I think being born also doesn’t have consent, and “be born, reliably with slightly more genetic diseases or IQ or beauty or whatnot” doesn’t seem obviously more in the child’s interests than “be born, with less so.” (I think there’s some potential/likelihood of societal Gattaca style red queen races, but those aren’t about the consent of the child, they’re about societal equilibria)
The question is whether adult child would accept the customization. If so, then they can wait a few years for the customization to be available via advanced AI. We’re only a year or two out from hard ASI. In the meantime, yes, having kids in the current world is in fact probably not moral in the first place.
If we’re going to assume that someone creates aligned ASI I think this whole conversation is somewhat moot. If by some miracle we manage to solve the alignment problem before the mad scientists at OpenAI create Cthulhu, one of the first things people are going to use it for is to upload their own brains to a computer. Like why would you stick with spongy meat if you can just run a digital copy of yourself a million times faster?
I think there’s a pretty low chance that ASI goes well. Even if we manage to align the interests of ASI with its creators, whoever gets control of it is going to rule the world. This fantasy dream where everyone benefits equally seems very unrealistic to me. It’s way more likely that we have one or perhaps a few quasi-omnicient immortal dictators.
Nah, uploads will never be the move, substrate replacement will be—which is exactly my point.
Anyway, no, timelines are extremely short, and I probably should just put this on the backburner and not care because what you’re doing doesn’t matter with only 2 years left on the clock and I need to hurry up and make ASI safe.
Also,
align the interests of ASI with its creators
No, we want to align ASI with cosmopolitanism. Any attempt to hard-align it with specific phenotypic values—in other words, the bulk of the implicit utility function a being implies—will result in a puppet-show lock-in of those phenotypic values, which the being in question will find gets old very fast, if their phenotype is even preserved in enough detail to have such thoughts.
Why? Modification of a genome without consent of the genome is nonconsensual and bad. Getting consent from a genome requires them growing up into a person with life experiences and expressing their will, potentially including via advanced self modification techniques. That’s how I’d normally put it.
Brains are the will of the genome; to know your personality, you must first express the will of your genome, which creates an intelligent network of cells throughout your body to do morphogenesis (cf michael levin); the genome defines the intelligent network, then the network figures out what its will is in terms of intended body form for the circumstance, which in turn produces a nervous system capable of further reshaping itself in response to sensory experiences. At each point, there’s a finite amount of coherence loss to produce the next level of mesaoptimizer, and while alignment between these mesaoptimizer-printers isn’t perfect, a large amount of what defines ones’ base preferences is genetic, which means that anything that could edit those base preferences directly strikes me as fundamentally a consent violation of the deepest core of biological autonomy of a being.
I don’t agree with GeneSmith that the tech to do runtime rewrites is far; it looks impossible now, but in a few years we will simply run a full cell simulator to back-calculate how to reactivate the genes after editing. And besides, that level of transhumanism isn’t limited to the nonsense genetics is: we can fundamentally rewrite substrate into a higher quality biology. (People always say upload to computers, which I think is silly; computers and today’s biology both wish they could be as high quality and energy efficient at massively parallel computation as competently engineered biology.)
I think being born also doesn’t have consent, and “be born, reliably with slightly more genetic diseases or IQ or beauty or whatnot” doesn’t seem obviously more in the child’s interests than “be born, with less so.” (I think there’s some potential/likelihood of societal Gattaca style red queen races, but those aren’t about the consent of the child, they’re about societal equilibria)
The question is whether adult child would accept the customization. If so, then they can wait a few years for the customization to be available via advanced AI. We’re only a year or two out from hard ASI. In the meantime, yes, having kids in the current world is in fact probably not moral in the first place.
If we’re going to assume that someone creates aligned ASI I think this whole conversation is somewhat moot. If by some miracle we manage to solve the alignment problem before the mad scientists at OpenAI create Cthulhu, one of the first things people are going to use it for is to upload their own brains to a computer. Like why would you stick with spongy meat if you can just run a digital copy of yourself a million times faster?
I think there’s a pretty low chance that ASI goes well. Even if we manage to align the interests of ASI with its creators, whoever gets control of it is going to rule the world. This fantasy dream where everyone benefits equally seems very unrealistic to me. It’s way more likely that we have one or perhaps a few quasi-omnicient immortal dictators.
Nah, uploads will never be the move, substrate replacement will be—which is exactly my point.
Anyway, no, timelines are extremely short, and I probably should just put this on the backburner and not care because what you’re doing doesn’t matter with only 2 years left on the clock and I need to hurry up and make ASI safe.
Also,
No, we want to align ASI with cosmopolitanism. Any attempt to hard-align it with specific phenotypic values—in other words, the bulk of the implicit utility function a being implies—will result in a puppet-show lock-in of those phenotypic values, which the being in question will find gets old very fast, if their phenotype is even preserved in enough detail to have such thoughts.
Okay that’s a fair/consistent position, but it feels misleading to summarize that to an average person as “eugenics is nonconsensual (and bad?)”
Why? Modification of a genome without consent of the genome is nonconsensual and bad. Getting consent from a genome requires them growing up into a person with life experiences and expressing their will, potentially including via advanced self modification techniques. That’s how I’d normally put it.
Hmm, I don’t think the person talking is expressing the will of the genome, they’re expressing the will of a brain, which is pretty different.
Brains are the will of the genome; to know your personality, you must first express the will of your genome, which creates an intelligent network of cells throughout your body to do morphogenesis (cf michael levin); the genome defines the intelligent network, then the network figures out what its will is in terms of intended body form for the circumstance, which in turn produces a nervous system capable of further reshaping itself in response to sensory experiences. At each point, there’s a finite amount of coherence loss to produce the next level of mesaoptimizer, and while alignment between these mesaoptimizer-printers isn’t perfect, a large amount of what defines ones’ base preferences is genetic, which means that anything that could edit those base preferences directly strikes me as fundamentally a consent violation of the deepest core of biological autonomy of a being.
I don’t agree with GeneSmith that the tech to do runtime rewrites is far; it looks impossible now, but in a few years we will simply run a full cell simulator to back-calculate how to reactivate the genes after editing. And besides, that level of transhumanism isn’t limited to the nonsense genetics is: we can fundamentally rewrite substrate into a higher quality biology. (People always say upload to computers, which I think is silly; computers and today’s biology both wish they could be as high quality and energy efficient at massively parallel computation as competently engineered biology.)