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In the short term I think the risks are overstated. Vastly increased health and intelligence looks like it will be possible to select and/or edit for, as well as the elimination of Mendelian disease. The scale of this good is so large it overwhelms most scruples.
"Vastly increased health and intelligence"... again, you keep making assertions without any reference.
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Because it requires medical experimentation on human beings who can’t consent to it. Is it really so difficult to understand why that’s wrong?
If a few dozen or even thousand suffer to prevent the suffering of many millions or even billions in the long run, is that not a trade off one would have to make? It all comes down to the old debate of deontology vs utilitarianism
If you had to live your entire life with a painful deformity because someone experimented on your genes, do you think you’d find this argument convincing?
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Ahh I see, you are just making stuff up.
No. I think the claim "one can raise IQ several standard deviations by editing https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3421.pdf
> It's "unconscionable ... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene editing expert and editor of a genetics journal. This is 100% correct. (COI: Kiran was my postdoc while I was a student in the lab a decade ago.)
Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of nations that do not share our taboos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it requires medical experimentation on human beings who can’t consent to it. Is it really so difficult to understand why that’s wrong?
If a few dozen or even thousand suffer to prevent the suffering of many millions or even billions in the long run, is that not a trade off one would have to make? It all comes down to the old debate of deontology vs utilitarianism
Here is a controversial article published in 2013 by an evolutionary psychologist that everyone should give some thoughts on: Disclaimers: I do not have the expertise to evaluate its veracity but if true it will affect everyone in the world in some important ways within a few decades (the effects might already start to appear as we see how fast China has developed technologically. Yes, technology transfer is clearly…
Thanks for that super weird article. The author's motivations for supporting China's eugenics efforts are puzzling for sure. Thankfully we might be safe for the time being. IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable. My 50c is that we as a population have currently stopped evolving regions of our genome that…
Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. They seemed to enjoy contemplating more universal and deeper questions than immersing themselves too much on worldly matters. A majority of powerful people did seem to have above or well-above average intelligence but they were probably not in the same league, intelligence-wise, as those famous thinkers. Their other traits were also important to their rise to power.
Environment and population intelligence likely have co-evolved and very high intelligence did not confer much advantage over an above average one for most common professions before the 21st century. The technology and level of economy-of-scale available in the past meant that social graciousness and other personality traits could have been better predictors of career and economic success than intelligence above a certain point.
To have a great engineering or scientific career developing some of our increasingly advanced technologies, very high intelligence seems to present certain advantages over a more balanced group of traits. So a shift in global technological landscape could also mean that the optimal collection of population intelligence and other traits change as well.
As concrete examples, the founders of the largest American tech empires all seem to have/had an IQ at least 3-4 SD above mean based on their academic records.
PS. Your 1) seems possible in some cases and I would add that traits like non-extreme autism-spectrum condition may not be a handicap, but rather an advantage, in a certain environment and career path.
Hear it from He Jiankui himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0vnOmFltc
Oooh, so it is that He , the man used to have a very peculiar reputation on Chinese university BBSes back when China just got internet connectivity. That was what possibly lead to him being ousted from Chinese academia a decade ago. I myself think it was certainly no coincidence that Stanford picked him up. I'm afraid calling up some of his opinions, and in particularly on the topic of race, as they will be a ten meg…
Looks pretty bad.
the first edit is HIV resistance, not a bad way to start the black mirror episode that is the rest of our lives from now on.
If it works and HIV resistance installed in a population, then it opens the possibility HIV could be then could become an effective bioweapon for that population.
2. HIV would make a terrible bioweapon. It's difficult to spread, takes a very long time to incapacitate people, and there are generally effective treatments.
> It's "unconscionable ... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene editing expert and editor of a genetics journal. This is 100% correct. (COI: Kiran was my postdoc while I was a student in the lab a decade ago.)
Some theists believe that we shouldn't tamper with God's perfect creation, because everything happens for a reason (including miscarriages, birth defects, and genetic diseases.) Atheists might believe that natural selection has got us this far, so it must be a pretty good process. A scientist shouldn't change anything, because they will be adding unnecessary risk to the natural process of evolution.
But you have to think about the "baseline". Natural selection is actually a brutal and horrific process where genes are just mutated at random. 50% of all pregnancies end in a miscarriage. Birth defects occur in 3% of all live births, and they account for 21% of all infant deaths. Nature is already a mad scientist that runs random experiments on babies.
I read that humans have about 30 genetic mutations per generation [1]. So imagine if a scientist picks 1 gene at random, and they use CRISPR to randomly change that gene. Now the embryo has around ~31 random mutations. Isn't that basically the same result as natural selection? You probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the scientist had changed anything.
Is that an accurate way of looking at it, or am I missing something?