The Race to Automate Human Birth | EP 312 | The Hustle Daily Show

Key Takeaways

today we're going to talk about an admittedly odd subject it's a type of AI far different from chat GPT which is sperm injecting robots [Music] we're going to talk about advancements in IVF some 500 000 babies are born worldwide each year through IVF which is a fertilization process that takes place in a lab but it's a fairly laborious process one fertility doctor described IVF labs to MIT technology review as bespoke artisanal kitchens so some startups are starting to get involved and what they want to do is automate the IVF process and there's actually one of these startups that just announced two babies have been born as the result of wait for it sperm injecting robot so this is very interesting and very complex and a little bit different than what we usually talk about on here but nevertheless there's there's a lot here with tech and business and really a startup angle Juliet what is the problem that these startups are trying to solve like I guess the issues that there are with IVF well as many aspiring parents probably know IVF can be very expensive prohibitively expensive for some a single cycle can cost fifteen to thirty thousand dollars insurance coverage varies often depending on where you work where you live and it's never a guarantee like you don't just do it once and a baby happens many patients have to do multiple Cycles before a child is conceived and some never have success through IVF so you're basically pouring a lot of money into this hope which is probably like the thing you want most in life is to be a parent and and you don't even have a guarantee so a lot of these companies are trying to step in and make it easier faster cheaper more reliable for these parents yeah I think I saw you know one one person who's involved with some of these startups say that it can be you know you mentioned 15 to 30 000 it can be upwards of of 80 000 easily just like you said because of so many different cycles and and then no guarantee of success right and okay but the the kind of news here is that there was one company that just announced that two babies two baby girls were born from an automated IVF process what what company is this and and how does this automated process work so this is a Spanish company called Overture life and I think the thing that people are really latching on to is that they used a PlayStation 5 controller to make this okay hang on a PlayStation 5 controller yep which is also hard to get a PS5 so you know we've got a lot of a lot of delicate things in the balance here but essentially so obviously we all know how babies are made I'm pretty sure but you got to get one sperm and one egg cell to to connect you gotta get the sperm to fertilize the egg now typically you would have a highly trained person do this under a microscope using a thin Hollow needle they make a lot of money because it's hard to do it's very delicate Overture recently implanted the sperm cell into the egg using a robotic needle which still required a human to Pilot it with a Sony PlayStation 5 controller it's got it hooked up to a microscope the microscope had a camera but it's actually if you go to the MIT technology review there's actually a video of how this works so to say that it's fully automated would not be accurate they just kind of automated this one needle thing the the implantation here where I guess the fertilization here they did this over a dozen times and since then two baby girls have been born as a result yeah and like you said it was one part of it and and a lot of these companies are working on you know different aspects of the IVF process so even if it's not the full thing automated there are components of it that can be automated and before I move on to the next question I want to add one more thing to I think give an extra perspective about just kind of how Wild this whole story is the the person who used that PlayStation 5 controller was a student mechanical engineer who has no real experience in fertility medicine so there were just so many different parts of this that are just like mind-boggling truly so all right so we have this Spanish company Overture life are there any others is is this like a pretty hot field right now yeah so I was reading about a lot of different companies and it's fascinating what some people are doing there is a company called fertility they have this AI powered tool they call Chloe which stands for cultivating human life through optimal embryos and basically it just helps clinicians select healthy embryos there's another company called IVF 2.0 they kind of do the same thing but with selecting healthy sperm they look at how they're swimming and their size to try to choose the best one the was also the one that I thought was the most interesting was called fertilis and they are making a 3D printed cradle wow to essentially hold and protect the egg and the embryo through various segments of this process reducing human handling so maybe just a little safer I mean I guess the big thing is we're talking about something that is very very delicate yes and all of this could help the process just be more efficient and more successful I assume how realistic is it that we will see a future of automated IVF like is this going to come to fruition anytime soon uh based on the interviews that MIT did with several doctors and also some of the other stuff that I read I would say were probably not in this super sci-fi futuristic scenario yet we're kind of just trying to get all of these parts to align a lot of people pointed out you know there are these headlines saying these babies were born by robots but really it was just one one very small part but it is kind of exciting to look at the potential that is here especially when you have so many parents that are struggling to conceive and are facing these barriers and one of the most interesting things in that article it was talking about how if and this is such a long way off if humanity is ever going to populate other planets it takes a very long time to get there given the current space technology that we have yes and so you might want to have these embryos essentially Frozen on a ship so that when you get there you can start making life versus having people spend maybe decades on a spacecraft getting to this other planet which is actually the plot of Raised by Wolves you've seen that show they send these embryos to this other planet after humans destroy it in a civil war versus these two ideologies and the resulting children are raised by hyper-intelligent Androids so that's the future that we are looking at yeah you know last week I I think Juliet you and I talked about like the real life version of the holiday with with people just kind of switching homes and now we're talking about sci-fi raised with wolves and embryo Frozen embryos and an automated fertilization process potentially on a different planet so this is really the future yeah we're getting pretty far ahead of ourselves today and it seems like there might be one other implication if this automated IVF process really does take off and I think this one is probably more realistic than you know moving to another planet which you know hey who knows could happen I'm not going to have the hot take saying it won't you know in in that MIT article they pointed out that in Denmark about 10 of babies are born through IVF in the US it's only two percent so it it seems maybe there's a world where maybe people have more children if if there's automated IVF is that right yeah and you know I don't think it's too I I don't think we have to speculate too hard to figure out the difference between you know any of the Scandinavian Nations and their Healthcare systems and what we've got going on in the United States and why that might be but yeah it's just people are more incentivized to to do it there and they are they have fewer barriers and so they of course do yeah okay so it could be more children on the way if the automation of IVF works out but that's going to do it for us today Juliet thank you and thank you all for joining us and tuning in to the hustle Daily Show we're a proud part of the HubSpot podcast Network we have a lot more Tech and business coverage for you in our newsletter so if you're not signed up please go to the hustle.co email and we will catch you next week [Applause] thank you