That’s… maybe a bit of an overreaction on your part. I’m very much on board with PendingKetchup’s comment, and I read it as supplementary material to your article, not a critique of you as a person, and I’m not sure where you get that idea from.
Like…
You seem to think that because my post did not explicitly support your social views, it must have been written with the goal of undermining those views.
What?
Indication that drawing the boundary is hard is just looking at how bad current LLMs are with hallucinating. An LLM almost never states “I don’t know” or “I am unsure”, at least not in a meaningful fashion. Ask it about anything that’s known to be an unsolved problem, it’ll tell you so — but ask it about anything obscure, and it’ll come up with some plausible-sounding bullshit.
And I think that’s a failure to recognize the boundary of what it knows vs what it doesn’t.
I think I decided to support in-ovo sex testing in the end, but I remember taking a while to decide because I oppose killing the male chicks at all. Took me a while to realize that the hypothetical doesn’t give me that option. But yeah, maybe that’s part of the explanation for your last observation?
A friend from Spain studying law explained why not only is surrogacy illegal in Spain, but why it is an actual crime to even have a child from surrogacy — doesn’t matter in which country you had that surrogacy.
The point here is that the surrogate mother, as you have pointed out, develops an emotional bond to the unborn child, and then is contractually compelled to give away that child. If you allow surrogacy, you are basically putting contract law above intuitive, inborn feelings of family relations. It is cruel. Really cruel. Unbelievable cruel. Taking a child away from it’s mother cruel, literally. There’s a reason that’s often used as a baseline for measuring cruelty. According to that friend, the surrogate mothers usually are completely devastated and need extensive psychotherapy (which they usually don’t have access to).
Furthermore, you’re basically doing the most sexist possible thing: Reducing a whole woman to her reproductive capacity. Not sure how much that latter point matters to you, but it certainly matters to me.
Like, yeah, maybe you could make the argument that surrogacy could be possible for a mother who doesn’t develop that emotional connection, but that seems such an outlier case so unlikely that it’s more likely that a desperate woman is lying about being able to do that than her actually not making that emotional connection. Moving the point of when the decision is made which family the baby will belong to after birth runs into the same problem. There’s a reason that voluntary slavery is illegal: Desperate people would do it (and have historically done it), and that didn’t make it right.
I may have gotten some details wrong.
Editing somehow doesn’t work, so let me add this here:
Are you aware that “the alarm beeping in my head” may not be about you, but about some of your readers, about what your article might mean to them?