Yeah I’m not, like, trying to sneak this in as a law or something. It’s a proposed policy principle, i.e. a proposed piece of culture.
My main motive here is just to figure out what a good world with germline engineering could/would look like, and a little bit to start promoting that vision as something to care about and work towards. I agree that practical technology will push the issue, but I think it’s good to think about how to make the world with this technology good, rather than just deferring that. Besides the first-order thing where you’re just supposed to try to make technology end up going well, it’s also good to think about the question for cooperative reasons. For one thing, pushing technology ahead without thinking about whether or how it will turn out well is reckless / defecty, and separately it looks reckless / defecty. That would justify people pushing against accelerating the technology, and would give people reason to feel skittish about the area (because it contains people being reckless / defecty). For another thing, having a vision of a good world seems like it ought to be motivating to scientists and technologists.
I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this myself. But one suggestion I would recommend:
For any idea you have, also imagine 20 other neighbouring ideas, ideas which are superficially similar but ultimately not the same.
The reason I’m suggesting this exercise is that ideas keep mutating. If you try to popularise any set of ideas, people are going to come up with every possible modification and interpretation of them. And eventually some of those are going to become more popular and others less popular.
For example with “no removing a core aspect of humanity” principle, imagine if someone who values fairness and equality highly considers this value a core aspect of humanity and then thinks through its implications. Or let’s say with “parents have a strong right to propagate their own genes”, a hardcore libertarian takes this very seriously and wants to figure out edge case of exactly how many “bad” genes are they allowed to transmit to their child before they run afoul of “aimed at giving their child a life of wellbeing” principle.
You can come up with a huge number of such permutations.
Yeah I’m not, like, trying to sneak this in as a law or something. It’s a proposed policy principle, i.e. a proposed piece of culture.
My main motive here is just to figure out what a good world with germline engineering could/would look like, and a little bit to start promoting that vision as something to care about and work towards. I agree that practical technology will push the issue, but I think it’s good to think about how to make the world with this technology good, rather than just deferring that. Besides the first-order thing where you’re just supposed to try to make technology end up going well, it’s also good to think about the question for cooperative reasons. For one thing, pushing technology ahead without thinking about whether or how it will turn out well is reckless / defecty, and separately it looks reckless / defecty. That would justify people pushing against accelerating the technology, and would give people reason to feel skittish about the area (because it contains people being reckless / defecty). For another thing, having a vision of a good world seems like it ought to be motivating to scientists and technologists.
Got it!
I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this myself. But one suggestion I would recommend:
For any idea you have, also imagine 20 other neighbouring ideas, ideas which are superficially similar but ultimately not the same.
The reason I’m suggesting this exercise is that ideas keep mutating. If you try to popularise any set of ideas, people are going to come up with every possible modification and interpretation of them. And eventually some of those are going to become more popular and others less popular.
For example with “no removing a core aspect of humanity” principle, imagine if someone who values fairness and equality highly considers this value a core aspect of humanity and then thinks through its implications. Or let’s say with “parents have a strong right to propagate their own genes”, a hardcore libertarian takes this very seriously and wants to figure out edge case of exactly how many “bad” genes are they allowed to transmit to their child before they run afoul of “aimed at giving their child a life of wellbeing” principle.
You can come up with a huge number of such permutations.