Personally, I’m desperately hoping for a near-term Gattaca solution, by which ordinary or defective parents can, by genetic engineering, cheaply optimize their children’s tendencies towards all good things, at least as determined by genotype, including ethical behavior and competence, in one generation. Screw this grossly inefficient and natural selection nonsense.
I know the movie presented this as a dystopia, in which the elite were apparently chosen mostly to be tall and good-looking. Ethan Hawke’s character, born naturally, was short and was supposedly ugly. Only in the movies, Ethan. But he had gumption and grit and character, which (in the movie) had no genetic component, enabling him to beat out all his supposed superiors. I call shenanigans on that philosophy. I suspect that gumption and grit and character do have a genetic component, which I would wish my own descendants to have.
I am also hoping that all parents in the future have the ability to make intentional genetic improvements to their children, and I also agree with you that this would not necessarily result in some horrible dystopia. It might actually result in more diversity because you wouldn’t have to wait for a mutation in order to add something new. I wonder if anyone has considered that. I doubt that this would solve all the problems in one generation. Some people would be against genetic enhancement and we’d have to wait for their children to grow up and decide for themselves whether to enhance themselves or their offspring. Some sociopaths would probably see sociopath genes as beneficial and refuse to remove them from their offspring… which means we may have to wait multiple generations before those genes would disappear (or they may never completely vanish). We also have to consider that we’d be introducing this change into a population with x number of irresponsible people who may do things like give the child a certain eye color but fail to consider things like morality or intelligence. Then we will also have the opposite problem—some people will be responsible enough to want to change the child’s intelligence, but may lack the wisdom to endow the child with an appropriate intelligence level. Jacking the kid’s IQ up to 300 or would result in something along the lines of:
The parents become horrified when they realize that the child has surpassed them at age three. As the child begins providing them adult level guidance on how to live and observing that their suggestions are actually better than their parents could come up with, the child has a mental breakdown and identity crisis—because they are no longer a child but are stuck in a toddler’s body, and because they no longer have a relationship with anyone that can realistically be considered to play the role of a parent.
If the parents are really unwise they’ll continue to treat that person as a toddler, discourage them from doing independent thinking, and stifle all of their adult-like qualities until they’re over 18 - because what they really wanted was to raise a baby, not a super-intelligent adult-like entity in a tiny body.
There must be many other enhancements that could backfire as well. An immoral parent trying to raise a moral child may also cause mutual horror and psychological issues (ex: the child turns in the parents for a crime and becomes an orphan).
I don’t think it would be quite as efficient and clean as you’re imagining, but I think the problem we’d run into (assuming everyone has access) would not be that we’d suddenly have too much conformity or that the elites would overpower everyone… but that people would do really stupid things due to not understanding the children they created and not having any clue what they were getting themselves into before hand. It could take multiple generations before we’d wake up and go “Ohhh! It needs to be illegal for parents to increase their child’s IQ to three times their own!”
I agree with the spirit of “Screw this grossly inefficient and natural selection nonsense.” but it’s possible that even if genetic engineering can be made accessible to everyone, that people will simply refuse to legalize it for religious reasons or due to paranoia or that they’ll have other irrational reasons… and it’s possible that if it were legal and widely accessible, that humanity will do really unwise things with it and create big problems (especially if traits like responsibility are being lost). It’s also possible that we simply won’t perfect the technology anytime soon. It is pretty complicated to combine psychological traits in a functional way… give one kid LLI and they become a genius… do it with another kid and they become a schizophrenic. The scientists know it’s complicated—but who will they test it on? It’s not ethical to test it on humans, but testing psychological trait engineering on mice wouldn’t do… That’s a real obstacle.
So there are many reasons I’m still interested in thinking about less efficient methods.
By the way, evolution would still work in a world of genetical engineering. If someone modified their children to have a desire to have as many children as possible (well, assuming that such genes exist), that modification would spread like a wildfire. Or imagine a religious faith that requires you to modify your child for maximum religiousness; including a rule that it is ok (or even encouraged) to marry a person from a different faith as long as they agree that all your children will have this faith and this modification.
The point is, some modifications may have the potential to spread exponentially. So it’s not just one pair of parents making the life of their child suboptimal, but a pair of parents possibly starting a new global problem. (Actually, you don’t even need a pair of parents; one women with donated sperm is enough.)
Personally, I’m desperately hoping for a near-term Gattaca solution, by which ordinary or defective parents can, by genetic engineering, cheaply optimize their children’s tendencies towards all good things, at least as determined by genotype, including ethical behavior and competence, in one generation. Screw this grossly inefficient and natural selection nonsense.
I know the movie presented this as a dystopia, in which the elite were apparently chosen mostly to be tall and good-looking. Ethan Hawke’s character, born naturally, was short and was supposedly ugly. Only in the movies, Ethan. But he had gumption and grit and character, which (in the movie) had no genetic component, enabling him to beat out all his supposed superiors. I call shenanigans on that philosophy. I suspect that gumption and grit and character do have a genetic component, which I would wish my own descendants to have.
I am also hoping that all parents in the future have the ability to make intentional genetic improvements to their children, and I also agree with you that this would not necessarily result in some horrible dystopia. It might actually result in more diversity because you wouldn’t have to wait for a mutation in order to add something new. I wonder if anyone has considered that. I doubt that this would solve all the problems in one generation. Some people would be against genetic enhancement and we’d have to wait for their children to grow up and decide for themselves whether to enhance themselves or their offspring. Some sociopaths would probably see sociopath genes as beneficial and refuse to remove them from their offspring… which means we may have to wait multiple generations before those genes would disappear (or they may never completely vanish). We also have to consider that we’d be introducing this change into a population with x number of irresponsible people who may do things like give the child a certain eye color but fail to consider things like morality or intelligence. Then we will also have the opposite problem—some people will be responsible enough to want to change the child’s intelligence, but may lack the wisdom to endow the child with an appropriate intelligence level. Jacking the kid’s IQ up to 300 or would result in something along the lines of:
The parents become horrified when they realize that the child has surpassed them at age three. As the child begins providing them adult level guidance on how to live and observing that their suggestions are actually better than their parents could come up with, the child has a mental breakdown and identity crisis—because they are no longer a child but are stuck in a toddler’s body, and because they no longer have a relationship with anyone that can realistically be considered to play the role of a parent.
If the parents are really unwise they’ll continue to treat that person as a toddler, discourage them from doing independent thinking, and stifle all of their adult-like qualities until they’re over 18 - because what they really wanted was to raise a baby, not a super-intelligent adult-like entity in a tiny body.
There must be many other enhancements that could backfire as well. An immoral parent trying to raise a moral child may also cause mutual horror and psychological issues (ex: the child turns in the parents for a crime and becomes an orphan).
I don’t think it would be quite as efficient and clean as you’re imagining, but I think the problem we’d run into (assuming everyone has access) would not be that we’d suddenly have too much conformity or that the elites would overpower everyone… but that people would do really stupid things due to not understanding the children they created and not having any clue what they were getting themselves into before hand. It could take multiple generations before we’d wake up and go “Ohhh! It needs to be illegal for parents to increase their child’s IQ to three times their own!”
I agree with the spirit of “Screw this grossly inefficient and natural selection nonsense.” but it’s possible that even if genetic engineering can be made accessible to everyone, that people will simply refuse to legalize it for religious reasons or due to paranoia or that they’ll have other irrational reasons… and it’s possible that if it were legal and widely accessible, that humanity will do really unwise things with it and create big problems (especially if traits like responsibility are being lost). It’s also possible that we simply won’t perfect the technology anytime soon. It is pretty complicated to combine psychological traits in a functional way… give one kid LLI and they become a genius… do it with another kid and they become a schizophrenic. The scientists know it’s complicated—but who will they test it on? It’s not ethical to test it on humans, but testing psychological trait engineering on mice wouldn’t do… That’s a real obstacle.
So there are many reasons I’m still interested in thinking about less efficient methods.
By the way, evolution would still work in a world of genetical engineering. If someone modified their children to have a desire to have as many children as possible (well, assuming that such genes exist), that modification would spread like a wildfire. Or imagine a religious faith that requires you to modify your child for maximum religiousness; including a rule that it is ok (or even encouraged) to marry a person from a different faith as long as they agree that all your children will have this faith and this modification.
The point is, some modifications may have the potential to spread exponentially. So it’s not just one pair of parents making the life of their child suboptimal, but a pair of parents possibly starting a new global problem. (Actually, you don’t even need a pair of parents; one women with donated sperm is enough.)