Strongly agree with this one. It’s pretty clear from plant breeding and husbandry that one can push any given trait tens of standard deviations from its natural mean even just using brain-dead selective breeding techniques. Research from Shai Carmi, Steve Hsu and others has shown that most traits are relatively independent from another (meaning most alleles that affect one trait don’t affect another trait). And most genes have a linear effect: they increase or decrease some trait by an amount, and don’t require some gene-gene interaction term to model.
Together these suggest that we could likely increase positive traits in humans such as prosocial behavior, intelligence, health and others by gigantic amounts simultaneously.
This is already possible to a limited degree using IVF and polygenic predictors already available. A gain of perhaps 0.2-1 standard deviations on a variety of traits is already feasible using simple embryo selection alone.
I’ve been working on a guide for people to do this for almost a year now. It has been an incredibly involved research project, mostly because I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to quantify which IVF clinics in the US are best and how large of an advantage picking a really good one can give you.
Embryo selection to reduce disease, increase intelligence, and reduce dark tetrad traits in future generations is just such an obvious no-brainer. The expected medical savings alone are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Throw in extra earnings from a higher IQ, and reduced societal costs from less crime, greater community bonds etc and you may understand why I think genetic engineering holds such incredible promise.
Not enough time. I was researching intelligence enhancement of adults via genetically engineering delivered hy viral vectors. Then my timelines for AGI got shorter than my time estates for having a testable prototype. I switched to directly studying machine learning. That was like 7 years ago. We probably have less than 5 years left. That’s not much time for genetic engineering projects.
That’s probably true. I’m taking a gamble that only pays off in world where biological brains matter for at least another 30 years. But given the size of the potential impact and the neglected mess, I think it is a gamble worth taking.
I would be completely on-board with this if there was a method of improvement other than IVF embryo selection, since I consider human embryos to have moral value. Even if you don’t, unless you’re very sure of your position, I’d ask you to reconsider on the basis of the precautionary principle alone—i.e. if you’re wrong, then you’d be creating a huge problem.
I’d give us 50% odds of developing the technology capable of human genetic enhancement without excess embryos in the next decade. Editing looks like the most plausible candidate, though chromosome selection also looks pretty feasible.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the question of whether discarding embryos is acceptable. Maybe I’ll write a post about this at some point, but I’ll try to give a quick summary:
At the time of selection, human embryos have about 100 cells. They have no brain, no heart, and no organs. They don’t even have a nervous system. If they stopped development and never grew into humans, we would give them zero moral weight. Unless you believe that the soul enters the embryo during fertilization, the moral importance of an embryo is entirely down to its potential to develop into a human.
The potential of any given pairing of egg and sperm is almost unchanged after fertilization. A given pairing of sperm and egg will produce the same genome every time. I don’t see a clear line at fertilization regarding the potential of a particular sperm/egg coupling.
Roughly a third of regular non-IVF pregnancies end in miscarriage; usually before the mother even knows she’s pregnant. The rate of miscarriage approaches 100% towards a woman’s late 40s. If embryos are morally equivalent to babies, there is a huge ongoing preventable moral disaster going on during normal conception, to the point where one could make a case that unprotected sex between 40 and menopause is immoral.
Thanks for the response. I realize that this is a very belated reply, and that it would have done a lot more good prior to the release of your How-To-PSC essay. Nevertheless, I’ll respond to a few of your points.
For one thing, an embryo that was conceived from the gametes of two humans doesn’t “grow into a human” or “develop into a human”; it is a human. I’m not saying that this necessarily confers moral worth, but it does jog the question of which trait does, and you don’t provide a strong alternative.
In defense of the ZEF’s potentiality: before fertilization, an arbitrary pair of sperm and egg isn’t a coherent object any more than union of my left sock and the moon is a coherent object. In contrast, after fertilization, it’s the sperm and the egg that cease to be coherent objects. The egg releases chemical signals to reject additional sperm, the successful sperm’s cell membrane disintegrates, and the former contents of the gametes are bound together within one structure: the zygote.
I think that natural pregnancies are more nuanced than that, although I do agree that it involves an ongoing moral disaster to some extent. I don’t think it’s immoral for a woman to become pregnant despite the high miscarriage rate—just as I don’t believe it was immoral for a woman living 1,000 years ago to become pregnant, even though a third of her children who were born would die by the age of 5. Instead, I think that there’s an imperative on society to develop medical technology that prevents (pre)natal deaths.
Interesting viewpoint. I think your point about the morality of having children despite the high natural miscarriage rate is a good one.
My basic view is that human moral value develops throughout pregnancy (and indeed continues to develop after birth). I don’t think there’s a simple binary switch from “no value” to “value”. I’d treat it more like a gradual ramp-up beginning with brain development during pregnancy.
I’m curious how you feel about culturing of naive embryonic stem cells. It’s possible to culture cells from a very early embryo and maintain their epigenomic state. One might then perform some editing on each, then grow each into a colony of perhaps 100 cells before destructively sequencing some of the stem cells and then performing subsequent edits on the stem cells in which the edits successfully took place.
If done correctly, the process would result in an embryo with much better prospects for a healthy and happy life. One embryo goes in and one embryo goes out. But the sequencing in the interim steps would require the destruction of naive embryonic stem cells.
Would you consider such a process morally permissible?
No. You might get something that works, but it will never be as good as intervening at the gamete or embryo stage simply because half the genes you’d want to change are only active during development (ie before adulthood).
I’m I get the same effects you would need really crazily advanced biotech that could somehow edit the genes and replay the development stage of life without interfering with the current functioning of the organism. I don’t see anything like that being developed in the next 50 years without some kind of strong intelligence (whether artificial or biological in nature).
Then we have the reason why so little effort is going to genetic engineering on LW: The viable options here are way too slow, and the fast options are very weak, relative to how fast the world is changing.
Thus, it’s worth waiting so that we can reconsider our options later.
Yes, I completely understand why there is MORE interest in alignment, engineered pandemics and nuclear war. I think that is correct. But I don’t think the balance is quite right. Genetic engineering could be a meta-level solution to all those problems given enough time.
That seems like something worth working on for a larger chunk of people than those currently involved.
We don’t have enough time, and by the time the relevant amount of time has passed, ai will have blasted genetic augmentation into a new era. Existential AI alignment is necessary to do any significant amount of genetic modding.
I disagree. I could do a moderate but substantial amount of human genetic engineering right now, if I had more resources and if the police wouldn’t arrest me. AI is not required for this.
Given the responses to a similar question, I think the answer is no, that is I would expect basically no genetic editing/IVF breakthroughs to transfer to the somatic cells.
I think that’s a fine position, but doesn’t seem to be addressing’ gears’ point. (“We don’t know for sure how much time we have and this seems like a thing that’s worth working on” seems like a fine answer though)
I feel shocked that so little effort is being put into human genetic enhancement, relative to its potential. Everyone here seems focused on AI!
Strongly agree with this one. It’s pretty clear from plant breeding and husbandry that one can push any given trait tens of standard deviations from its natural mean even just using brain-dead selective breeding techniques. Research from Shai Carmi, Steve Hsu and others has shown that most traits are relatively independent from another (meaning most alleles that affect one trait don’t affect another trait). And most genes have a linear effect: they increase or decrease some trait by an amount, and don’t require some gene-gene interaction term to model.
Together these suggest that we could likely increase positive traits in humans such as prosocial behavior, intelligence, health and others by gigantic amounts simultaneously.
This is already possible to a limited degree using IVF and polygenic predictors already available. A gain of perhaps 0.2-1 standard deviations on a variety of traits is already feasible using simple embryo selection alone.
I’ve been working on a guide for people to do this for almost a year now. It has been an incredibly involved research project, mostly because I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to quantify which IVF clinics in the US are best and how large of an advantage picking a really good one can give you.
Embryo selection to reduce disease, increase intelligence, and reduce dark tetrad traits in future generations is just such an obvious no-brainer. The expected medical savings alone are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Throw in extra earnings from a higher IQ, and reduced societal costs from less crime, greater community bonds etc and you may understand why I think genetic engineering holds such incredible promise.
Not enough time. I was researching intelligence enhancement of adults via genetically engineering delivered hy viral vectors. Then my timelines for AGI got shorter than my time estates for having a testable prototype. I switched to directly studying machine learning. That was like 7 years ago. We probably have less than 5 years left. That’s not much time for genetic engineering projects.
That’s probably true. I’m taking a gamble that only pays off in world where biological brains matter for at least another 30 years. But given the size of the potential impact and the neglected mess, I think it is a gamble worth taking.
I would be completely on-board with this if there was a method of improvement other than IVF embryo selection, since I consider human embryos to have moral value. Even if you don’t, unless you’re very sure of your position, I’d ask you to reconsider on the basis of the precautionary principle alone—i.e. if you’re wrong, then you’d be creating a huge problem.
I’d give us 50% odds of developing the technology capable of human genetic enhancement without excess embryos in the next decade. Editing looks like the most plausible candidate, though chromosome selection also looks pretty feasible.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the question of whether discarding embryos is acceptable. Maybe I’ll write a post about this at some point, but I’ll try to give a quick summary:
At the time of selection, human embryos have about 100 cells. They have no brain, no heart, and no organs. They don’t even have a nervous system. If they stopped development and never grew into humans, we would give them zero moral weight. Unless you believe that the soul enters the embryo during fertilization, the moral importance of an embryo is entirely down to its potential to develop into a human.
The potential of any given pairing of egg and sperm is almost unchanged after fertilization. A given pairing of sperm and egg will produce the same genome every time. I don’t see a clear line at fertilization regarding the potential of a particular sperm/egg coupling.
Roughly a third of regular non-IVF pregnancies end in miscarriage; usually before the mother even knows she’s pregnant. The rate of miscarriage approaches 100% towards a woman’s late 40s. If embryos are morally equivalent to babies, there is a huge ongoing preventable moral disaster going on during normal conception, to the point where one could make a case that unprotected sex between 40 and menopause is immoral.
Thanks for the response. I realize that this is a very belated reply, and that it would have done a lot more good prior to the release of your How-To-PSC essay. Nevertheless, I’ll respond to a few of your points.
For one thing, an embryo that was conceived from the gametes of two humans doesn’t “grow into a human” or “develop into a human”; it is a human. I’m not saying that this necessarily confers moral worth, but it does jog the question of which trait does, and you don’t provide a strong alternative.
In defense of the ZEF’s potentiality: before fertilization, an arbitrary pair of sperm and egg isn’t a coherent object any more than union of my left sock and the moon is a coherent object. In contrast, after fertilization, it’s the sperm and the egg that cease to be coherent objects. The egg releases chemical signals to reject additional sperm, the successful sperm’s cell membrane disintegrates, and the former contents of the gametes are bound together within one structure: the zygote.
I think that natural pregnancies are more nuanced than that, although I do agree that it involves an ongoing moral disaster to some extent. I don’t think it’s immoral for a woman to become pregnant despite the high miscarriage rate—just as I don’t believe it was immoral for a woman living 1,000 years ago to become pregnant, even though a third of her children who were born would die by the age of 5. Instead, I think that there’s an imperative on society to develop medical technology that prevents (pre)natal deaths.
Interesting viewpoint. I think your point about the morality of having children despite the high natural miscarriage rate is a good one.
My basic view is that human moral value develops throughout pregnancy (and indeed continues to develop after birth). I don’t think there’s a simple binary switch from “no value” to “value”. I’d treat it more like a gradual ramp-up beginning with brain development during pregnancy.
I’m curious how you feel about culturing of naive embryonic stem cells. It’s possible to culture cells from a very early embryo and maintain their epigenomic state. One might then perform some editing on each, then grow each into a colony of perhaps 100 cells before destructively sequencing some of the stem cells and then performing subsequent edits on the stem cells in which the edits successfully took place.
If done correctly, the process would result in an embryo with much better prospects for a healthy and happy life. One embryo goes in and one embryo goes out. But the sequencing in the interim steps would require the destruction of naive embryonic stem cells.
Would you consider such a process morally permissible?
Question, can we ever get somatic gene editing that is as good or better than having to edit the gametes?
No. You might get something that works, but it will never be as good as intervening at the gamete or embryo stage simply because half the genes you’d want to change are only active during development (ie before adulthood).
I’m I get the same effects you would need really crazily advanced biotech that could somehow edit the genes and replay the development stage of life without interfering with the current functioning of the organism. I don’t see anything like that being developed in the next 50 years without some kind of strong intelligence (whether artificial or biological in nature).
Then we have the reason why so little effort is going to genetic engineering on LW: The viable options here are way too slow, and the fast options are very weak, relative to how fast the world is changing.
Thus, it’s worth waiting so that we can reconsider our options later.
Yes, I completely understand why there is MORE interest in alignment, engineered pandemics and nuclear war. I think that is correct. But I don’t think the balance is quite right. Genetic engineering could be a meta-level solution to all those problems given enough time.
That seems like something worth working on for a larger chunk of people than those currently involved.
We don’t have enough time, and by the time the relevant amount of time has passed, ai will have blasted genetic augmentation into a new era. Existential AI alignment is necessary to do any significant amount of genetic modding.
I disagree. I could do a moderate but substantial amount of human genetic engineering right now, if I had more resources and if the police wouldn’t arrest me. AI is not required for this.
Can we do genetic engineering that is immediately useful, as opposed to “at a minimum wait ~ 10 years for an infant to become Ender Wiggin?”
Given the responses to a similar question, I think the answer is no, that is I would expect basically no genetic editing/IVF breakthroughs to transfer to the somatic cells.
No, probably not. But I think it’s still a good idea that most people are ignoring.
I think that’s a fine position, but doesn’t seem to be addressing’ gears’ point. (“We don’t know for sure how much time we have and this seems like a thing that’s worth working on” seems like a fine answer though)