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.
This is imo mostly nonsense if applied to genetic enhancements, for a number of reasons.
Both sequencing and IVF are already very accessible for the middle class. It's probably not far off from becoming accessible for the poor. The only way to make it exclusive to the uber-rich is, ironically, by outlawing it. CRISPRing people isn't really prohibitively expensive, either, and becoming cheaper as well.
Better selection has pretty much zero marginal cost per person. It's 100% developmental cost, and once we know which genes matter, it's widely usable.
This hasn't happened even when it made sense. For example, the same argument could have been applied to all technological advancements that have significant marginal cost per person. Cars, better healthcare/hygiene, education, electricity, etc. all of those are much more plausible to cause a runaway effect with the rich getting disproportionate ROI and everyone else falling behind since they have nothing to invest, but it didn't. Currently, AI is much more plausible to cause a runaway effect, and human enhancements are if anything one of the more plausible ways of competing with them.
My main objection: What do we want to select for, and how do we do it plausibly? We want to select for generalised success (which includes IQ, health, social success, educational attainment, etc), and we find the genes associated with those by comparing the successful with the not-so-successful. As such, genetic selection uniquely disproportionally benefits the downtrodden, since the successful will already hold a decent chunk of the genetic enhancements we want to select for.
As a concrete example, we know that specific genetic variants are almost mandatory to become a top-tier runner. Making targeted genetic enhancements accessible does not benefit the top-tier runners, since they already have these. It does benefit everyone else, though. The same principle applies to all attributes, even complex ones that are associated with thousands of variants. There is also both significant evidence in favor of diminishing returns for many attributes, as well as strong theoretic arguments (for example, there is a physical limit to how fast a carbon-based, two-legged lifeform can run. As you approach that limit, "better" genes do less and less, meaning that improvements are largest for the relatively genetically cursed).
The only plausible objection here is that in the lab, we can find even better variants - which nobody holds - so that the top-tier can benefit again. However, to my knowledge we have no consistent approach to do this, and since trial runs on animals only get you so far, the first generation humans trying them will still have excessive risks. I personally wouldn't try such a variant even if I could. Much better to use variants that already plenty of successful people have, so at worst it's something marginally negative that isn't holding them back much and on average it should benefit them.
It bears repeating that disproportionate returns for the rich is something I'm always worried about with most new technologies, but gene editing/selection is uniquely implausible to cause that. On the other hand I'm very worried about AI, since factories and companies purely or overwhelmingly staffed by AI can make the elite independent of the plebes in a way they have never been before.
um, this is somewhat true. But also think about carbon-based human-size brain with effective density those as insects have. Our human brains have low neuron density! There's so much space to grow. Solving this would be hard however, since apparently evolution didn't do it.
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