I really think the effect that AI safety people’s short timelines have on whether or not reprogenetics research gets done is ~0. Human intelligence enhancement is illegal, and faces a massive social stigma. We could have cloned the smartest humans starting decades ago and we haven’t (at least publicly) because governments and the regulators seem to hate that idea.
We could have been doing selective breeding to foster intelligence since we discovered evolution in the early 1800s. We haven’t done it because of stigma and lack of government interest. Short AI timelines is just irrelevant.
I think IVF wasn’t illegal before it was practiced, but the inventor was definitely persecuted and there was a ton of social stigma against it. These things develop. I’m more interested in
Is reprogenetics actually good? Or more importantly, how would we do it in a beneficial way?
How should society process the idea of reprogenetics?
We could have cloned the smartest humans starting decades ago and we haven’t (at least publicly) because governments and the regulators seem to hate that idea.
There’s a very good reason to not clone humans, which is that you stand a quite high risk of producing sick and/or disabled babies due to the significant deviation of an SCNT embryo from the natural epigenetic state of an embryo. This is how pet cloning (e.g. ViaGen) works; especially in the earlier days of pet cloning, the process would look something like:
make hundreds of embryos via SCNT
many don’t grow
try to implant hundreds into dozens of surrogates
most don’t implant
some miscarry
many are born with terrible issues (birth defects / illnesses / dying shortly after birth)
maybe one or a few are in good shape
There’s good reason to not allow human cloning. I don’t think it was motivated by wanting to not have smart people be cloned, though I haven’t checked the original reasoning for these laws, it’s not totally implausible that this would appear there.
Short AI timelines is just irrelevant.
Lots of different people have lots of different reasons for not wanting to work on reprogenetics or not thinking it’s a good thing to do. I’ve talked to lots (tens) of people who brought up short AGI timelines as the or a main reason they didn’t think reprogenetics would help.
I really think the effect that AI safety people’s short timelines have on whether or not reprogenetics research gets done is ~0. Human intelligence enhancement is illegal, and faces a massive social stigma. We could have cloned the smartest humans starting decades ago and we haven’t (at least publicly) because governments and the regulators seem to hate that idea.
We could have been doing selective breeding to foster intelligence since we discovered evolution in the early 1800s. We haven’t done it because of stigma and lack of government interest. Short AI timelines is just irrelevant.
I think IVF wasn’t illegal before it was practiced, but the inventor was definitely persecuted and there was a ton of social stigma against it. These things develop. I’m more interested in
Is reprogenetics actually good? Or more importantly, how would we do it in a beneficial way?
How should society process the idea of reprogenetics?
There’s a very good reason to not clone humans, which is that you stand a quite high risk of producing sick and/or disabled babies due to the significant deviation of an SCNT embryo from the natural epigenetic state of an embryo. This is how pet cloning (e.g. ViaGen) works; especially in the earlier days of pet cloning, the process would look something like:
make hundreds of embryos via SCNT
many don’t grow
try to implant hundreds into dozens of surrogates
most don’t implant
some miscarry
many are born with terrible issues (birth defects / illnesses / dying shortly after birth)
maybe one or a few are in good shape
There’s good reason to not allow human cloning. I don’t think it was motivated by wanting to not have smart people be cloned, though I haven’t checked the original reasoning for these laws, it’s not totally implausible that this would appear there.
Lots of different people have lots of different reasons for not wanting to work on reprogenetics or not thinking it’s a good thing to do. I’ve talked to lots (tens) of people who brought up short AGI timelines as the or a main reason they didn’t think reprogenetics would help.
I think this is basically just false in the context of the post, unless you’re talking about something mostly unrelated.