I have no particular yuck factor involving IVF. And you’re right that it’s not obvious where to draw the line with things like turkey basters. To be safe, I’d exclude them.
Keep in mind that this is just for the first round, and the first round group would presumably decide to expand the pool of people. It’s not permanently institutionalized. It’s just a safety precaution, because the future of humanity is at stake.
Something like the Dr. Evil CEV hack described in the main post. Essentially, we want to block out any way of creating new humans that could be used to override CEV, so it makes sense to start by blocking out all humans created artificially. It might also be a good idea to require the humans to have been born before a certain time, say 2005, so no humans created after 2005 can affect CEV (at least in the first round).
Turkey basters are probably not a threat. However, there’s an advantage to being overly conservative here. The very small number of people created or modified through some sort of artificial means for non-CEV-hacking reasons can be added in after subsequent rounds of CEV. But if the first round includes ten trillion hacked humans by mistake, it will be too late to remove them because they’ll outvote everyone else.
Requiring that people have been incubated in a human womb seems like enough of a bottleneck, though even that’s politically problematic if there are artificial wombs or tech for incubation in non-humans.
The associations between prevalence and cultural dimensions are consistent with the prediction that T. gondii can influence human culture. Just as individuals infected with T. gondii score themselves higher in the neurotic factor guilt-proneness, nations with high T. gondii prevalence had a higher aggregate neuroticism score. In addition, Western nations with high T. gondii prevalence were higher in the ‘neurotic’ cultural dimensions of masculine sex roles and uncertainty avoidance. These results were predicted by a logical scaling-up from individuals to aggregate personalities to cultural dimensions.
Requiring that people have been incubated in a human womb seems like enough of a bottleneck
You’re probably right. It probably is. But we lose nothing by being more conservative, because the first round of CEV will add in all the turkey baster babies.
I have no particular yuck factor involving IVF. And you’re right that it’s not obvious where to draw the line with things like turkey basters. To be safe, I’d exclude them.
Keep in mind that this is just for the first round, and the first round group would presumably decide to expand the pool of people. It’s not permanently institutionalized. It’s just a safety precaution, because the future of humanity is at stake.
What risk are you trying to protect against?
Something like the Dr. Evil CEV hack described in the main post. Essentially, we want to block out any way of creating new humans that could be used to override CEV, so it makes sense to start by blocking out all humans created artificially. It might also be a good idea to require the humans to have been born before a certain time, say 2005, so no humans created after 2005 can affect CEV (at least in the first round).
Turkey basters are probably not a threat. However, there’s an advantage to being overly conservative here. The very small number of people created or modified through some sort of artificial means for non-CEV-hacking reasons can be added in after subsequent rounds of CEV. But if the first round includes ten trillion hacked humans by mistake, it will be too late to remove them because they’ll outvote everyone else.
Requiring that people have been incubated in a human womb seems like enough of a bottleneck, though even that’s politically problematic if there are artificial wombs or tech for incubation in non-humans.
However, I’m more concerned that uncaring inhuman forces already have a vote.
You may also be interested in this article:
Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?
You’re probably right. It probably is. But we lose nothing by being more conservative, because the first round of CEV will add in all the turkey baster babies.