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Making Cognitive Enhancement Palatable

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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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.

Why would gene selection technology be limited to the .01%? I can see a case it would be limited to developed countries, or be limited to the very wealthy in those countries for a short period, bit fundamentally technologies like crispr do not require significant resources to use other than the initial investment required to learn how to use them.

I think the risk fully comes in once you get synthetic gene modding instead of just swapping in naturally occurring genes mapped off humans, at that point it could easily turn into an arms race over ever escalating augmentations that leave everyone not on the bleeding edge in the dust. Top level firms aimed at the wealthy could entrench a new ruling caste where the proles get [current year -5] gene augs compared to the latest and greatest augs available at 5,000,000 per kid.

That's exactly how any new technology works. First, it's so expensive only the idle rich can afford to play with it. Then as more development occurs, funded by those same idle rich, it becomes cheap enough for the working rich. Then the middle class. Then, finally, for everyone.

To my mind, the biggest argument against "the rich keep it all to themselves"—aside from that never having happened with any other tech—is this: national borders. If Country A limits cognitive enhancement to its elites and Country B gives it to everyone, pretty soon Country A will be irrelevant.

Most technologies can't lead to actual speciation events and a total divergence of our species into possibly thousands of different branches with wildly different qualities and capabilities. Self modification can.