The funny thing is is that the AI singularity will likely come before the gene editing singularity, nullifying the advantage of being able to genetically engineer super smart babies on account of the de-facto dominant species on the planet becoming the collective cloud hyperintelligence
Unless we genetically engineer babies to interface with the collective cloud hyper intelligence better.
In all seriousness, all advancements in AI have been around benefiting the individuals utilizing it to better perform. Raising the baseline of what an individual can accomplish by themselves will likely increase what they can do with AI help too.
Why should we allow self appointed "biomedical ethicists" to dictate what interventions we can use?
If someone says they should have the right to refuse a intervention, even if those "ethicists" otherwise approve of it, those ethicists give a smug nod of approval.
But if someone says they should have the right to use an intervention that those self appointed "ethicists" don't approve of, they will stamp their feet like toddlers and use every force of the state available to try and stop you.
If we allow parents to destroy embryos, why is it so controversial to allow them to modify them?
At least one point of those ethicists is to stop people who are naive from doing things with permanent consequences without first checking to see what those consequences would be.
I would say that in the area of reproductive science, you need to be exceptionally cautious about what's permitted as you are permanently modifying the germline, and society has very strong opinions about that. At this stage of the science you're more likely to cause harm than cure disease (except in a limited number of Mendelian diseases) while also baking that harm into a person's genome so that if they do survive, their children may also inherit that.
(I worked towards germline modification for several decades and concluded, well before He Jianku shat the bed, that we're not ready to do it, and there do need to be some guardrails preventing rogue scientists finding naive parents and getting them to sign inadequate consent forms).
> At least one point of those ethicists is to stop people who are naive from doing things with permanent consequences without first checking to see what those consequences would be.
Are the consequences really that permanent? It's pretty easy (in China) to monitor a handful of test subjects with heritable mutations and make sure they don't reproduce.
> At this stage of the science you're more likely to cause harm than cure disease
The potential upside of developing the science is huge, which is essentially what He is doing.
Your criticism is difficult to follow. There's a big difference between refusing an intervention and making use of one. I can licitly refuse treatment for a disease (the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary care), but I cannot licitly make use of immoral means to treat a disease.
> If we allow parents to destroy embryos, why is it so controversial to allow them to modify them?
Genetic modification as such, in the abstract, when therapeutic (fixing some genetic defect that causes a disease) may be licit in principle, but in practice,
1. our ignorance of genetics and non-trivial hereditary effects suggests we should be cautious, not only for the sake of the person whose genes are being edited, but because the change is not localized; that modification may not be transmitted to descendants
2. that embryos are subjects of modification introduces the standard moral problems of IVF (such as the objectification of human beings).
If modification is not therapeutic, then the usual moral problems surrounding designer babies apply in addition to those that apply to IVF. Killing embryonic human beings is intrinsically worse, though the secondary genetic risks are obviously absent.
Why should we allow self appointed "biomedical ethicists" to dictate what interventions we can use?
The medical industry seems to be largely divided into two camps: Camp A would happily sell allergy medication that triples your risk of diabetes, and Camp B would rather ten thousand terminal patients die in agony than kill a hundred of them with medication that cured the rest.
It's simply the momentum of the world we live in. It's perfectly legal for a 45 year old woman to get pregnant by an elderly man, then chainsmoke, take caffeine pills, and get shitfaced every day of her pregnancy and create a profoundly disadvantaged baby whose life will be full of hardship. They can even do it on purpose if they want. The powers-that-be don't give a damn about human happiness or suffering; they just want to make sure it isn't them who gets blamed.
I would suggest that 'the medical world' has fringes like that you describe but that the overwhelming, vast majority would take a significantly more nuanced view.
Honestly even that description is massively underselling how much more comprehensive the ethical views of 100% of the medical profession has here. The fringes like that are a tiny rounding error.
There probably exist examples of both the extremes you describe, but in such small numbers as to probably be irrelevant. On the whole the industry is conservative but changes fairly quickly.
I dislike biomedical ethicists as much as most people here, but the anger here seems way out of proportion to their actual influence. They don't "dictate" anything; for the most part they're a bunch of noisy busybodies who make statements which get quoted by journalists but otherwise influence nothing. For the most part, market demand dictates interventions and bioethicists are essentially an irrelevant speed bump in this process. If you don't like them, you can just ignore them.
To your last question, destroyed embryos can't suffer. Neither can genetically modified embryos that are destroyed or never get implanted. That's a pretty big difference!
How would you feel about performing untested gene therapies on healthy babies?
> Why should we allow self appointed "biomedical ethicists" to dictate what interventions we can use?
…We don’t? Nobody does? Ethicists aren’t cops. Nobody gets arrested by the ethics police or thrown into ethics jail. They have opinions which are then either ignored or supported by somebody in a political or managerial position.
Why would we give cover to the people that actually make decisions about laws by pretending that some stuffy academics are omnipotent?
edit:
> If we allow parents to destroy embryos, why is it so controversial to allow them to modify them?
There’s an entire profession of people that get hired to debate questions like that, they’re called… ethicists.
In my view, the greatest indictment possible of many of these so-called "ethicists" is that even as they obsess over non-issues, they make not a word of protest against murdering babies.
Rich people will find a way to use and experiment with this. They'll do it on a private island if they have to.
Then dictators will be tempted to "build" better workers and soldiers to get an edge on "those pesky democracies". If they succeed and become a threat to other nations, those nations will feel obligated to follow suit. The cat's out of the bag. (I'll pre-order a second wanker.)
If nukes don't get you, AI will. If AI doesn't get you, genetically modified monsters will. If genetically modified monsters[1] don't get you, then rioters paranoid over the first 3 will get you. Enjoy every day like it's your last.
[1] Could be altered humans, altered viruses, altered bears, altered mash-ups of all 3, etc.
Rich people (and not only them) already do much more than this. We all select the best mates we can get our hands on.
The gain from this kind of gene editing is likely much smaller than simply having a bunch of kids with a very genetically fit individual, and that is exactly what rich people do.
I also recall reading that some countries had strategies to foster interaction between very genetically fit individuals, beyond what would naturally happen by the general tendency of people to be attracted to others like them.
I don’t think this is an area in which pure first principles reasoning leads to good outcomes.
People are resistant to any sort of genetic restrictions on procreation for a couple reasons. First, the historical precedent of eugenics is so monstrously abusive that any step in that direction is viewed as dangerous. Second, how would you enforce a ban on procreation of people with genetic defects? Put the parents in jail? Forcefully abort the fetus? What if they don’t know about their genetic condition?
With genetic engineering, it’s a bit more clear. It’s much easier to just not start doing germline editing than to roll back the (unknown) consequences. The harm in not doing that is of course that some people get sick and die, but we can mitigate that with normal medicine. Also the particularities of the case matter here. The scientist chose a questionably effective approach to preventing HIV, a disease that has good treatments. Also he did a shit job informing the parents about the risks. Just bad choices all around.
Doing secret, shady genetic engineering on children is not the same thing as letting people with genetic conditions have children.
I honestly don't think there's any way to stop people with bad genetics from having children than isn't an ethical nightmare, but I have always found it curious that the right to have children is always considered to be incomparably more important than preventing children from living a lifetime of suffering from debilitating illnesses or deformities.
In general, it seems as though our civilization views children as little more than property of their parents.
"we can mitigate that with normal medicine" -- for some illnesses. For many, it's an abbreviated lifetime, curtailed options, and some measure of ongoing suffering.
I don't really care about historical precedents. They can best be used as a measure of how not to do something, rather than a suggestion that it not be done at all.
Germline editing has the chance to relieve the suffering of real people. My entire life would likely to be quite different and much better, were it available back then. And yet a lot of people are just ... counted as part of the cost. Sorry you will die soon, and painfully, but at least we're not the Nazis.
Putting people in jail is exactly what nearly every Western country in the world currently does to prevent the birth of genetically-defective children:
> Susan and Patrick were a young German couple in love. But, the German state never allowed Susan and Patrick to get married. Shockingly, Patrick was imprisoned for years because of his sexual relationship with Susan. Despite these obstacles, over the course of their relationship, Susan and Patrick had four children. Three of their children—Eric, Sarah, and Nancy—had severe problems: epilepsy, cognitive disabilities, and a congenital heart defect that required a transplant. The German state took away these children and placed them with foster families. Why did Germany do all these terrible things to Susan and Patrick?
> Eugenics. No, this story didn’t happen in Nazi Germany, it happened over the course of the last 20 years. But why haven’t you heard this story before? Because Patrick and Susan are siblings.
Like people who don't understand that creating new genetic diseases might be worse than the ones that we already have? That they might cause even more complex issues that we can't foresee?
Why do the ethical concerns of gene editing matter, ethically, when there are billions of people starving?
Instead of spending time and money on ethics of a few, why not spend that time and money on helping others who actually would love to have the opportunity to make an ethical choice by surviving?
I mean seriously, bioethics is just a way for the upper-middle classes to feel better about their choices. But in real life the rich don't really care about that sort of shit; ethics really is a way for the rich to deny the almost rich the same privileges and opportunities.
This is inevitable, ethics won't stop most of the world from this research.
The advantages are too great for a nation state as well, from recent polls India is extremely pro designer babies.
Once one country opens this pandora's box, they all will.
"Progress" is something that emerges only in hindsight, and is a value judgement that embeds a perspective from which it is made. What we have in the present are choices, and possibilities, and estimations of their outcomes.
You could oppose this because you think it's unlikely to work at all, and so is a dead end and wasted effort. You could oppose it because you think it will work, but that the changes are not likely to be improvements.
Is a procedure that creates a new form of smarter, healthier, longer lived human progress? For them it certainly is. If they deny me that technology for my descendants, is it progress for them?
It is simply not going to break down so easily into "this is progress and progress is good." It will have consequences, some of them negative, many of them unexpected. It will be better for some people some of the time and worse for some people some of the time, like almost all changes are. Resisting change simply to slow it down and better understand and predict the effects is a valid stance as well. None of these things are inherently unethical.
Would you volunteer your child for experimental gene therapy to make them HIV resistant, a therapy that has never been proven to work and has an unknown risk of permanent side effects?
No, because the chance of my child getting HIV is ridiculously low.
If you shift it to make my child really smart or really pretty, the answer might be different - especially if the parents aren’t especially smart or good looking themselves.
Imagine laws that sanction mandatory "improvements" on the future subjects. To me, in that context, this "it's grossly unethical to stand in the way if that progress" is where the true (as in hardcore) politics begins. (Compare to that, the current politics, which deals in easy amendable decisions, feels like child play.) Then there is this dynamic we can all see in software development, with haste of feature addition and not much regard for other lesser aspects (in the marketable sense), that may cross into gene development. There are many more interesting angles that will pop up if you give it a thought...
Readit News
In all seriousness, all advancements in AI have been around benefiting the individuals utilizing it to better perform. Raising the baseline of what an individual can accomplish by themselves will likely increase what they can do with AI help too.
If someone says they should have the right to refuse a intervention, even if those "ethicists" otherwise approve of it, those ethicists give a smug nod of approval.
But if someone says they should have the right to use an intervention that those self appointed "ethicists" don't approve of, they will stamp their feet like toddlers and use every force of the state available to try and stop you.
If we allow parents to destroy embryos, why is it so controversial to allow them to modify them?
I would say that in the area of reproductive science, you need to be exceptionally cautious about what's permitted as you are permanently modifying the germline, and society has very strong opinions about that. At this stage of the science you're more likely to cause harm than cure disease (except in a limited number of Mendelian diseases) while also baking that harm into a person's genome so that if they do survive, their children may also inherit that.
(I worked towards germline modification for several decades and concluded, well before He Jianku shat the bed, that we're not ready to do it, and there do need to be some guardrails preventing rogue scientists finding naive parents and getting them to sign inadequate consent forms).
Are the consequences really that permanent? It's pretty easy (in China) to monitor a handful of test subjects with heritable mutations and make sure they don't reproduce.
> At this stage of the science you're more likely to cause harm than cure disease
The potential upside of developing the science is huge, which is essentially what He is doing.
Dead Comment
> If we allow parents to destroy embryos, why is it so controversial to allow them to modify them?
Genetic modification as such, in the abstract, when therapeutic (fixing some genetic defect that causes a disease) may be licit in principle, but in practice,
1. our ignorance of genetics and non-trivial hereditary effects suggests we should be cautious, not only for the sake of the person whose genes are being edited, but because the change is not localized; that modification may not be transmitted to descendants
2. that embryos are subjects of modification introduces the standard moral problems of IVF (such as the objectification of human beings).
If modification is not therapeutic, then the usual moral problems surrounding designer babies apply in addition to those that apply to IVF. Killing embryonic human beings is intrinsically worse, though the secondary genetic risks are obviously absent.
The medical industry seems to be largely divided into two camps: Camp A would happily sell allergy medication that triples your risk of diabetes, and Camp B would rather ten thousand terminal patients die in agony than kill a hundred of them with medication that cured the rest.
It's simply the momentum of the world we live in. It's perfectly legal for a 45 year old woman to get pregnant by an elderly man, then chainsmoke, take caffeine pills, and get shitfaced every day of her pregnancy and create a profoundly disadvantaged baby whose life will be full of hardship. They can even do it on purpose if they want. The powers-that-be don't give a damn about human happiness or suffering; they just want to make sure it isn't them who gets blamed.
Honestly even that description is massively underselling how much more comprehensive the ethical views of 100% of the medical profession has here. The fringes like that are a tiny rounding error.
There probably exist examples of both the extremes you describe, but in such small numbers as to probably be irrelevant. On the whole the industry is conservative but changes fairly quickly.
How would you feel about performing untested gene therapies on healthy babies?
…We don’t? Nobody does? Ethicists aren’t cops. Nobody gets arrested by the ethics police or thrown into ethics jail. They have opinions which are then either ignored or supported by somebody in a political or managerial position.
Why would we give cover to the people that actually make decisions about laws by pretending that some stuffy academics are omnipotent?
edit:
> If we allow parents to destroy embryos, why is it so controversial to allow them to modify them?
There’s an entire profession of people that get hired to debate questions like that, they’re called… ethicists.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
In my view, the greatest indictment possible of many of these so-called "ethicists" is that even as they obsess over non-issues, they make not a word of protest against murdering babies.
Then dictators will be tempted to "build" better workers and soldiers to get an edge on "those pesky democracies". If they succeed and become a threat to other nations, those nations will feel obligated to follow suit. The cat's out of the bag. (I'll pre-order a second wanker.)
If nukes don't get you, AI will. If AI doesn't get you, genetically modified monsters will. If genetically modified monsters[1] don't get you, then rioters paranoid over the first 3 will get you. Enjoy every day like it's your last.
[1] Could be altered humans, altered viruses, altered bears, altered mash-ups of all 3, etc.
The gain from this kind of gene editing is likely much smaller than simply having a bunch of kids with a very genetically fit individual, and that is exactly what rich people do.
I also recall reading that some countries had strategies to foster interaction between very genetically fit individuals, beyond what would naturally happen by the general tendency of people to be attracted to others like them.
People are resistant to any sort of genetic restrictions on procreation for a couple reasons. First, the historical precedent of eugenics is so monstrously abusive that any step in that direction is viewed as dangerous. Second, how would you enforce a ban on procreation of people with genetic defects? Put the parents in jail? Forcefully abort the fetus? What if they don’t know about their genetic condition?
With genetic engineering, it’s a bit more clear. It’s much easier to just not start doing germline editing than to roll back the (unknown) consequences. The harm in not doing that is of course that some people get sick and die, but we can mitigate that with normal medicine. Also the particularities of the case matter here. The scientist chose a questionably effective approach to preventing HIV, a disease that has good treatments. Also he did a shit job informing the parents about the risks. Just bad choices all around.
Doing secret, shady genetic engineering on children is not the same thing as letting people with genetic conditions have children.
In general, it seems as though our civilization views children as little more than property of their parents.
"we can mitigate that with normal medicine" -- for some illnesses. For many, it's an abbreviated lifetime, curtailed options, and some measure of ongoing suffering.
I don't really care about historical precedents. They can best be used as a measure of how not to do something, rather than a suggestion that it not be done at all.
Germline editing has the chance to relieve the suffering of real people. My entire life would likely to be quite different and much better, were it available back then. And yet a lot of people are just ... counted as part of the cost. Sorry you will die soon, and painfully, but at least we're not the Nazis.
> Susan and Patrick were a young German couple in love. But, the German state never allowed Susan and Patrick to get married. Shockingly, Patrick was imprisoned for years because of his sexual relationship with Susan. Despite these obstacles, over the course of their relationship, Susan and Patrick had four children. Three of their children—Eric, Sarah, and Nancy—had severe problems: epilepsy, cognitive disabilities, and a congenital heart defect that required a transplant. The German state took away these children and placed them with foster families. Why did Germany do all these terrible things to Susan and Patrick?
> Eugenics. No, this story didn’t happen in Nazi Germany, it happened over the course of the last 20 years. But why haven’t you heard this story before? Because Patrick and Susan are siblings.
https://dissentient.substack.com/p/eugenicist
https://education.blogs.archives.gov/2017/05/02/buck-v-bell/
Why do the ethical concerns of gene editing matter, ethically, when there are billions of people starving?
Instead of spending time and money on ethics of a few, why not spend that time and money on helping others who actually would love to have the opportunity to make an ethical choice by surviving?
I mean seriously, bioethics is just a way for the upper-middle classes to feel better about their choices. But in real life the rich don't really care about that sort of shit; ethics really is a way for the rich to deny the almost rich the same privileges and opportunities.
Once one country opens this pandora's box, they all will.
Convince me I'm wrong.
You could oppose this because you think it's unlikely to work at all, and so is a dead end and wasted effort. You could oppose it because you think it will work, but that the changes are not likely to be improvements.
Is a procedure that creates a new form of smarter, healthier, longer lived human progress? For them it certainly is. If they deny me that technology for my descendants, is it progress for them?
It is simply not going to break down so easily into "this is progress and progress is good." It will have consequences, some of them negative, many of them unexpected. It will be better for some people some of the time and worse for some people some of the time, like almost all changes are. Resisting change simply to slow it down and better understand and predict the effects is a valid stance as well. None of these things are inherently unethical.
If you shift it to make my child really smart or really pretty, the answer might be different - especially if the parents aren’t especially smart or good looking themselves.