This is a thoughtful post, and I appreciate it. I don’t think I disagree with it from a liberty perspective, and agree there are potential huge benefits for humanity here.
However, my honest first reaction is “this reasoning will be used to justify a world in which citizens of rich countries have substantially superior children to citizens of poor countries (as viewed by both groups)”. These days, I’m much more suspicious of policies likely to be socially corrosive: it leads to bad governance at a time where, because of AI risk, we need excellent governance.
I’m sure you’ve thought about this question, it’s the classic objection. Do you have any idea how to avoid or at least mitigate the inequality adopting genomic liberty would cause? Or do you think it wouldn’t happen at all? Or do you think that it’s simply worth it and natural that any new technology is first adopted by those who can afford it, and that adoption drives down prices and will spread the technology widely soon enough?
This seems like an argument that proves too much; ie, the same argument applies equally to childhood education programs, improving nutrition, etc. The main reason it doesn’t work is that genetic engineering for health and intelligence is mostly positive-sum, not zero-sum. Ie, if people in one (rich) country use genetic engineering to make their descendents smarter and the people in another (poor) country don’t, this seems pretty similar to what has already happened with rich countries investing in more education, which has been strongly positive for everyone.
this seems pretty similar to what has already happened with rich countries investing in more education, which has been strongly positive for everyone
While this is probably true in a first-order sense, and I’d say it’s totally true (most likely),
As a separate matter, I think many people don’t think this way. Instead they view it as quite substantively bad for there to be inequality as such—even if everyone is better-off to first-order, if that involves increasing inequality by a lot, it could be net-worse than the alternative.
At least hypothetically, they could be right about this! Inequality makes it easier for one group to exploit / betray / suppress / generally harm another group. If inequality increases, not in your favor, that increases the extent to which there exists a group who could decide to team up against you in the future, and do so successfully. Further, if the derivative has them pulling ahead, that’s some indication that this will continue, which would increase the potential for betrayal; and it’s some evidence (maybe weak) that the advantaged group intends to eventually betray (because they are not successfully preventing that possibility for themselves by actively sharing the technology).
Good objection. I think gene editing would be different because it would feel more unfair and insurmountable. That’s probably not rational—the effect size would have to be huge for it to be bigger than existing differences in access to education and healthcare, which are not fair or really surmountable in most cases—but something about other people getting to make their kids “superior” off the bat, inherently, is more galling to our sensibilities. Or at least mine, but I think most people feel the same way.
this reasoning will be used to justify a world in which citizens of rich countries have substantially superior children to citizens of poor countries (as viewed by both groups)
I’m not quite sure I follow. Let me check. You might be saying:
Genomic liberty says that people should be free to make genomic choices, and that states should regulate this only minimally, and in particular that international governance shouldn’t prevent states from using germline engineering.
Or maybe you’re saying:
Spiritually, genomic liberty is individualistic / localistic; it says that if some individual or group or even state (at a policy level, as a large group of individuals) wants to use germline engineering technology, it is good for them to do so, regardless of whether others are using it. Thus, it justifies unequal access, saying that a world with unequal access is still a good world.
To be kinda precise and narrow, the narrow meaning of genomic liberty as a negative right doesn’t say it’s good or even ok to have worlds with unequal access. As a moral claim, it more narrowly says
For the great majority of ways people will use germline engineering, that use will be not so morally abhorrent that we should use state force to prevent that use, given the high moral cost of curtailing reproductive genomic autonomy.
This does say something about the unequal world—namely that it’s “not so morally abhorrent that we should [have international regulation backed by the threat of war] to prevent that use”. I don’t think that’s a ringing endorsement.
I’m sure you’ve thought about this question, it’s the classic objection.
To be honest, mainly I’ve thought about inequality within single economic and jurisdictional regimes. (I think that objection is more common than the international version.) I’m not even sure how to orient to international questions—practically, morally, and conceptually. Probably I’d want to have at least a tiny bit of knowledge about other international relations (conflicts, law, treaties, cooperative projects, aid, long-term development) before thinking about this much. I’m unclear on the ethics of one country doing something that doesn’t harm other countries in any direct way, and even directly helps other coutries at least on first-order; but also doesn’t offer that capability to other countries especially vigorously.
Certainly, personally, I take a humanist and universalist stance: It is good for all people to be empowered; it is bad for some group to try to have some enduring advantage over others by harming or suppressing the others or even by permanently withholding information that would help them.
It does seem good to think about the international question. I’m unsure whether it should ultimately be a crux, though.
I do think it’s better if germline engineering is developed in the US before, say, Russia, because the US will work out the liberal version, and will be likely to be generous with the technology in the long-run.
Or do you think it wouldn’t happen at all?
It would almost certainly happen to a significant extent.
Or do you think that it’s simply worth it and natural that any new technology is first adopted by those who can afford it, and that adoption drives down prices and will spread the technology widely soon enough?
Right, this is a big part of what I hope, and somewhat expect, and want to aim for. I am however curious to hear examples of technologies that
Did have some innovation curve, but stalled out;
Or generally ended up benefiting only some small portion of people or countries;
And really ought to have been the sort of thing that did end up benefiting everyone.
(So, “superyachts” doesn’t count, because obviously it’s expensive to make a seaworthy building; “super complex medical treatment” may or may not count depending on what fundamental barriers there are to inexpensivizing and whether there even are that many people it would treat. One might have to have different expected curves for within- vs. between-countries. )
Do you have any idea how to avoid or at least mitigate the inequality adopting genomic liberty would cause?
So, to some extent we want to make the technology end up cheap and effective. A big part of this is looking for strong GV methods:
GV strength is generally interchangeable with cutting costs. Cutting costs is crucial for making GV technology widely available, in order to have the greatest benefit and to prevent problems with inequality.
Another part is spreading the ideology that everyone should have access. I think the US is a great starting place because we’re a diverse country (ethnically, ideologically, culturally, religiously, and in terms of country of ancestors). So maybe developing the tech here binds it up with “all people should have this”. Maybe I’m confused how culture works though, I’m just making this up, and of course very many people do not think this way. (To the extent that I personally push this tech forward, which realistically won’t be very much in all likelihood, hopefully I’d also have some kind of voice.)
The ideology should get a separate treatment—genomic liberty but as a positive right—what I’ve been calling genomic emancipation.
Spiritually, genomic liberty is individualistic / localistic; it says that if some individual or group or even state (at a policy level, as a large group of individuals) wants to use germline engineering technology, it is good for them to do so, regardless of whether others are using it. Thus, it justifies unequal access, saying that a world with unequal access is still a good world.
Re: genomic liberty makes narrow claims, yes I agree, but my point is that if implemented it will lead to a world with unequal access for some substantial period of time, and that I expect this to be socially corrosive.
Switching to quoting your post and responding to those quotes:
To be honest, mainly I’ve thought about inequality within single economic and jurisdictional regimes. (I think that objection is more common than the international version.)
Yeah that’s the common variant of the concern but I think it’s less compelling—rich countries will likely be able to afford subsidizing gene editing for their citizens, and will be strongly incentivized to do so even if it’s quite expensive. So my expectation is that the intra-country effects for rich countries won’t be as bad as science fiction has generally predicted, but that the international effects will be.
(and my fear is this would play into general nationalizing trends worldwide that increase competition and make nation-states bitter towards each other, when we want international cooperation on AI)
I am however curious to hear examples of technologies that {snip}
My worry is mostly that the tech won’t spread “soon enough” to avoid socially corrosive effects, less so that it will never spread. As for a tech that never fully spread but should have benefitted everyone, all that comes to mind is nuclear energy.
So maybe developing the tech here binds it up with “all people should have this”.
I think this would happen, but it would be expressed mostly resentfully, not positively.
The ideology should get a separate treatment—genomic liberty but as a positive right—what I’ve been calling genomic emancipation.
As for a tech that never fully spread but should have benefitted everyone, all that comes to mind is nuclear energy.
Thanks for the example. I think nuclear is a special case (though lots of cases are special in different ways): It takes a pretty large project to start up; and it comes with nuclear proliferation, which is freaky because of bombs.
I think this would happen, but it would be expressed mostly resentfully, not positively.
Wait, I’m confused; I thought we both think it’s at least fairly likely to go well within the US, i.e. lots of people and diverse people have access. So then they can say “it is good, and we are happy about it and want it to be shared, or at least are not going to seriously impede that”. (Call me pollyanna if you want lol, but that’s kinda what I mainline expect I think?)
....Oh is this also referring to countries being resentful? Hm… Possibly I should be advocating for the technology to not be embargoed/withheld by the federal government (like some military technology is)?
For chip exports, is this mainly a question of “other countries will have a harder time getting the very latest chip designs”? (I don’t know anything about the chip export thing.) For germline engineering, I expect the technological situation to be significantly better for democratization, though not perfect. With chips, the manufacturing process is very complex and very concentrated in a couple companies; and designing chips is very complex; and this knowledge is siloed in commercial orgs. With germline engineering, most of the research is still happening in public academic research (though not all of it), and is happening in several different countries. There could definitely still be significant last-mile breakthroughs that get siloed in industry in one or a few countries, but I’d be pretty surprised if it was nearly as embargoable as chip stuff. E.g. if someone gets in vitro oogenesis, it might be because they figured out some clever sequence of signaling contexts to apply to a stem cell; but they’d probably be working with culture methods not too different from published stuff, and would be working off of published gene regulatory networks based on published scRNA-seq data, etc. Not sure though.
There are diminishing returns and a ceiling on gains. The ceiling is quite high, but it’s there. You can only decrease disease risk to “roughly 0”, and this probably happens with medium-strength engineering (vaguely speaking); longevity probably (I speculate) has some caps coming from aging processes that aren’t fixed using genetic variants existing in the population; and IQ can’t be safely pushed way outside the human range. This means that countries could get ahead, but probably not crazy-ahead, and in the long run it should be easier to catch up than to pull ahead farther. (Ok this isn’t clear because maybe a head start on intelligence amplification snowballs or something.)
Uptake will start slow. It will speed up when people see how good the results are. But that information will be available to roughly everyone at roughly the same time: everyone sees the exceptionally healthy, capable kids at the same time, wherever those kids were. So for the big ramp-up, part that would matter on a national-national scale, there’s less of a head start. (There’s still probably serial lead time for some elements, but who knows.)
I do think there’s significant risk of inequality between ancestry groups, which relates to states though not one to one. That’s because there’s quite large inequalities between how much genomic data has been collected for different groups (see e.g. here: https://gwasdiversitymonitor.com/, though this is about GWASes, not exactly genomic data). Current PGSes don’t translate between groups very well. One way to address this is of course to gather more diverse data. (But the situation might not be so bad: plausibly once you more accurately identify which genetic variants are causal, your PGSes generalize between groups much better, or it takes much less additional data from the group to make scores that generalize.)
This is a thoughtful post, and I appreciate it. I don’t think I disagree with it from a liberty perspective, and agree there are potential huge benefits for humanity here.
However, my honest first reaction is “this reasoning will be used to justify a world in which citizens of rich countries have substantially superior children to citizens of poor countries (as viewed by both groups)”. These days, I’m much more suspicious of policies likely to be socially corrosive: it leads to bad governance at a time where, because of AI risk, we need excellent governance.
I’m sure you’ve thought about this question, it’s the classic objection. Do you have any idea how to avoid or at least mitigate the inequality adopting genomic liberty would cause? Or do you think it wouldn’t happen at all? Or do you think that it’s simply worth it and natural that any new technology is first adopted by those who can afford it, and that adoption drives down prices and will spread the technology widely soon enough?
This seems like an argument that proves too much; ie, the same argument applies equally to childhood education programs, improving nutrition, etc. The main reason it doesn’t work is that genetic engineering for health and intelligence is mostly positive-sum, not zero-sum. Ie, if people in one (rich) country use genetic engineering to make their descendents smarter and the people in another (poor) country don’t, this seems pretty similar to what has already happened with rich countries investing in more education, which has been strongly positive for everyone.
While this is probably true in a first-order sense, and I’d say it’s totally true (most likely),
As a separate matter, I think many people don’t think this way. Instead they view it as quite substantively bad for there to be inequality as such—even if everyone is better-off to first-order, if that involves increasing inequality by a lot, it could be net-worse than the alternative.
At least hypothetically, they could be right about this! Inequality makes it easier for one group to exploit / betray / suppress / generally harm another group. If inequality increases, not in your favor, that increases the extent to which there exists a group who could decide to team up against you in the future, and do so successfully. Further, if the derivative has them pulling ahead, that’s some indication that this will continue, which would increase the potential for betrayal; and it’s some evidence (maybe weak) that the advantaged group intends to eventually betray (because they are not successfully preventing that possibility for themselves by actively sharing the technology).
Good objection. I think gene editing would be different because it would feel more unfair and insurmountable. That’s probably not rational—the effect size would have to be huge for it to be bigger than existing differences in access to education and healthcare, which are not fair or really surmountable in most cases—but something about other people getting to make their kids “superior” off the bat, inherently, is more galling to our sensibilities. Or at least mine, but I think most people feel the same way.
I’m not quite sure I follow. Let me check. You might be saying:
Or maybe you’re saying:
To be kinda precise and narrow, the narrow meaning of genomic liberty as a negative right doesn’t say it’s good or even ok to have worlds with unequal access. As a moral claim, it more narrowly says
This does say something about the unequal world—namely that it’s “not so morally abhorrent that we should [have international regulation backed by the threat of war] to prevent that use”. I don’t think that’s a ringing endorsement.
To be honest, mainly I’ve thought about inequality within single economic and jurisdictional regimes. (I think that objection is more common than the international version.) I’m not even sure how to orient to international questions—practically, morally, and conceptually. Probably I’d want to have at least a tiny bit of knowledge about other international relations (conflicts, law, treaties, cooperative projects, aid, long-term development) before thinking about this much. I’m unclear on the ethics of one country doing something that doesn’t harm other countries in any direct way, and even directly helps other coutries at least on first-order; but also doesn’t offer that capability to other countries especially vigorously.
Certainly, personally, I take a humanist and universalist stance: It is good for all people to be empowered; it is bad for some group to try to have some enduring advantage over others by harming or suppressing the others or even by permanently withholding information that would help them.
It does seem good to think about the international question. I’m unsure whether it should ultimately be a crux, though.
I do think it’s better if germline engineering is developed in the US before, say, Russia, because the US will work out the liberal version, and will be likely to be generous with the technology in the long-run.
It would almost certainly happen to a significant extent.
Right, this is a big part of what I hope, and somewhat expect, and want to aim for. I am however curious to hear examples of technologies that
Did have some innovation curve, but stalled out;
Or generally ended up benefiting only some small portion of people or countries;
And really ought to have been the sort of thing that did end up benefiting everyone.
(So, “superyachts” doesn’t count, because obviously it’s expensive to make a seaworthy building; “super complex medical treatment” may or may not count depending on what fundamental barriers there are to inexpensivizing and whether there even are that many people it would treat. One might have to have different expected curves for within- vs. between-countries. )
So, to some extent we want to make the technology end up cheap and effective. A big part of this is looking for strong GV methods:
Another part is spreading the ideology that everyone should have access. I think the US is a great starting place because we’re a diverse country (ethnically, ideologically, culturally, religiously, and in terms of country of ancestors). So maybe developing the tech here binds it up with “all people should have this”. Maybe I’m confused how culture works though, I’m just making this up, and of course very many people do not think this way. (To the extent that I personally push this tech forward, which realistically won’t be very much in all likelihood, hopefully I’d also have some kind of voice.)
The ideology should get a separate treatment—genomic liberty but as a positive right—what I’ve been calling genomic emancipation.
Thanks for the detailed response!
Re: my meaning, you got it correct here:
Re: genomic liberty makes narrow claims, yes I agree, but my point is that if implemented it will lead to a world with unequal access for some substantial period of time, and that I expect this to be socially corrosive.
Switching to quoting your post and responding to those quotes:
Yeah that’s the common variant of the concern but I think it’s less compelling—rich countries will likely be able to afford subsidizing gene editing for their citizens, and will be strongly incentivized to do so even if it’s quite expensive. So my expectation is that the intra-country effects for rich countries won’t be as bad as science fiction has generally predicted, but that the international effects will be.
(and my fear is this would play into general nationalizing trends worldwide that increase competition and make nation-states bitter towards each other, when we want international cooperation on AI)
My worry is mostly that the tech won’t spread “soon enough” to avoid socially corrosive effects, less so that it will never spread. As for a tech that never fully spread but should have benefitted everyone, all that comes to mind is nuclear energy.
I think this would happen, but it would be expressed mostly resentfully, not positively.
Sounds interesting!
Thanks for the example. I think nuclear is a special case (though lots of cases are special in different ways): It takes a pretty large project to start up; and it comes with nuclear proliferation, which is freaky because of bombs.
Wait, I’m confused; I thought we both think it’s at least fairly likely to go well within the US, i.e. lots of people and diverse people have access. So then they can say “it is good, and we are happy about it and want it to be shared, or at least are not going to seriously impede that”. (Call me pollyanna if you want lol, but that’s kinda what I mainline expect I think?)
....Oh is this also referring to countries being resentful? Hm… Possibly I should be advocating for the technology to not be embargoed/withheld by the federal government (like some military technology is)?
Yeah referring to international sentiments. We’d want to avoid a “chip export controls” scenario, which would be tempting I think.
For chip exports, is this mainly a question of “other countries will have a harder time getting the very latest chip designs”? (I don’t know anything about the chip export thing.) For germline engineering, I expect the technological situation to be significantly better for democratization, though not perfect. With chips, the manufacturing process is very complex and very concentrated in a couple companies; and designing chips is very complex; and this knowledge is siloed in commercial orgs. With germline engineering, most of the research is still happening in public academic research (though not all of it), and is happening in several different countries. There could definitely still be significant last-mile breakthroughs that get siloed in industry in one or a few countries, but I’d be pretty surprised if it was nearly as embargoable as chip stuff. E.g. if someone gets in vitro oogenesis, it might be because they figured out some clever sequence of signaling contexts to apply to a stem cell; but they’d probably be working with culture methods not too different from published stuff, and would be working off of published gene regulatory networks based on published scRNA-seq data, etc. Not sure though.
Other points:
There are diminishing returns and a ceiling on gains. The ceiling is quite high, but it’s there. You can only decrease disease risk to “roughly 0”, and this probably happens with medium-strength engineering (vaguely speaking); longevity probably (I speculate) has some caps coming from aging processes that aren’t fixed using genetic variants existing in the population; and IQ can’t be safely pushed way outside the human range. This means that countries could get ahead, but probably not crazy-ahead, and in the long run it should be easier to catch up than to pull ahead farther. (Ok this isn’t clear because maybe a head start on intelligence amplification snowballs or something.)
Uptake will start slow. It will speed up when people see how good the results are. But that information will be available to roughly everyone at roughly the same time: everyone sees the exceptionally healthy, capable kids at the same time, wherever those kids were. So for the big ramp-up, part that would matter on a national-national scale, there’s less of a head start. (There’s still probably serial lead time for some elements, but who knows.)
I do think there’s significant risk of inequality between ancestry groups, which relates to states though not one to one. That’s because there’s quite large inequalities between how much genomic data has been collected for different groups (see e.g. here: https://gwasdiversitymonitor.com/, though this is about GWASes, not exactly genomic data). Current PGSes don’t translate between groups very well. One way to address this is of course to gather more diverse data. (But the situation might not be so bad: plausibly once you more accurately identify which genetic variants are causal, your PGSes generalize between groups much better, or it takes much less additional data from the group to make scores that generalize.)