Builder Brain

This Twitter thread caught my eye on Tuesday evening. I want to talk about it briefly because I think it’s a good representation of a mentality that’s prevalent among people in the tech and techno-finance spaces. It starts, as these things often do, with a musing from Elon Musk about population growth and birth rates, and kicks off a little whiteboarding-in-public session among some Men Who Solve Problems. The conversation went from zero to SYNTHETIC WOMBS at an alarming speed.

Eventually, Vitalik Buterin, a programmer by trade and a co-founder of the cryptocurrency technology Ethereum, chimed in.

Buterin’s tweet was thoroughly dunked on (I confess to being weak and joining in) but I wanted to unpack his response a bit more. Musk’s initial tweet is about declining fertility rates, which is a real phenomenon both in the U.S. and abroad. As this Vox piece lays out, “fewer babies make for aging countries, which slows down economic growth and holds back innovation.” And so it makes sense that this set of tech men are specifically interested in and concerned with this issue.

But, rather than diving into the fundamentals of to raise a child, or that the early child-care education , both in terms of supporting care workers and parents)—Buterin jumps directly to synthetic wombs.