Machine Antihumanism and the Inversion of Family Law

Delivered at the “Meaning vs. the Machine” conference in Margaretville, New York in October, this speech by Jeff Shafer, a lawyer and Director of The Hale Institute at New Saint Andrews College, was widely recognized as a true bombshell by many in attendance. What Shafer does exceptionally powerfully is to demonstrate, step-by-step, how the application of new technologies and commercial surrogacy processes to reproduction is already radically redefining both family and human personhood within the liberal managerial worldview, not only in theory but in law. And he then shows how this redefinition must logically lead to a truly totalitarian social and political dynamic, in which children become not persons but assembled products, and parents (if they can be identified as such at all) merely “provisionally accredited custodians” of this property on behalf of various stakeholders, and ultimately the state.

“In the vision of the Technium, as well as in those precincts of the law that have absorbed the machine logic as its own,” Shafer explains, “children are radically homeless… understood as conceived and entering existence without objective relation to anyone.” Effectively assembled from pieces sourced from around the world, the “global baby” of the future is destined to have “no default placement, no security of embeddedness, no people, no ancestors, no family history…” It will only have the state. And this is the chillingly anti-human future we already find ourselves inadvertently stumbling toward with exceptional speed, thanks to a blind rush to integrate new reproductive technologies (and accompanying philosophical assumptions) into markets and law, exacerbated by an unwillingness to ever say “no.”

It was, frankly, one of the most disturbing talks I have ever sat and listened to. and I have therefore agreed to both publish Shafer’s remarks (slightly reformatted as an essay, below) so that they can be distributed more widely. We found we both felt it deeply important to do so. This essay will thus appear at Crawford’s Substack Archedelia as well; some portions of the material also previously appeared at Humanum Review. I do hope you will read it. – N.S. Lyons

Yesterday I received an email message alerting me to two news items. The first described an American tech startup that offers genetic testing of human embryos for IQ levels so that the owners of these embryonic children may select which of them to gestate and which to discard, based on their forecasted intelligence.