Not a day goes by without a new story on the perils of technology. We hear of increasingly clever machines that surpass human capability and comprehension, of tech billionaires imploring each other to stop the ‘out-of-control race’ to produce the most powerful artificial intelligence which poses ‘profound risks to society’, we hear of genetic technologies capable of altering the human genome in ways we cannot predict and a future two-tier humanity consisting of those of us who are genetically enhanced and those who are not. How can we respond to these stories? What should we do politically? By way of exploring these questions (using the UK as the primary example of context), I want to move beyond the usual arguments and legal devices that serve to identify tech developers, and users, as being at fault for individual acts of wrongdoing, recklessness, incompetence or negligence, and ask instead how we might address the broader structural dynamics intertwined with the increasing use of AI and Repro-tech. My argument will be that to take a much sharper structural perspective on these transformative technologies is a vital requirement of contemporary politics.

What will our reproductive habits look like in the future, and why does it matter? Part of the answer to this question is the use of in vitro pre-implantation genetic technologies (PGTs). Originally designed to screen for a range of genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease or Huntington’s disease, new markets are set to emerge where prospective parents will be promised the opportunity to select the personality characteristics of their unborn children: this is what the political theorist Robert Nozick (1974) thought would result in a ‘genetic supermarket’. Unlike the case of AI, there has been a long-standing tradition of regulating Repro-tech. The UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryonic Association (HFEA) is a regulatory public body created in 1990 in light of a report authored by the philosopher Mary Warnock. It is widely regarded internationally as the gold standard of regulators and the first to govern technologies as complex as gene-editing and cloning. However, though we might see some elements of promise in Warnock’s approach for a wider model of technology governance, I consider what I see as the general demise of regulatory landscapes in line with the dominant US-based ‘state capture’ school of thought.