If genetic editing technology is first used by the wealthy, it may further exacerbate social inequality. This technology could be used to create a “super elite,” thereby further solidifying social stratification. The scenario of a “superbaby oligarchy” mentioned in the article is a worrying potential future.
I agree this is a worry. Apart from this stuff just not mattering because AI takes over first, dramatic acceleration of inequality is my biggest worry.
This tech almost certainly WILL accelerate inequality at the start. But in the long run I think there’s no reason we can’t make gene editing available for almost everyone.
Editing reagents are cheap. We’re working with at most a few microliters of editing agents (more realistically a few nanoliters).
It costs a lot of money to collect the data and put it into biobanks, but once that is done you’ve got the data forever.
And at SCALE the cost of absolutely everything comes down.
I expect the main cost to be regulatory rather than technical, this seems to be a trend across various medicine. These costs might scale with the richest peoples ability to pay.
examples-ish; - Needing expensive studies to get FDA (or other regulatory framework) approval, (and thus needing to sell at a premium to make up the loss). - Regulations which make market entry expensive (and favor the market leader by requiring bio-equivalence studies) which promote monopolies. - Need for expensive (time, money & training-capacity) general certifications for people to be allowed to administer narrow treatments.
I don’t have any domain-knowledge or analysis to illustrate my point, but I am curious to what extent you’ve (or someone else working on accelerating this technology) have thought about this.
(metanote; I’m not meant to be discouraging of your work direction. to me it seems that both work on the tech itself, thinking about how to encourage favorable regulation and public opinion, as well as thinking about cultural downstream effects of the technology, are all extremely neglected.)
If genetic editing technology is first used by the wealthy, it may further exacerbate social inequality. This technology could be used to create a “super elite,” thereby further solidifying social stratification. The scenario of a “superbaby oligarchy” mentioned in the article is a worrying potential future.
I agree this is a worry. Apart from this stuff just not mattering because AI takes over first, dramatic acceleration of inequality is my biggest worry.
This tech almost certainly WILL accelerate inequality at the start. But in the long run I think there’s no reason we can’t make gene editing available for almost everyone.
Editing reagents are cheap. We’re working with at most a few microliters of editing agents (more realistically a few nanoliters).
It costs a lot of money to collect the data and put it into biobanks, but once that is done you’ve got the data forever.
And at SCALE the cost of absolutely everything comes down.
I expect the main cost to be regulatory rather than technical, this seems to be a trend across various medicine. These costs might scale with the richest peoples ability to pay.
examples-ish;
- Needing expensive studies to get FDA (or other regulatory framework) approval, (and thus needing to sell at a premium to make up the loss).
- Regulations which make market entry expensive (and favor the market leader by requiring bio-equivalence studies) which promote monopolies.
- Need for expensive (time, money & training-capacity) general certifications for people to be allowed to administer narrow treatments.
I don’t have any domain-knowledge or analysis to illustrate my point, but I am curious to what extent you’ve (or someone else working on accelerating this technology) have thought about this.
(metanote; I’m not meant to be discouraging of your work direction. to me it seems that both work on the tech itself, thinking about how to encourage favorable regulation and public opinion, as well as thinking about cultural downstream effects of the technology, are all extremely neglected.)