I definitely want to see more work in this direction, and agree that improving humans is a high-value goal.
But to play devil’s advocate for a second on what I see as my big ethical concern: There’s a step in the non-human selective breeding or genetic modification comparison where the experimenter watches several generations grow to maturity, evaluates whether their interventions worked in practice, and decides which experimental subjects if any get to survive or reproduce further. What’s the plan for this step in humans, since “make the right prediction every time at the embryo stage” isn’t a real option? ′
Concrete version of that question: Suppose we implement this as a scalable commercial product and find out that e.g. it causes a horrible new disease, or induces sociopathic or psychopathic criminal tendencies, that manifest at age 30, after millions of parents have used it. What happens next?
I think almost everyone misunderstands the level of knowledge we have about what genetic variants will do.
Nature has literally run a randomized control trial for genes already. Every time two siblings are created, the set of genes they inherit from each parent are scrambled and (more or less) randomly assigned to each. That’s INCREDIBLY powerful for assessing the effects of genes on life outcomes. Nature has run a literal multi-generational randomized control trial for the effect of genes on everything. We just need to collect the data.
This gives you a huge advantage over “shot-in-the-dark” type interventions where you’re testing something without any knowledge about how it performs over the long run.
Also, nature is ALREADY running a giant parallelized experiment on us every time a new child is born. Again, the genes they get from their parents are randomized. If reshuffling genetic variants around were extremely dangerous we’d see a huge death rate in the newborn population. But that is not in fact what we see. You can in fact change around some common genetic variants without very much risk.
And if you have a better idea about what those genes do (which we increasingly do), then you can do even better.
There are still going to be risks, but the biggest ones I actually worry about are about getting the epigenetics right.
But there we can just copy what nature has done. We don’t need to modify anything.
True, and this does indicate that children produced from genes found in 2 parents will not be outside the range which a hypothetical natural child of theirs could occupy. I am also hopeful that this is what matters, here.
However, there are absolutely, definitely viable combinations of genes found in a random pair of parents which, if combined in a single individual, result in high-IQ offspring predisposed to any number of physical or mental problems, some of which may not manifest until long after the child is born. In practice, any intervention of the type proposed here seems likely to create many children with specific combinations of genes which we know are individually helpful for specific metrics, but which may not often (or ever) have all co-occurred. This is true even in the cautious, conservative early generations where we stay within the scope of natural human variations. Thereafter, how do we ensure we’re not trialing someone on an entire generation at once? I don’t want us to end up in a situation where a single mistake ends up causing population-wide problems because we applied it to hundreds of millions of people before the problem manifested.
This is a good argument for not going outside the human envelope in one shot. But if you’re firmly within the realm where natural human genomes are, we have 8 billion natural experiments running around, some of which are sibling RCTs.
GeneSmith forgot to explicitly say that you can and should weight against sociopathy. Parents will be motivated to do this because if your kid is a jerk then your life will be miserable. (I do think if you select for success without selecting against sociopathy then you’ll get lots of sociopaths.)
I would bet against some weird disease manifesting, especially if you are weighting for general health.
And that makes perfect sense. I guess I’m just not sure I trust any particular service provider or research team to properly list the full set of things it’s important to weight against. Kind of feels like a lighter version of not trusting a list of explicit rules someone claims will make an AI safe.
I definitely want to see more work in this direction, and agree that improving humans is a high-value goal.
But to play devil’s advocate for a second on what I see as my big ethical concern: There’s a step in the non-human selective breeding or genetic modification comparison where the experimenter watches several generations grow to maturity, evaluates whether their interventions worked in practice, and decides which experimental subjects if any get to survive or reproduce further. What’s the plan for this step in humans, since “make the right prediction every time at the embryo stage” isn’t a real option? ′
Concrete version of that question: Suppose we implement this as a scalable commercial product and find out that e.g. it causes a horrible new disease, or induces sociopathic or psychopathic criminal tendencies, that manifest at age 30, after millions of parents have used it. What happens next?
I think almost everyone misunderstands the level of knowledge we have about what genetic variants will do.
Nature has literally run a randomized control trial for genes already. Every time two siblings are created, the set of genes they inherit from each parent are scrambled and (more or less) randomly assigned to each. That’s INCREDIBLY powerful for assessing the effects of genes on life outcomes. Nature has run a literal multi-generational randomized control trial for the effect of genes on everything. We just need to collect the data.
This gives you a huge advantage over “shot-in-the-dark” type interventions where you’re testing something without any knowledge about how it performs over the long run.
Also, nature is ALREADY running a giant parallelized experiment on us every time a new child is born. Again, the genes they get from their parents are randomized. If reshuffling genetic variants around were extremely dangerous we’d see a huge death rate in the newborn population. But that is not in fact what we see. You can in fact change around some common genetic variants without very much risk.
And if you have a better idea about what those genes do (which we increasingly do), then you can do even better.
There are still going to be risks, but the biggest ones I actually worry about are about getting the epigenetics right.
But there we can just copy what nature has done. We don’t need to modify anything.
True, and this does indicate that children produced from genes found in 2 parents will not be outside the range which a hypothetical natural child of theirs could occupy. I am also hopeful that this is what matters, here.
However, there are absolutely, definitely viable combinations of genes found in a random pair of parents which, if combined in a single individual, result in high-IQ offspring predisposed to any number of physical or mental problems, some of which may not manifest until long after the child is born. In practice, any intervention of the type proposed here seems likely to create many children with specific combinations of genes which we know are individually helpful for specific metrics, but which may not often (or ever) have all co-occurred. This is true even in the cautious, conservative early generations where we stay within the scope of natural human variations. Thereafter, how do we ensure we’re not trialing someone on an entire generation at once? I don’t want us to end up in a situation where a single mistake ends up causing population-wide problems because we applied it to hundreds of millions of people before the problem manifested.
This is a good argument for not going outside the human envelope in one shot. But if you’re firmly within the realm where natural human genomes are, we have 8 billion natural experiments running around, some of which are sibling RCTs.
GeneSmith forgot to explicitly say that you can and should weight against sociopathy. Parents will be motivated to do this because if your kid is a jerk then your life will be miserable. (I do think if you select for success without selecting against sociopathy then you’ll get lots of sociopaths.)
I would bet against some weird disease manifesting, especially if you are weighting for general health.
And that makes perfect sense. I guess I’m just not sure I trust any particular service provider or research team to properly list the full set of things it’s important to weight against. Kind of feels like a lighter version of not trusting a list of explicit rules someone claims will make an AI safe.