What if like homo deus we get separate Very Smart group of humans and one not so smart?
I agree this would most likely be either somewhat bad or quite bad, probably quite bad (depending on the details), both causally and also indicatorily.
I’ll restrict my discussion to reprogenetics, because I think that’s the main way we get smarter humans. My responses would be “this seems quite unlikely in the short run (like, a few generations)” and “this seems pretty unlikely in the longer run, at least assuming it’s in fact bad” and “there’s a lot we can do to make those outcomes less likely (and less bad)”.
Why unlikely in the short run? Some main reasons:
Uptake of reprogenetics is slow (takes clock time), gradual (proceeds by small steps), and fairly visible (science generally isn’t very secretive; and if something is being deployed at scale, that’s easy to notice, e.g. many clinics offering something or some company getting huge investments). These give everyone more room to cope in general, as discussed above, and in particular gives more time for people to notice emerging inequality and such. So humanity in general gets to learn about the tech and its meaning, institute social and governmental regulation, gain access, understand how to use it, etc.
Likewise, the strength of the technology itself will grow gradually (though I hope not too slowly). Further, even as the newest technology gets stronger, the previous medium strength tech gets more uptake. This means there’s a continuum of people using different levels of strength of the technology.
Parents will most likely have quite a range of how much they want to use reprogenetics for various things. Some will only decrease their future children’s disease risks; some will slightly increase IQ; some might want to increase IQ around as much as is available.
IQ, and even more so for other cognitive capacities and traits, is controlled…
partly by genetic effects we can make use of (currently something in the ballpark of 20% or so);
partly by genetic effects we can’t make use of (very many of which might take a long time to make use of because they have small and/or rare effects, or because they have interactions with other genes and/or the environment);
partly by non-genetic causes (unstructured environment such as randomness in fetal development, structured external environment such as culture, structured internal environment such as free self-creation / decisions about what to be or do).
Thus, we cannot control these traits, in the sense of hitting a narrow target; we can only shift them around. We cannot make the distribution of a future child’s traits be narrow. (This is a bad state of affairs in some ways, but has substantive redeeming qualities, which I’m invoking here: people couldn’t firmly separate even if they wanted to (though this may need quantification to have much force).)
Together, I suspect that the above points create, not separated blobs, but a broad continuum:
As mentioned in the post, there are ceilings to human intelligence amplification that would probably be hit fairly quickly, and probably wouldn’t be able to be bypassed quickly. (Who knows how long, but I’m imagining at least some decades—e.g. BCIs might take on that time scale or longer to impact human general intelligence—reprogenetics is the main strategy that takes advantage of evolution’s knowledge about how to make capable brains, and I’m guessing that knowledge is more than we will do in a couple decades but not insanely much in the grand scheme of things.)
What can we do? Without going into detail on how, I’ll just basically say “greatly increase equality of access through innovation and education, and research cultures to support those things”.
Okay, I think the gradual point is a good one and also that it very much helps our institutions to be able to deal with increased intelligence.
I would be curious what you think about the idea of more permanent economic rifts and also the general economics of gene editing? Might it be smart to make it a public good instead?
Maybe there’s something here about IQ being hereditary already and thus the point about a more permanent two caste society with smart and stupid people is redundant but somehow I still feel that the economics of private gene editing over long periods of time feels a bit off?
I would be curious what you think about the idea of more permanent economic rifts and also the general economics of gene editing?
As a matter of science and technology, reprogenetics should be inexpensive. I’ve analyzed this area quite a bit (though not focused specifically on eventual cost), see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html . My fairly strong guess is that it’s perfectly feasible to have strong reprogenetics that’s pretty inexpensive (on the order of $5k to $25k for a pretty strongly genomically vectored zygote). From a tech and science perspective, I think I see multiple somewhat-disjunctive ways, each of which is pretty plausibly feasible, and each of which doesn’t seem to have any inputs that can’t be made inexpensive.
(As a comparison point, IVF is expensive—something like $8k to $20k—but my guess is that this is largely because of things like regulatory restrictions (needing an MD to supervise egg retrieval, even though NPs can do it well), drug price lock-in (the drugs are easy to manufacture, so are available cheaply on gray markets), and simply economic friction/overhang (CNY is cheaper basically by deciding to be cheaper and giving away some concierge-ness). None of this solves things for IVF today; I’m just saying, it’s not expensive due to the science and tech costing $20k.)
Assuming that it can be technically inexpensive, that cuts out our work for us: make it be inexpensive, by
Both internal to the field, and pressure / support from society and gvt
Don’t patent and then sit on it or keep it proprietary; instead publish science, or patent and license, or at least provide it as a platform service
Avoiding large other costs
Sane regulation
No monopolies
Subsidies
Might it be smart to make it a public good instead?
I definitely think that
as much as possible, gvt should fund related science to be published openly; this helps drive down prices, enables more competitive last-mile industry (clinics, platforms for biological operations, etc.), and signals a societal value of caring about this and not leaving it up to raw market forces
probably gvt should provide subsidies with some kind of general voucher (however, it should be a general voucher only, not a voucher for specific genomic choices—I don’t want the gvt controlling people’s genomic choices according to some centralized criterion, as this is eugenicsy, cf. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation_contra_eugenics.html )
Is that what you mean? I don’t think we can rely on gvt and philanthropic funding to build out a widely-accessible set of clinics / other practical reprogenetics services, so if you meant nationalizing the industry, my guess is no, that would be bad to do.
I meant the basic economy way of defining public good, not necessarily the distribution mchanism, electricity and water are public goods but they aren’t necessarily determined by the government.
I’ve had the semi ironic idea of setting up a “genetic lottery” if supply was capped as it would redistribute things evenly (as long as people sign up evenly which is not true).
Anyways, cool stuff, happy that someone is on top of this!
I agree this would most likely be either somewhat bad or quite bad, probably quite bad (depending on the details), both causally and also indicatorily.
I’ll restrict my discussion to reprogenetics, because I think that’s the main way we get smarter humans. My responses would be “this seems quite unlikely in the short run (like, a few generations)” and “this seems pretty unlikely in the longer run, at least assuming it’s in fact bad” and “there’s a lot we can do to make those outcomes less likely (and less bad)”.
Why unlikely in the short run? Some main reasons:
Uptake of reprogenetics is slow (takes clock time), gradual (proceeds by small steps), and fairly visible (science generally isn’t very secretive; and if something is being deployed at scale, that’s easy to notice, e.g. many clinics offering something or some company getting huge investments). These give everyone more room to cope in general, as discussed above, and in particular gives more time for people to notice emerging inequality and such. So humanity in general gets to learn about the tech and its meaning, institute social and governmental regulation, gain access, understand how to use it, etc.
Likewise, the strength of the technology itself will grow gradually (though I hope not too slowly). Further, even as the newest technology gets stronger, the previous medium strength tech gets more uptake. This means there’s a continuum of people using different levels of strength of the technology.
Parents will most likely have quite a range of how much they want to use reprogenetics for various things. Some will only decrease their future children’s disease risks; some will slightly increase IQ; some might want to increase IQ around as much as is available.
IQ, and even more so for other cognitive capacities and traits, is controlled…
partly by genetic effects we can make use of (currently something in the ballpark of 20% or so);
partly by genetic effects we can’t make use of (very many of which might take a long time to make use of because they have small and/or rare effects, or because they have interactions with other genes and/or the environment);
partly by non-genetic causes (unstructured environment such as randomness in fetal development, structured external environment such as culture, structured internal environment such as free self-creation / decisions about what to be or do).
Thus, we cannot control these traits, in the sense of hitting a narrow target; we can only shift them around. We cannot make the distribution of a future child’s traits be narrow. (This is a bad state of affairs in some ways, but has substantive redeeming qualities, which I’m invoking here: people couldn’t firmly separate even if they wanted to (though this may need quantification to have much force).)
Together, I suspect that the above points create, not separated blobs, but a broad continuum:
As mentioned in the post, there are ceilings to human intelligence amplification that would probably be hit fairly quickly, and probably wouldn’t be able to be bypassed quickly. (Who knows how long, but I’m imagining at least some decades—e.g. BCIs might take on that time scale or longer to impact human general intelligence—reprogenetics is the main strategy that takes advantage of evolution’s knowledge about how to make capable brains, and I’m guessing that knowledge is more than we will do in a couple decades but not insanely much in the grand scheme of things.)
What can we do? Without going into detail on how, I’ll just basically say “greatly increase equality of access through innovation and education, and research cultures to support those things”.
Okay, I think the gradual point is a good one and also that it very much helps our institutions to be able to deal with increased intelligence.
I would be curious what you think about the idea of more permanent economic rifts and also the general economics of gene editing? Might it be smart to make it a public good instead?
Maybe there’s something here about IQ being hereditary already and thus the point about a more permanent two caste society with smart and stupid people is redundant but somehow I still feel that the economics of private gene editing over long periods of time feels a bit off?
As a matter of science and technology, reprogenetics should be inexpensive. I’ve analyzed this area quite a bit (though not focused specifically on eventual cost), see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html . My fairly strong guess is that it’s perfectly feasible to have strong reprogenetics that’s pretty inexpensive (on the order of $5k to $25k for a pretty strongly genomically vectored zygote). From a tech and science perspective, I think I see multiple somewhat-disjunctive ways, each of which is pretty plausibly feasible, and each of which doesn’t seem to have any inputs that can’t be made inexpensive.
(As a comparison point, IVF is expensive—something like $8k to $20k—but my guess is that this is largely because of things like regulatory restrictions (needing an MD to supervise egg retrieval, even though NPs can do it well), drug price lock-in (the drugs are easy to manufacture, so are available cheaply on gray markets), and simply economic friction/overhang (CNY is cheaper basically by deciding to be cheaper and giving away some concierge-ness). None of this solves things for IVF today; I’m just saying, it’s not expensive due to the science and tech costing $20k.)
Assuming that it can be technically inexpensive, that cuts out our work for us: make it be inexpensive, by
Making the tech inexpensive
Thinking not just about the current tech, but investing in the stronger tech (stronger → less expensive https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html#strong-gv-and-why-it-matters )
Culture of innovation
Both internal to the field, and pressure / support from society and gvt
Don’t patent and then sit on it or keep it proprietary; instead publish science, or patent and license, or at least provide it as a platform service
Avoiding large other costs
Sane regulation
No monopolies
Subsidies
I definitely think that
as much as possible, gvt should fund related science to be published openly; this helps drive down prices, enables more competitive last-mile industry (clinics, platforms for biological operations, etc.), and signals a societal value of caring about this and not leaving it up to raw market forces
probably gvt should provide subsidies with some kind of general voucher (however, it should be a general voucher only, not a voucher for specific genomic choices—I don’t want the gvt controlling people’s genomic choices according to some centralized criterion, as this is eugenicsy, cf. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation_contra_eugenics.html )
Is that what you mean? I don’t think we can rely on gvt and philanthropic funding to build out a widely-accessible set of clinics / other practical reprogenetics services, so if you meant nationalizing the industry, my guess is no, that would be bad to do.
I meant the basic economy way of defining public good, not necessarily the distribution mchanism, electricity and water are public goods but they aren’t necessarily determined by the government.
I’ve had the semi ironic idea of setting up a “genetic lottery” if supply was capped as it would redistribute things evenly (as long as people sign up evenly which is not true).
Anyways, cool stuff, happy that someone is on top of this!