I’ve finally come in to land after my 48-hour visit to San Francisco last week, to visit Anthropic HQ for a “convening” of journalists and think-tankers. Our topic was the present and future picture for frontier AI. I’m sure more than a few of you will be appalled that I accepted the invitation. It was fascinating: my initial report on the event was published on Saturday at Unherd (paywalled, I’m afraid) but I have many more reflections on the experience which I’ll share here as they crystallise.
Elsewhere this week, my remarks at the Women’s Conference in Rochester, NY are now online at Fairer Disputations! Read now. Continuing the reprotech theme, today’s newsletter is a public service broadcast reminding you all: don’t buy spaff off the internet.
Does anyone actually need to hear this? It beggars belief that this should be the case, and yet: scarcely a month goes by without another story emerging, of someone who obtained human genetic material online and later regretted it.
There was all those women who obtained spaff off a man who fathered 15 children despite having an inherited genetic condition, Fragile X. The man in question knew about his heritable condition, but still advertised his sperm for use by lesbian couples, via social media. More gothic still is the fascists spaff super-spreader: Clive Jones, a former BNP member who is one of Britain’s most prolific sperm donors, claiming to have fathered more than 140 children.
According to the Times, Jones also advertises via social media. Then, having made contact, he’ll drive to the house of any woman who requests it and hand over a pot of, er, himself. For free. Why? Is he trying to do a budget Elon? Is this a fetish thing? Is he just a nice man who wants to help? I don’t understand anything any more, and I hate this timeline.
But though I’m taking a slightly flippant tone here, the theme is serious. A world in which people are buying and selling (or exchanging, for whatever other baroque motivation) human gametes, of either kind, that could become new children, is a world in which we’re already so far down the Meat Lego chute it’s hard to see how we scramble back up. And yes I know that sounds disgusting as well. It’s meant to, because it is.