Question: Do you think it will be possible to artificially construct a human in the future?

Tom Hartley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

Yes. I am not an expert by any means, but the recent developments with cloning large mammals, and “synthetic life” which you probably remember from the news recently, suggest that it might be possible in the not too distant future to clone a human, or in the more distant future to engineer part or all of the human genome. The second in particular would be very difficult. You would then leave an embryonic cell to build the person in the normal way, perhaps implanting them into a surrogate mother’s womb. That would be the easiest way I guess. I would be very worried about this happening as I can’t see how/why it would be for the “created” person’s benefit. It seems more than halfway toward the society imagined by Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” and I don’t think I’d want to live in that kind of world.

Would this count, or did you mean building an lifelike android from non-organic components? That might be possible soonish, but the brain would be a huge challenge. A century or two away I’d guess, but you never know.