But there is a slippery slope towards a scenario where people select for sex, skin (and hair and eye) colour, not being queer, not being neurodivergent… and I do find that a dystopian scenario where we would lose something valuable that enriches our world.
Yes, this is actually a fairly common critique of embryo selection. One useful intuition pump I’ve found helps me think about it is the reversal test; should we make people sicker or more mentally distraught to enrich the world? It’s a bit odd to imagine that evolution somehow put us at the perfect equilibrium where any increment or decrement in mental illness rates would result in a worse society. It’s especially odd to think that since evolution doesn’t care at all about either of those things except insofar as they affect inclusive reproductive fitness.
Also, my experience so far just talking to people makes me think parents are going to have different priorities regarding the traits they select for.
But I assure you, if my parents had gotten to pick, they would also have made sure that I am not gay. Or tall. Or enby. Or have ADHD and autism. Things that were challenges, to be sure, but that I do not see as a net negative. I also know that both my parents found it disagreeable that I am highly gifted, and smarter than them; my father explicitly considers it a disease state and unpleasant complication, and would certainly have selected against it. I am very glad that he could not.
I’m sorry about your parents. That sounds like an unpleasant experience.
I don’t think the thought experiment of “erasing” someone like you from existence is really a very good test of the morality of embryo selection. You are a person with decades of memories and ties to the community of people around you. In my view the morality of “erasing” you feels a lot different than making a choice between two embryos. Unless you believe in souls or something, an embryo is almost pure genetic potential. It has no internal organs, let alone a brain. Even the placenta hasn’t formed yet.
We also already have a scenario where it is incredibly difficult for a poor person to have proper upwards social mobility. If their competitors are literally superior from birth, prior to also getting their personal tutoring and private schools and trust funds and brain implants… at some point, no amount of hard work will make you competitive anymore, the different classes will become insurmountably separated and fixed. Not because the rich parents want this—they just want the best for their children, who wouldn’t. But if access to this tech is not fair, and its legitimate usage is not carefully reflected and set, the changes could be dystopian indeed.
I would point out that all the dynamics you described are already true to some degree; there are some people born with such extreme genetic disadvantages (through a combination of parentage and bad luck) that there are some paths in life simply closed to them.
Of course embryo selection will increase variance, so your point is still well taken. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and the obvious solution here is just to work very hard to make this technology cheaper and better. If we make enough progress on that front then we can just have the government subsidize the technology and give free access to anyone that wants it.
Inequality WILL still increase in the meantime, but there are some dynamics that I think help us here:
There is a ceiling on improvements through embryo selection or editing. That limit is determined by the amount of variance in the human gene pool. The ceiling is very high, but its existence makes it plausible that some people will get there first and others will catch up
To push beyond that ceiling you’ll either need to generate new genetic variants and test them out in people. This will require the cooperation of a very large number of people. To make good predictors today, you need literally a million people or more in a database. To a first approximation I would guess you’ll need that many if you want to test out a ton of new genetic variants and have enough statistical power to distinguish true positives from false positives.
The main way rich people can get an advantage in embryo selection is by harvesting more embryos or getting access to better predictors. The predictors are all made from huge databases, most of which are public. So it’s unlikely rich people could maintain a monopoly on the best predictors. Also, it’s hard for them to get a big advantage by selecting from a lot more embryos. You can of course pay to use a better clinic, and you can pay to go through more egg retrievals to harvest more embryos. But there are steeply diminishing returns; you’re still sampling from a normal distribution. The expected maximum value of N samples from a normal distribution is sqrt(ln(N)). That’s an INCREDIBLY slow growing function. If you go from 10 embryos to 1000, the benefit only increases by 70%.
Will rich people still have an advantage? Yes. But genetic enhancement does not have the same runaway “intelligence explosion” dynamics that AI does.
Yes, this is actually a fairly common critique of embryo selection. One useful intuition pump I’ve found helps me think about it is the reversal test; should we make people sicker or more mentally distraught to enrich the world? It’s a bit odd to imagine that evolution somehow put us at the perfect equilibrium where any increment or decrement in mental illness rates would result in a worse society. It’s especially odd to think that since evolution doesn’t care at all about either of those things except insofar as they affect inclusive reproductive fitness.
Also, my experience so far just talking to people makes me think parents are going to have different priorities regarding the traits they select for.
I’m sorry about your parents. That sounds like an unpleasant experience.
I don’t think the thought experiment of “erasing” someone like you from existence is really a very good test of the morality of embryo selection. You are a person with decades of memories and ties to the community of people around you. In my view the morality of “erasing” you feels a lot different than making a choice between two embryos. Unless you believe in souls or something, an embryo is almost pure genetic potential. It has no internal organs, let alone a brain. Even the placenta hasn’t formed yet.
I would point out that all the dynamics you described are already true to some degree; there are some people born with such extreme genetic disadvantages (through a combination of parentage and bad luck) that there are some paths in life simply closed to them.
Of course embryo selection will increase variance, so your point is still well taken. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and the obvious solution here is just to work very hard to make this technology cheaper and better. If we make enough progress on that front then we can just have the government subsidize the technology and give free access to anyone that wants it.
Inequality WILL still increase in the meantime, but there are some dynamics that I think help us here:
There is a ceiling on improvements through embryo selection or editing. That limit is determined by the amount of variance in the human gene pool. The ceiling is very high, but its existence makes it plausible that some people will get there first and others will catch up
To push beyond that ceiling you’ll either need to generate new genetic variants and test them out in people. This will require the cooperation of a very large number of people. To make good predictors today, you need literally a million people or more in a database. To a first approximation I would guess you’ll need that many if you want to test out a ton of new genetic variants and have enough statistical power to distinguish true positives from false positives.
The main way rich people can get an advantage in embryo selection is by harvesting more embryos or getting access to better predictors. The predictors are all made from huge databases, most of which are public. So it’s unlikely rich people could maintain a monopoly on the best predictors. Also, it’s hard for them to get a big advantage by selecting from a lot more embryos. You can of course pay to use a better clinic, and you can pay to go through more egg retrievals to harvest more embryos. But there are steeply diminishing returns; you’re still sampling from a normal distribution. The expected maximum value of N samples from a normal distribution is sqrt(ln(N)). That’s an INCREDIBLY slow growing function. If you go from 10 embryos to 1000, the benefit only increases by 70%.
Will rich people still have an advantage? Yes. But genetic enhancement does not have the same runaway “intelligence explosion” dynamics that AI does.