenance, as even the author of the article admits in passing:

These ultraorthodox Jews have been enthusiastic clients of Israel’s pro-natalist policies and rely on the support handed out to large families by the state as an economic basis for their traditional lifestyles and their continued study of the Jewish scriptures. 

Thus, the article's conclusions about Marx are completely off-base. Insofar as capitalism contains within its demographics the seeds of its own demise, the facts demonstrate Marx was completely clueless. Anyone reading through Marxist writings would search in vain for a reference to the demographics we currently face. Marx had absolutely no idea capitalism would struggle with demography. Asserting that Karl Marx was somehow correct about capitalism is absurd. Marx was simply another Malthus. He was a blowhard, an intellectual who didn't ever really understand how the world works. Failed academics are his tribe, which is why today's failed academics love him so and try endlessly to prop him up as a visionary. Failure calls to failure across the deep, and find consolation in each other. 

Computer-generated Art Does Not Exist

When a computer "does" anything, it is "doing" that action in the same way that a shovel is "shovelling" dirt or a hammer is hammering a nail. Somebody, somewhere, is manipulating the machine to do that.

So, when we say a computer has "tunnel-vision" or "limited understanding", we are wrong. The programmers who created the task list for the computer, the PROGRAMMERS have tunnel-vision, for a variety of technical reasons (e.g., they have limited resources with which to manipulate the machine).

We have a tendency to anthropomorphize an inanimate object, attributing the skills of the programmer to the computer in a way we would never do with a shovel or a hammer. We must always remember that a computer runs a program in the same way a hammer beats down a nail - it does so mindlessly. A computer is a series of electrical junctions working in synch, that's it. Although the music may be beautiful, the player piano does not play music. Although the result may be brilliant, the computer does not think.

Computer-generated "x" is a misnomer. It is always "programmer-generated art" or "programmer-generated writing". The programmers have created a situation in which other people (users) may collaborate with the programmers and their tools (via user-input) to produce a result.

So AI-art is really just anonymously collaborated art. AI-writing is the same. The programmers create interactive parameters, the users provide inputs, and the programmers' rule-based "world" uses that input to create an output.

Now, the output may be completely unexpected and beautiful from the viewpoint of everyone involved. That's very neat if it is. But insofar as it is beautiful or useful, that's a result of the people involved. The computer contributed only speed and technical accuracy.

And this is why "computer-generated art" *SHOULD* win art competitions. It truly is the product of talented human minds, all working together. The individual people could never have achieved the result, but the team of people - who do not know each other and may never meet - HAVE achieved the result. In that sense, "computer-generated art" is not substantially different than the entirety of human culture throughout history. Every human artist today builds upon the work of countless previous generations of artists, most of whom they do not even know, and none of whom they have met. But instead of collaborating across generational time, computers allow the artists to collaborate across physical space. The anonymity hasn't changed, the individual contributions haven't changed. The tools have changed a bit, but that's it. Whether the tool be a quill pen, a paintbrush, a camera or a computer, the art is still created by the people using the tools they have at their disposal.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Pens, cameras, pianos, computers don't create art, people create art. "Computer-generated art" is a human achievement, not a computer's achievement.