The point about genetic engineering isn’t anything to do with not having kids. It’s about not propagating your own genome.
Kinda like uploading, we would keep “having kids” in the human sense, but not in the sense used by evolution for the last few billion years. It’s easy to slip between these by anthropomorphizing evolution (choosing “sensible” goals for it, conforming to human sensibilities), but worth resisting. In the analogy to AI, we wouldn’t be satisfied if it reinterpreted everything we tried to teach it about morality in the way we’re “reinterpreting evolution” even today.
So like a couple would decide to have kids and they would just pick a set of genes entirely unrelated to theirs to maximise whatever characteristics they valued?
If I understand it correctly, I still feel like most people would choose not to do this, a lot of people seem against even minor genetic engineering, let alone something as major as that. I do understand a lot of the reticence towards genetic engineering has other sources besides “this wouldn’t feel like my child, it’s hard to make any clear predictions.
Yeah, anthropomorphising evolution is pretty iffy, I guess in this situation I’m imagining we’re evolution and we create a human race with the goal of replicating a bunch of DNA sequences that starts doing all sorts of wild things we didn’t predict. I still think I’d be more pleased with the outcome here than what a lot of current thinking on AGIs predicts we will be once we create a capable enough AGI. We do propagate our little DNA sequences, not as ambitiously as we perhaps could, but also responsibly enough that we aren’t destroying absolutely everything in our path. I don’t see this as a whole-sale reinterpreting of what evolution “wants”, more of a not very zealous approach to achieving it.
A bit like if I made a very capable paper clip making AI and it made only a few million paperclips and then got distracted watching YouTube and only making some paperclips every now and then. Not ideal, but better than annihilation.
The point about genetic engineering isn’t anything to do with not having kids. It’s about not propagating your own genome.
Kinda like uploading, we would keep “having kids” in the human sense, but not in the sense used by evolution for the last few billion years. It’s easy to slip between these by anthropomorphizing evolution (choosing “sensible” goals for it, conforming to human sensibilities), but worth resisting. In the analogy to AI, we wouldn’t be satisfied if it reinterpreted everything we tried to teach it about morality in the way we’re “reinterpreting evolution” even today.
So like a couple would decide to have kids and they would just pick a set of genes entirely unrelated to theirs to maximise whatever characteristics they valued?
If I understand it correctly, I still feel like most people would choose not to do this, a lot of people seem against even minor genetic engineering, let alone something as major as that. I do understand a lot of the reticence towards genetic engineering has other sources besides “this wouldn’t feel like my child, it’s hard to make any clear predictions.
Yeah, anthropomorphising evolution is pretty iffy, I guess in this situation I’m imagining we’re evolution and we create a human race with the goal of replicating a bunch of DNA sequences that starts doing all sorts of wild things we didn’t predict. I still think I’d be more pleased with the outcome here than what a lot of current thinking on AGIs predicts we will be once we create a capable enough AGI. We do propagate our little DNA sequences, not as ambitiously as we perhaps could, but also responsibly enough that we aren’t destroying absolutely everything in our path. I don’t see this as a whole-sale reinterpreting of what evolution “wants”, more of a not very zealous approach to achieving it.
A bit like if I made a very capable paper clip making AI and it made only a few million paperclips and then got distracted watching YouTube and only making some paperclips every now and then. Not ideal, but better than annihilation.