In other words, this technology as it is now should not be used, and we should wait for the drastically much more difficult version that allows editing genes at runtime before we deploy it at scale. In the meantime, I strongly support the coalition against doing offspring editing.
I don’t follow this argument. You’re saying we shouldn’t edit the germline or select embryos because the child has not provided consent?
If so we are prioritizing something that’s impossible to get (consent from a ball of stem cells) over the expected future wellbeing of a person.
The argument that parents need to get consent from their children before doing things that the parents believe are in the interest of the child also undermines the basic rights of parents. It is very common for adults to do things children don’t want or don’t like because they believe it is in the best interest of the child.
Undoubtedly some of those things are in fact not good for the child and are only done in the name of serving the child’s best interest when in fact they serve some needs of the adult. We have rules around what parents are allowed to do to their children that reduce some of the worst abuses of this power. But the general principle of adult control over children seems pretty important to how society functions.
If this service can’t be made free, it should be destroyed on deployment, to prevent moloch.
How many of the important technological advancements that have been made in the last 10,000 years could hold up to this standard? If every technology had to be free and universally available on launch, we would have no technology. There would not be medicine, nor manufacturing, nor clothing, nor cooked food. This is an untenable standard.
I don’t follow this argument. You’re saying we shouldn’t edit the germline or select embryos because the child has not provided consent?
Yeah. Wait until they’re grown, then do runtime modification. Stem cells define genomes, genomes plus lifetimes define people, people define consent.
How many of the important technological advancements that have been made in the last 10,000 years could hold up to this standard? If every technology had to be free and universally available on launch, we would have no technology. There would not be medicine, nor manufacturing, nor clothing, nor cooked food. This is an untenable standard.
Many more than were. If you can’t make it available to everyone, it’s questionable whether it should be shared, each tech needs to be evaluated and depending on how it affects balance of power maybe it shouldn’t be deployed; some tech spreads power, but any tech that can concentrate power should be destroyed if deployed in ways that in fact concentrate power. And in this instance, it concentrates power in the germline of people, which means that parents can make their prejudice fantasies real: the poors really are dumber, with this change. Yes, the machines that can do it should absolutely be destroyed if only available to the few.
Yeah. Wait until they’re grown, then do runtime modification. Stem cells define genomes, genomes plus lifetimes define people, people define consent.
If I thought this was actually feasible with anywhere near our current level of technology then perhaps I would agree. But it is simply impossible without god-like biotech. Half the genes that show up in intelligence GWAS (or any other trait for that matter) are only active during development, particularly during early development in the womb and early childhood. The other half affect cells that literally last a lifetime (namely neurons).
Modifying one gene that is active in one particular stem cell population can currently be done for like cancer immunotherapy, but it costs like $500k and you have to radiate the person to kill their non-modified stem cells.
God-like nanotech is about six years after general superintelligence, by my current estimate. I don’t at all agree with yud that it comes instantly, you’re correct that it’s incredibly hard, but it’s permitted by physics and the tech is coming soon. So it’s worth waiting to ensure that we never introduce genetic changes to the gene pool that are not first tested on the person proposing them. Skin in the game or no playing around with the human genome, imo. Offspring are not the parents’ right to control like that.
Maybe if it was available as a basic healthcare service or a free clinical trial, so as to ensure it could never be used to edit offspring’s personality.
The key thing I will never accept is giving parents agency over their kids’ genome. My parents (my dad, specifically) would have used it to kill me and any parents found to have done such a thing—editing a child’s personality-entangled genes—should experience appropriate retaliation from society, which I’d suggest as 12 to 24 months of jail time.
God-like nanotech is about six years after general superintelligence, by my current estimate.
This is a difference of opinion that has no practical consequences, but it’s certainly alien to my expectations. If you consider what’s already in all biological and chemical literature and databases, apply superhuman intelligence at GPT speed and volume to that, let it experiment and measure as necessary… what could it need to know, that would take six years to find out?
I’m estimating sequential experiment depth. could be wrong but I expect fast saturating returns from superintelligence that leave uncertainty about untested physical processes annoyingly high. still lower enough to allow demigod-like bioweapons that kill us immediately if we screw up alignment, but we’re discussing drastically more intense meddling with a large complex adaptive system. I think there will be slow experiments that are needed to resolve uncertainty the physics simulator can’t fully resolve even after you’ve got a cell sim, because scaling approximate cell sim up to full body sim results in a lot of accumulated uncertainty. it might take as little as 3 months, but even for a saturated asi on the entire Google datacenter network, I’d be shocked if it takes minutes or days with only targeted experiments to send to labs. there’s too much emergent behavior to map.
How is this kind of reasoning about counterfactual children never born different from the regular Christian stuff about not masturbating?
A statements like ‘my parents would have used polygenic screening to kill me’ is no more meaningful than ‘you are murdering your counterfactual children when you wear a condom’ or something like that. It seems to have more meaning because you are talking about yourself, but in the universe where ‘you’ were ‘murdered’ by polygenic screening, ‘you’ does not refer to anything.
Is tendency to wish to transition one’s gender genetic? I recall reading that the number of people self-identifying as trans has tripled in the last decade. That would suggest that the trait is probably not very heritable and would be hard to select against.
In the process of this development, these networks assign themselves a physiological form gender; intersex people get a mix of attributes at this stage, but for most people, even for most trans people, this stage almost entirely selects one profile of sexual dimorphism; typically for people with XX chromosomes, this stage selects female, and for people with XY, this stage selects male. However, it’s well known to science and can be looked up that sometimes people can be apparently entirely one body-form and have no desire or urge to transition, and yet have opposite chromosomes from their body’s layout-presentation.
This sounds like you’re talking about the SRY cascade without explicitly naming it. But that process starts at 6-8 weeks. Embryos are screened after 3-7 days of development. There’s no way to see what is happening with the SRY cascade at that stage.
Maybe there are some genes that influence the course it is likely to take? I understand your concern.
But I also think some of this tech could HELP acceptance of trans people. I suspect that many of the people who are anti-trans are at some level worried about its effects on family formation. Without freezing gametes, many trans people will not be able to have biological children after medically transitioning. Gametogenesis could give anyone the ability to have kids if they want them, regardless of their gender identity or transition status. I think that would at least do a little to quell the hate against transgender people (though I understand most of the people who get upset about transgender people are not very rational about their views).
yeah, your counterarguments aren’t entirely implausible. I might be able to be convinced out of my current viewpoint by further debate on the topic of how to ensure that this tech actually has prosocial outcomes. But at least you have a picture of why I’m quite so worried about destructive outcomes and why the name change doesn’t really weigh on it.
without explicitly naming it
I didn’t know about it, I probably had seen things downstream of that research. I’m not a biologist, my bio knowledge has a lot of jump point search flavored holes.
I certainly concede that the argument about counterfactual populations has a lot more force.
Personally I would solve this with increased support for eg. polygenic screening and other reproductive technologies and less regulation about what they can select for, and hope that people do their weird people thing and choose diversity. I worry that regulation will always result in more standardization.
And I for sure don’t think punishing people for making reproductive choices is a good move, even if those choices result in the extinction of specific populations.
even if those choices result in the extinction of specific populations.
so anyway, this is why I started out saying a mere rename doesn’t cut it, you need to actually change policy. epilogenics is still eugenics, even if it’s not mass murder. parents should not have the right to deny their offspring a chance to exist. offspring are not property.
also, I actually do agree with conservatives that loss of any genetic information is kinda sad, I just don’t think any non-selective loss has the problems I care about, and anyway people have the right to simply not have kids; what I don’t think they have the right to do is spy on their kids’ futures by reading their genome in order to decide whether to have kids. humanity is used to our genomes being randomized by parental choice, so it is part of us; humanity is not used to genomes being steered by parental choice and that’s a big enough change to warrant real conflict.
okay, sure, that might move the boundaries of the concept that I haven’t pinned down, but I have a pinned point it doesn’t move: parents shouldn’t be able to select children by personality traits in ways new to society. This is a capability we should not add to humanity; it is against transhumanism.
parents should not have the right to deny their offspring a chance to exist
but again here you are switching back from the population level to the individual level. Those offspring do not exist by default, there are no ‘offspring’ that the parents have ‘denied the right to exist’. There are only counterfactual offspring, who already don’t exist.
spy on their kids’ futures by reading their genome
this, on the other hand, may be more valid—because the parents will ‘spy on’ both actual and counterfactual childrens genomes (and select the former over the latter). But you still seem to be taking the rights of those children as significantly more important than the rights of the parents. But this (‘whose rights, parents or children’) seems like the fundamental crux that we are unlikely to shift one another on here.
Edit: and, reading through your other comments, there seems to be a question about the social impact of these technologies. This is then an impact on the rights of everyone—the parent, the child, and the rest of society. Also interesting, and I think it would be helpful to seperate out objections on the individual (parent/child) level, and on the society level, and I feel like they are getting muddled a lot here.
The key thing I will never accept is giving parents agency over their kids’ genome.
Do you oppose the existing efforts to prevent Tay-Sachs disease?
In the first 30 years of testing, from 1969 through 1998, more than 1.3 million persons were tested, and 48,864 carriers were identified. In at-risk families, among couples where both husband and wife were carriers, more than 3000 pregnancies were monitored by amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling. Out of 604 monitored pregnancies where there was a prenatal diagnosis of Tay–Sachs disease, 583 pregnancies were terminated. Of the 21 pregnancies that were not terminated, 20 of the infants went on to develop classic infantile Tay–Sachs disease, and the 21st case progressed later to adult-onset Tay–Sachs disease. In more than 2500 pregnancies, at-risk families were assured that their children would not be affected by Tay–Sachs disease.
yeah, as long as the parents only get a heal all rare genetic diseases button and there’s a chance for others to veto having those specific options available, so that if those genes determine their souls, they don’t get a chance to mess with them. I would want this constraint relaxed soon, but only for adults modifying themselves, so they’d have to live with the mod before getting to pass it on.
Parents have skin in the game when it comes to their children.
To me it seems unlikely that the nanotech necessary to do the massive somatic editing needed to replicate the effects of germline editing would not come far ahead of the tech necessary to just upload someone’s brain into a computer. And if you have that, why would you even bother with the huge limitations of biological intelligence?
I suppose it’s possible we might have some global ban on further improvements to computer intelligence, but in that case why wouldn’t you just genetically engineer people capable of solving alignment? Why hang around at the proteins & genes level of tech long enough to make massive somatic editing work?
EDIT: I have updated my views about the viability of somatic editing substantially in the last month. I will write more about this in the near future.
Parents have skin in the game when it comes to their children.
only good parents do. the ratio of evil parents is frighteningly high, ones who don’t care about their children’s future as people and just want their kids to be a copy of themselves.
why would you even bother with the huge limitations of biological intelligence?
because once you solve alignment it turns out proteins and genes are a ridiculously good base to start on, uploads are a fundamentally silly idea because computers of today suck because of not being biological enough. dna computers could be incomparably more powerful at similar wattage.
I don’t follow this argument. You’re saying we shouldn’t edit the germline or select embryos because the child has not provided consent?
If so we are prioritizing something that’s impossible to get (consent from a ball of stem cells) over the expected future wellbeing of a person.
The argument that parents need to get consent from their children before doing things that the parents believe are in the interest of the child also undermines the basic rights of parents. It is very common for adults to do things children don’t want or don’t like because they believe it is in the best interest of the child.
Undoubtedly some of those things are in fact not good for the child and are only done in the name of serving the child’s best interest when in fact they serve some needs of the adult. We have rules around what parents are allowed to do to their children that reduce some of the worst abuses of this power. But the general principle of adult control over children seems pretty important to how society functions.
How many of the important technological advancements that have been made in the last 10,000 years could hold up to this standard? If every technology had to be free and universally available on launch, we would have no technology. There would not be medicine, nor manufacturing, nor clothing, nor cooked food. This is an untenable standard.
Yeah. Wait until they’re grown, then do runtime modification. Stem cells define genomes, genomes plus lifetimes define people, people define consent.
Many more than were. If you can’t make it available to everyone, it’s questionable whether it should be shared, each tech needs to be evaluated and depending on how it affects balance of power maybe it shouldn’t be deployed; some tech spreads power, but any tech that can concentrate power should be destroyed if deployed in ways that in fact concentrate power. And in this instance, it concentrates power in the germline of people, which means that parents can make their prejudice fantasies real: the poors really are dumber, with this change. Yes, the machines that can do it should absolutely be destroyed if only available to the few.
If I thought this was actually feasible with anywhere near our current level of technology then perhaps I would agree. But it is simply impossible without god-like biotech. Half the genes that show up in intelligence GWAS (or any other trait for that matter) are only active during development, particularly during early development in the womb and early childhood. The other half affect cells that literally last a lifetime (namely neurons).
Modifying one gene that is active in one particular stem cell population can currently be done for like cancer immunotherapy, but it costs like $500k and you have to radiate the person to kill their non-modified stem cells.
God-like nanotech is about six years after general superintelligence, by my current estimate. I don’t at all agree with yud that it comes instantly, you’re correct that it’s incredibly hard, but it’s permitted by physics and the tech is coming soon. So it’s worth waiting to ensure that we never introduce genetic changes to the gene pool that are not first tested on the person proposing them. Skin in the game or no playing around with the human genome, imo. Offspring are not the parents’ right to control like that.
Maybe if it was available as a basic healthcare service or a free clinical trial, so as to ensure it could never be used to edit offspring’s personality.
The key thing I will never accept is giving parents agency over their kids’ genome. My parents (my dad, specifically) would have used it to kill me and any parents found to have done such a thing—editing a child’s personality-entangled genes—should experience appropriate retaliation from society, which I’d suggest as 12 to 24 months of jail time.
This is a difference of opinion that has no practical consequences, but it’s certainly alien to my expectations. If you consider what’s already in all biological and chemical literature and databases, apply superhuman intelligence at GPT speed and volume to that, let it experiment and measure as necessary… what could it need to know, that would take six years to find out?
I’m estimating sequential experiment depth. could be wrong but I expect fast saturating returns from superintelligence that leave uncertainty about untested physical processes annoyingly high. still lower enough to allow demigod-like bioweapons that kill us immediately if we screw up alignment, but we’re discussing drastically more intense meddling with a large complex adaptive system. I think there will be slow experiments that are needed to resolve uncertainty the physics simulator can’t fully resolve even after you’ve got a cell sim, because scaling approximate cell sim up to full body sim results in a lot of accumulated uncertainty. it might take as little as 3 months, but even for a saturated asi on the entire Google datacenter network, I’d be shocked if it takes minutes or days with only targeted experiments to send to labs. there’s too much emergent behavior to map.
How is this kind of reasoning about counterfactual children never born different from the regular Christian stuff about not masturbating?
A statements like ‘my parents would have used polygenic screening to kill me’ is no more meaningful than ‘you are murdering your counterfactual children when you wear a condom’ or something like that. It seems to have more meaning because you are talking about yourself, but in the universe where ‘you’ were ‘murdered’ by polygenic screening, ‘you’ does not refer to anything.
because that doesn’t let them select against trans people.
Is tendency to wish to transition one’s gender genetic? I recall reading that the number of people self-identifying as trans has tripled in the last decade. That would suggest that the trait is probably not very heritable and would be hard to select against.
I currently believe so, yes. possibly it’s during early gestation.
This sounds like you’re talking about the SRY cascade without explicitly naming it. But that process starts at 6-8 weeks. Embryos are screened after 3-7 days of development. There’s no way to see what is happening with the SRY cascade at that stage.
Maybe there are some genes that influence the course it is likely to take? I understand your concern.
But I also think some of this tech could HELP acceptance of trans people. I suspect that many of the people who are anti-trans are at some level worried about its effects on family formation. Without freezing gametes, many trans people will not be able to have biological children after medically transitioning. Gametogenesis could give anyone the ability to have kids if they want them, regardless of their gender identity or transition status. I think that would at least do a little to quell the hate against transgender people (though I understand most of the people who get upset about transgender people are not very rational about their views).
yeah, your counterarguments aren’t entirely implausible. I might be able to be convinced out of my current viewpoint by further debate on the topic of how to ensure that this tech actually has prosocial outcomes. But at least you have a picture of why I’m quite so worried about destructive outcomes and why the name change doesn’t really weigh on it.
I didn’t know about it, I probably had seen things downstream of that research. I’m not a biologist, my bio knowledge has a lot of jump point search flavored holes.
Ah I see.
I certainly concede that the argument about counterfactual populations has a lot more force.
Personally I would solve this with increased support for eg. polygenic screening and other reproductive technologies and less regulation about what they can select for, and hope that people do their weird people thing and choose diversity. I worry that regulation will always result in more standardization.
And I for sure don’t think punishing people for making reproductive choices is a good move, even if those choices result in the extinction of specific populations.
so anyway, this is why I started out saying a mere rename doesn’t cut it, you need to actually change policy. epilogenics is still eugenics, even if it’s not mass murder. parents should not have the right to deny their offspring a chance to exist. offspring are not property.
also, I actually do agree with conservatives that loss of any genetic information is kinda sad, I just don’t think any non-selective loss has the problems I care about, and anyway people have the right to simply not have kids; what I don’t think they have the right to do is spy on their kids’ futures by reading their genome in order to decide whether to have kids. humanity is used to our genomes being randomized by parental choice, so it is part of us; humanity is not used to genomes being steered by parental choice and that’s a big enough change to warrant real conflict.
Choosing a sexual partner IS an example of genomes being steered by parental choice.
okay, sure, that might move the boundaries of the concept that I haven’t pinned down, but I have a pinned point it doesn’t move: parents shouldn’t be able to select children by personality traits in ways new to society. This is a capability we should not add to humanity; it is against transhumanism.
Parents already do, they can abort children with known abnormalities in the womb.
but again here you are switching back from the population level to the individual level. Those offspring do not exist by default, there are no ‘offspring’ that the parents have ‘denied the right to exist’. There are only counterfactual offspring, who already don’t exist.
this, on the other hand, may be more valid—because the parents will ‘spy on’ both actual and counterfactual childrens genomes (and select the former over the latter). But you still seem to be taking the rights of those children as significantly more important than the rights of the parents. But this (‘whose rights, parents or children’) seems like the fundamental crux that we are unlikely to shift one another on here.
Edit: and, reading through your other comments, there seems to be a question about the social impact of these technologies. This is then an impact on the rights of everyone—the parent, the child, and the rest of society. Also interesting, and I think it would be helpful to seperate out objections on the individual (parent/child) level, and on the society level, and I feel like they are getting muddled a lot here.
Do you oppose the existing efforts to prevent Tay-Sachs disease?
I’m a fan of this.
yeah, as long as the parents only get a heal all rare genetic diseases button and there’s a chance for others to veto having those specific options available, so that if those genes determine their souls, they don’t get a chance to mess with them. I would want this constraint relaxed soon, but only for adults modifying themselves, so they’d have to live with the mod before getting to pass it on.
Parents have skin in the game when it comes to their children.
To me it seems unlikely that the nanotech necessary to do the massive somatic editing needed to replicate the effects of germline editing would not come far ahead of the tech necessary to just upload someone’s brain into a computer. And if you have that, why would you even bother with the huge limitations of biological intelligence?
I suppose it’s possible we might have some global ban on further improvements to computer intelligence, but in that case why wouldn’t you just genetically engineer people capable of solving alignment? Why hang around at the proteins & genes level of tech long enough to make massive somatic editing work?
EDIT: I have updated my views about the viability of somatic editing substantially in the last month. I will write more about this in the near future.
only good parents do. the ratio of evil parents is frighteningly high, ones who don’t care about their children’s future as people and just want their kids to be a copy of themselves.
because once you solve alignment it turns out proteins and genes are a ridiculously good base to start on, uploads are a fundamentally silly idea because computers of today suck because of not being biological enough. dna computers could be incomparably more powerful at similar wattage.