This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.
Let’s say we are in a Cold War with with China. In order to defeat the US they begin with their ideal Chinese man but then change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ. These guys crush the US. But then the super humans end ruling China too. And they are so modified they are more different from Han Chinese than European Americans.
You don’t really need War for this timeline as simply doing it in peace time would end up creating humanoids completely different to current humans and basically a mass extinction even or at a minimum making human existence void of any meaning a second tier species watched over by their better.
Same thing of course applies to AI.
Did you miss GATTACA? Beggars in Spain? Hysteria around designer babies when Dolly was cloned, or the human genome draft was published?
That's just not anywhere close to realistic with our current level of technology and understanding. You could try cloning Shaq or whoever you think is smart, but we're laughably far away from editing your fertilized embryos for traits in that way. Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.
Are you sure? Could anyone predict forty years of ethics-department-free AI progress like that? We were laughably far from good image-gen AI 5 years ago. And genetic augmentation is a particularly ethics-beholden field. We've got CRISPR which can change genes in fairly effective ways, it's not like FTL travel where we've got no good approach.
It's true, predicting the future is a fool's game and betting against progress doubly so. We'll never be able to resolve our bet given the near certain continued existence of the FDA.
That being said:
Say you want to use CRISPR to...I don't know, increase the size of your gut to accommodate the caloric needs of the giant brain your 250 IQ Chinese supersoldier is going to have. There is no 'gut size' gene that you can just augment the expression of, there are massive, interlocking transcriptional networks who need to be turned on at the right times and in the right cell types. This is likely to be far beyond our capability to understand ever, so the only reasonable path forward is building an AI oracle to understand it for us. It's either going to 1) Need monstrous datasets that we probably can't generate in a reasonable way yet 2) Molecular dynamics simulation is impossibly computationally expensive, so figure out some other abstracted simulation method 3) ??? someone else tell me how they'd envision this working, my imagination fails me.
There is no 'gut size' gene; there are dozens if not hundreds of genes you would need to alter, and moreover, alter in ways that are temporally, spatially and functionally correct. CRISPR just isn't capable of doing that with the precision or reliability you'd need; it's great at knocking out 1 to a handful of genes, mediocre-to-bad at activating genes, and mediocre at silencing genes - and these latter two functions are transient, so you'd need to find a way to keep expressing the CRISPR and gRNA. Probably we're again going to rely on godlike AI designing new methods for manipulating gene expression on broad scales, or maybe some Kwisatz Haderach breeding program over generations as we slowly introduce the changes we need.
Delivery to somatic tissues isn't currently possible in a meaningful way, although I'm optimistic we might actually solve this in a reasonable timescale. And I suppose you'd want to edit germline cells regardless, but I thought I'd point it out.
I'm most pessimistic about (1), and moreover a decided lack of interest in TPTB (to be clear, the academic establishment. I doubt the deep state cares overmuch) in understanding these systems in a way that we could build or intelligently edit them ourselves. Godlike AI is the wildcard, but at least so far, all AI can do is hold up a mirror and regurgitate the same garbage that we write in review papers. And Eliezer tells me we're all dead in that scenario anyways, no?
I'm not a developmental biologist and only tangentially touching on human genetics so I wouldn't say this is authoritative. But that's been my impression over the last decade or so.
A whole mountain range of skulls of the failed experiments when tweaking genes for "well, let's try this and see if it works"/"oh no, it didn't, well fire up batch of embryos number one thousand and let's go again!" and breeding programmes and all the horrors that cutting-edge tech and no ethical oversight will permit. Morals are for losers, baby, nature is red in tooth and claw, we ain't getting 250 IQ without breaking a hatchery's worth of eggs, and they're just clumps of cells that we permitted to go all the way through gestation anyhoo. Not like they're people or anything.
More options
Context Copy link
Why do we need such intensive transformations? We have large populations of very smart people, large populations of very physically capable people. We can sequence genes easily, see which ones are associated with intelligence and physical performance. 250 IQ might be a 1 in a hundred billion genius but still basically possible from blind chance. All we'd be doing is fixing the dice to get an impossibly rare natural creation. Maybe he'd be pretty hungry but we have plenty of calories.
I bet there'd be a bunch of problems with mental illness, you'd need to refine it with time and experience. I know it's more complicated than 'make a statistical model of what genes the smartest people are most likely to have and tick the boxes' but we'd have time for trial and error. Forty years is multiple gamechangers worth of time.
As for how one would edit those genes, I don't know. Technology advanced quickly in the last forty years, we didn't have anything like CRISPR forty years ago. We couldn't even sequence human genes.
Come on, it can do more than that. I got it to write some decent Top Gear fanfiction. Google had theirs doing protein folding, which is vaguely relevant.
Even more relevant: https://nyulangone.org/news/new-artificial-intelligence-tool-makes-speedy-gene-editing-possible
Not perfect but surely proof AI is useful on this front?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link