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 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.