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.
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.