parrhesia.substack.com
SS: I think that cognitive genetic enhancement is important for ensuring we have a better and lasting future. Many people have an intuitive dislike for the idea of using genetic enhancement to make a baby smarter but have little issue with in vitro fertilization (IVF). I try to build from a foundation of the acceptable practice of IVF to PGT-P for IQ.
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Notes -
I'm against cognitive enhancement because I fail to see a road where result of human enhancement isn't a speciation event where the top 0.01% of humanity acquires functionally unlimited power relative to the common person to find themselves on a footing closer to man-and-chimp with the rest of us barely auged or semi-auged proles. At that point we'll have about as much power to resist as the monkeys do if the gene modded ubermensch aristocrats decide to cull the rest of us useless eaters. Barring about a billion safeguards to stop this (probably inevitable) future I'm much more in favour of banning it all outright. Unless you're at the apex of the elite and have a good idea that your great grandkids will be similarly positioned once this tech really starts taking off, being in favour of human augmentation is like a neanderthal in favour of early humans making landfall in his neighbourhood.
This narrative is as applicable to AI, which can confer godlike power on an arbitrarily tiny elite class very soon, as it is inapplicable to genetics. Even the smartest naturally-occurring people begin substantially contributing at about 15 years of age at the earliest. This means the first generation of genetically augmented kids (or more realistically, clones of Terry Tao or John von Neumann, though we can't clone him right now) will create hype with their early performance many years before they can help advance reproductive technology beyond the level comprehensible for baseline humans, and upon maturation will be outpaced by the successive cohorts using better and, as it usually happens, cheaper tech stack. Their initial work will be public-facing too. When this whole batch begins to pay rent, literally and figuratively, access to enhancement will have proliferated way deeper than the top 0.01%.
Unless, of course, someone succeeds at banning it – for civilians, that is.
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