I think the reason that people use the same term for both is that historically, the lines between enabling, encouraging, recommending, de facto enforcing, legally enforcing and plain violently enforcing genetic changes have been rather fluid. It never started with enforcing it, but it tended to end up there.
Was there even a way to do voluntary eugenics before embryo selection? I guess maybe paying people to have more kids or fewer kids might count. But the options were pretty limited.
In your own writing, you had somebody comment, saying it should actually be a moral obligation to perform embryo selection for all who had the financial means. Your response was not “that would be a different evil thing, no”. It was “I’m not quite sure I would agree with this yet, though I can see the case being made for it.”
There is a difference between a moral obligation and a legal one. I think people have a moral obligation to donate money to cost-effective charities, but I also support their right not to do that.
The difference is understanding there ought to be a limit on how the state can be used to enforce other people to comply with your moral standards.
Also, as I already said I don’t think this technology is yet cost-effective enough to warrant such a moral obligation.
Yet that story ended in real life with kids with disabilities being gassed to death.
You seem to be implying that there is somehow a direct causal link between films arguing for a right to die and the holocaust. I don’t think that slope is as slippery as you portray it. There are plenty of people nowadays advocating for the right to die who don’t believe in killing disabled people.
And again, that’s not even what I’m arguing for. I’m merely arguing that parents should have the right to give their children better genetics so long as those changes have at least some benefit to the well-being of the child.
There are of course always going to be some traits that are on the borderline of what we might consider ethically permissible. For example, should deaf parents be allowed to purposefully have a deaf child? I lean towards yes, particularly if the child can choose to reverse the condition with some kind of implant or medical procedure later in life.
If you want a different word for this, please also state how you intent to ensure, in the long run, that the freedom not to use this tech is maintained. Not just as a theoretical legal right, but in practice. That this won’t end with us standing in a classroom, and the teacher saying, in disgust, I cannot believe this child was not deselected, so I wouldn’t have to deal with this neurodivergent mess.
To be frank, I have thought less about these kinds of issues because I am so worried about AI. In my mind, the greatest benefit of this technology is it might provide the human species with individuals capable of guiding us through the incredible technologically-induced upheavals we are likely to see over the next century. My greatest fear is that we simply are not going to have enough time for these children to grow up. Next to that, worries about discrimination in the classroom or workplace have seemed relatively minor.
Still, it deserves to be addressed. I don’t think you’re going to see the effect you’ve described without something stronger than simple embryo selection. By itself, embryo selection maxes out at about 1 standard deviation of gain on IQ. That will have a very noticeable impact, but given you’ll be selecting on other traits besides just IQ, children born with its benefits will just appear to be unusually talented. The difference won’t be big enough to mark them as like fundamentally different.
Even if you get in-vitro gametogenesis working, you’d max out at maybe 22 IQ points.
Of course the goal is to eventually get iterated CRISPR or chromosome selection or some other advanced techniques to work that would be truly transformative. But it will take quite some time for this tech to be scaled out to the point where selected children become the majority of new births. I would guess at least 40 years and possibly longer.
The only way I can see that happening is if we manage to put a global moratorium put in place on AI research and the improvement of computer hardware. But if we did manage to coordinate on such a wise proposal, I suspect it would be lifted when we figure out how to make an aligned ASI that acts in the bests interests of humans in general. It seems likely that we will solve that with a bunch of genetically enhanced geniuses around to work on the problem.
For the short window during which this might be a problem though, there are a couple of ways to deal with it:
Have different schools for kids of roughly similar abilities. This is already standard practice in many countries such as Vietnam.
Introduce universal basic income to ensure that no one ends up truly destitute due to genetic predispositions that are no fault of their own
Once embryo selection or whatever technique we’re talking about is cost-effective enough, subsidize access with government funds so that parents will never be denied access due to financial constraints. The same logic that compels us to fund public schools would also compel us to subsidize access to this tech if it is cost-effective enough; society as a whole has a strong interest in ensuring the next generation is healthy and productive.
Was there even a way to do voluntary eugenics before embryo selection? I guess maybe paying people to have more kids or fewer kids might count. But the options were pretty limited.
There is a difference between a moral obligation and a legal one. I think people have a moral obligation to donate money to cost-effective charities, but I also support their right not to do that.
The difference is understanding there ought to be a limit on how the state can be used to enforce other people to comply with your moral standards.
Also, as I already said I don’t think this technology is yet cost-effective enough to warrant such a moral obligation.
You seem to be implying that there is somehow a direct causal link between films arguing for a right to die and the holocaust. I don’t think that slope is as slippery as you portray it. There are plenty of people nowadays advocating for the right to die who don’t believe in killing disabled people.
And again, that’s not even what I’m arguing for. I’m merely arguing that parents should have the right to give their children better genetics so long as those changes have at least some benefit to the well-being of the child.
There are of course always going to be some traits that are on the borderline of what we might consider ethically permissible. For example, should deaf parents be allowed to purposefully have a deaf child? I lean towards yes, particularly if the child can choose to reverse the condition with some kind of implant or medical procedure later in life.
To be frank, I have thought less about these kinds of issues because I am so worried about AI. In my mind, the greatest benefit of this technology is it might provide the human species with individuals capable of guiding us through the incredible technologically-induced upheavals we are likely to see over the next century. My greatest fear is that we simply are not going to have enough time for these children to grow up. Next to that, worries about discrimination in the classroom or workplace have seemed relatively minor.
Still, it deserves to be addressed. I don’t think you’re going to see the effect you’ve described without something stronger than simple embryo selection. By itself, embryo selection maxes out at about 1 standard deviation of gain on IQ. That will have a very noticeable impact, but given you’ll be selecting on other traits besides just IQ, children born with its benefits will just appear to be unusually talented. The difference won’t be big enough to mark them as like fundamentally different.
Even if you get in-vitro gametogenesis working, you’d max out at maybe 22 IQ points.
Of course the goal is to eventually get iterated CRISPR or chromosome selection or some other advanced techniques to work that would be truly transformative. But it will take quite some time for this tech to be scaled out to the point where selected children become the majority of new births. I would guess at least 40 years and possibly longer.
The only way I can see that happening is if we manage to put a global moratorium put in place on AI research and the improvement of computer hardware. But if we did manage to coordinate on such a wise proposal, I suspect it would be lifted when we figure out how to make an aligned ASI that acts in the bests interests of humans in general. It seems likely that we will solve that with a bunch of genetically enhanced geniuses around to work on the problem.
For the short window during which this might be a problem though, there are a couple of ways to deal with it:
Have different schools for kids of roughly similar abilities. This is already standard practice in many countries such as Vietnam.
Introduce universal basic income to ensure that no one ends up truly destitute due to genetic predispositions that are no fault of their own
Once embryo selection or whatever technique we’re talking about is cost-effective enough, subsidize access with government funds so that parents will never be denied access due to financial constraints. The same logic that compels us to fund public schools would also compel us to subsidize access to this tech if it is cost-effective enough; society as a whole has a strong interest in ensuring the next generation is healthy and productive.