Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution • Hacker News Board

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#381

Post by lopmotr » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 7:00 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #366

lopmotr wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that something to be sad about? In case your kids miss out and feel jealous? Surely if yours kids have only an average intelligence, you'll still be happy for them despite the fact that they probably can't achieve as much success as their most successful peers in any intellectual field. Your attitude sounds like my Dad's attitude of being sad that my generation doesn't believe in God anymore or his own Dad's u…

This comment recalled for me the Bill Cosby joke which goes, "When I was a teen, I couldn't believe how stupid my Dad was. When my kids were teens I couldn't believe how much my Dad had learned between then and now." :-) I didn't appreciate the wisdom in that joke until my kids were teens. The sadness comes from the expectation of the painful times between the onset of the technology and the eventual successful integ…

While they're dying from genetic manipulation, they'll be surviving more diseases, car crashes, etc. The net safety will surely be better for your kids' and grandkids' generations than your own.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#382

Post by danieltillett » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #374

danieltillett wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thalidomide wasn’t a failure of chemistry, but of medicine. CFCs were an amazing breakthrough as they stopped people getting gassed by their refrigerator and killed (ammonia was used before). Once a problem was identified then changes were made. Similar with asbestos (not actually chemistry), leaded fuel and DDT. As for the others you have concentrated on the tiny percentage of bad outcomes rather then the millions o…

> takes a very special mind to see it in such a negative light It takes an even more special mind to pretend we know all the consequences, to assume our knowledge is complete and that there are no unknowns.

Ah when something is 99.999% good let’s concentrate on the 0.001% that is bad.

Everything has consequences, including not doing something. If we didn’t act because of the “unknown” we would still be living in caves.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#383

Post by Apocryphon » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #335

imtringued wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have killed renewiltord because I failed to invent immortality.

There is a solid argument to be made that the minuscule effort we put into life extension research has moral weight that will haunt our descendants.

Ah, good ol’ Roko’s Basilisk.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#384

Post by bergstromm466 » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #336

D_Alex wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Say these monkeys were intelligent enough... Great questions, we will need some good answers soon. Not so much for the monkeys, but for AI.

Yup. Ironically, it's in the context of AI where I first saw those questions being brought up. And there's an extra difficulty there: biological organisms can can reproduce only so fast. Software can reproduce as fast as you can provision new VMs in the data centre. So we can easily imagine suddenly going from 1 human-like AI program to a hundred billion instances of it, and then humanity becomes an insignificant min…

> we can easily imagine suddenly going from 1 human-like AI program to a hundred billion instances of it, and then humanity becomes an insignificant minority from the point of view of democracy.

What do you mean?