Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
There is a longterm dysgenic effect with 2 kids per household, because the way human fertility is designed to work is that ~8 births occur and perhaps 1 or 2 of the healthiest go on to have 8-12 births themselves. A norm of 2 births is a norm of decreasing health over generations until the problems become apocalyptic.
In America, even without mass immigration, you have the high fertility of the ultra Orthodox Jews. So unless you want a future without music or art or equality or indigenous Europeans it’s a good idea to incentivize births. Eg 200k in New York, doubling every 20 years means hundreds of millions within 200 years. And they already wield an absurd amount of political power in New York
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection, which unlike AI-powered robots has the perk of existing and already being cheap enough to be accessible for middle class people if they so choose. Even in the current form it'd be trivial for western government to subsidize usage for poor people (though I think there is enough slack to make it much, much cheaper to begin with through scaling).
Agree on the Ukraine war & on the problem of extremely fertile ultra-conservative populations, though.
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
IVF costs 10-30k per cycle, with a success rate of around 20-30%. There are around 3.5 million births per year in the US. Even discounting sequencing costs (you want whole genome? Just a SNP chip?), assuming I'm understanding you correctly, won't your program have a roughly hundred billion/year budget? Not to mention that many women don't want to do ivf.
I don't think it's necessary to use for every birth, just consistent usage for people who struggle with pregnancy in the first place & people with certain known problems (I'm deliberately vague here because I think there is a wide range of reasonable policies that should be subject to debate by both the public and experts to collectively find out what we find or find not adequate to select against) is likely to be sufficient to make effective dysgenics per generation almost zero or even turn it around. Many dysfunctions and abnormalities impact fertility, so even just better embryo selection for those that already use IVF is imo likely to impact dysgenics more than you'd naively expect. From the initial data I've seen, simple general-health PGS is likely to even substantially improve the chances for a successful pregnancy beyond what the existing standard tests do, so it's win-win for absolutely everyone.
My first rough idea is something like this:
Make sequencing (again, deliberately vague because while I think deep WGS should be the goal, WES, larger SNP arrays, etc. would be a big step up compared to current practice) for would-be (in the sense of planning, not already pregnant obviously) parents completely free. Even if we assume every second parent takes you up on this, and even assuming one of the most costly option, 100x WGS at ca. 1k (see Nebula for example), this is more in the ballpark of low single digit billions. Probably we will go for a cheaper option, and probably less parents will use it initially, so in practice I'd expect less than a billion.
Only if the parents fulfill the aforementioned "certain known problems" they will also have access to free IVF + embryo selection. Likewise, people that get regular IVF due to struggling to get pregnant also get free genetics-based embryo selection by default on top. Here there is a wide range of costs; I'd probably be initially in favor of a policy that subsidizes only the worst 1% or so. So this would again be in the low single digit billions or less than a billion depending on the take-up.
We can also save a lot by only subsidizing it for people who can't afford it otherwise, but I'm personally against such policies since they have bad incentives imo. But it's an option on the table that would slash the cost down substantially.
I think such a program would be very cost-effective initially as mainly people who already have family histories take it up + those struggling to get pregnant. Over time, success and normalisation would increase the take-up and hence costs, but - and here you can call me out I guess - I think the scaling will more than make up for it. Remember, dysgenics is a pretty slow long-term problem, it's fine if it takes some time, as long as we get the process started and don't just completely ignore it.
In my ideal future, it's completely normal and free for everyone to have access to their own genome through ultra-deep WGS, access to several different risk scores for various diseases, abnormalities and dysfunctions for themselves, there is simple, accessible software that can estimate the joint risk for the same things for the offspring of any two people, and there are clear, commonly agreed guidelines when embryo-selection is subsidized or free for you (ideally with a linear or a multi step function instead of a simple free vs full price).
All in addition to full-price IVF/embryo selection for those who don't agree with guidelines and want to select for the things they personally care about. And in think this ideal future is actually possible even just with the current technology level.
Thanks for the reply, and sorry for being slow to get back to you. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, just understand what you're really proposing.
For the record, I briefly looked into embryo screening when I was trying to have children but it seemed like we're not quite there yet. And IVF is such a pain in the ass that the only people who really go through with it really want a child.
I don't think it's necessary to use for every birth, just consistent usage for people who struggle with pregnancy in the first place & people with certain known problems (I'm deliberately vague here because I think there is a wide range of reasonable policies that should be subject to debate by both the public and experts to collectively find out what we find or find not adequate to select against) is likely to be sufficient to make effective dysgenics per generation almost zero or even turn it around.
I'm seeing only around 2% of people use IVF; why would you think they're the main potential drivers of (hypothetical) dysgenics? Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics. Note also that prenatal screening can have a pretty drastic effect, although I suppose many of the disorders you catch would be individuals who wouldn't go on to reproduce regardless so you may discount them.
From the initial data I've seen, simple general-health PGS is likely to even substantially improve the chances for a successful pregnancy beyond what the existing standard tests do, so it's win-win for absolutely everyone.
I can believe it.
Make sequencing (again, deliberately vague because while I think deep WGS should be the goal, WES, larger SNP arrays, etc. would be a big step up compared to current practice)
I've mostly focused on Mendelian disorders, but would you still be able to generate a PGS with whole exome? Or are you just looking for Mendelian diseases? Most of the well-validated genes are already tested for, whereas the disorders with a couple dozen known patients are more likely to just return VUS (variants of unknown significance) which aren't really actionable.
Over time, success and normalisation would increase the take-up and hence costs, but - and here you can call me out I guess - I think the scaling will more than make up for it.
I'm sure scale-up will factor in somehow, I just have no idea what order of magnitude to expect. The sequencing costs would probably scale. Analyzing the data and other bullshit probably wouldn't, unless we can get AI integrated into the healthcare system in some form or another. Hiring thousands of bioinformaticians, clinicians, nurses, lab techs, etc. would be a nightmare.
I'm not against what you're saying in broad strokes; I think something like this is coming sooner or later. I think it'll look a bit different than you outline, but maybe that's just splitting hairs. We'll almost certainly have the technology in place long before the public is anywhere close to accepting genetically engineered babies. It doesn't help that the godmother of CRISPR is profoundly decelerationist.
No problem, as you see I can be even slower, especially over the weekend when I'm barely touching my computer.
For the record, I briefly looked into embryo screening when I was trying to have children but it seemed like we're not quite there yet. And IVF is such a pain in the ass that the only people who really go through with it really want a child.
On my side, I also looked into embryo screening for our first child, and I briefly worked for an embryo screening company in the past. Similar to my proposal, I'd advise people to get themselves sequenced if they can afford it, and that they only should do embryo screening if there are specific reasons, such as that they already do IVF anyway or that they have higher risks for a serious disease based on their preliminary screening, score low on a general health PGS, etc. Btw, I'm also not opposed to germ cell selection since this came up somewhere else, but I'm not aware of this being an actual possibility at the moment.
I'm seeing only around 2% of people use IVF; why would you think they're the main potential drivers of (hypothetical) dysgenics? Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics. Note also that prenatal screening can have a pretty drastic effect, although I suppose many of the disorders you catch would be individuals who wouldn't go on to reproduce regardless so you may discount them.
As I wrote, I'd also advice people with a bad general health PGS/high risk for specific diseases etc. to get embryo screening, on a similar magnitude to the number of people who get IVF. So I don't think the IVF population is THE only main driver. But I do think the IVF population is very disproportionally an issue because they consistently have a much higher risks for almost every genetic/biological abnormality and this is often the reason for the pregnancy to fail in the first place. Sometimes because the parents are already unknowing carriers of something, sometimes the parents are even noticeably disabled themselves, and sometimes because the mother simply waited far too long (40+ the disability risk for children goes through the roof that mostly are down to genetics).
On the other point, despite the cliche that someone like me who believes in HBD and advocates embryo screening necessarily thinks that everything is genetics, I'd actually still attribute ~50% of most things to environmental effects. "Welfare queens", by the usual definition, are actually capable of work, they merely refuse to. And they very disproportionally are part of a culture that tolerates or even encourages this behaviour. I consider dysgenics, which actually makes you less capable of working, a related but not entirely identical issue.
I've mostly focused on Mendelian disorders, but would you still be able to generate a PGS with whole exome? Or are you just looking for Mendelian diseases? Most of the well-validated genes are already tested for, whereas the disorders with a couple dozen known patients are more likely to just return VUS (variants of unknown significance) which aren't really actionable.
The most comprehensive currently available risk scores I'm aware of, such as genomic prediction's embryo health score or the UKBB PGS release, are just based on genotyped SNPs or WES at best. WGS (ideally including SVs) would be optimal of course, but isn't really sufficiently available. You don't need to only look at monogenic/mendelian disorders. It works fine in practice for most reasonably common polygenic attributes/diseases, because even if you have an attribute that is associated with, say, 10.000 variants, then not a single of those needs to be significant for the score as a whole to be significant. But it's true that very rare diseases are still a problem. But also by definition they're not actually the most pressing issue, so it's fine if we can't act on them for the time being.
Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics.
And that’s interesting because as far as I can tell, the high TFR for very low incomes is driven by illegals picking fruit and Hasidic Jews not wanting day jobs, Shaniqua in the ghetto having 5 children was a 90’s stereotype and not one with a huge amount of basis in present-day fertility rates.
Instead the bigger driver of dysgenics looks to be the divergence between the TFR’s of college and high school educated women(I think the above replacement TFR for women with less than a high school diploma is mostly confounders and that it’s a small enough population for that to be the case).
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Notes -
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
There is a longterm dysgenic effect with 2 kids per household, because the way human fertility is designed to work is that ~8 births occur and perhaps 1 or 2 of the healthiest go on to have 8-12 births themselves. A norm of 2 births is a norm of decreasing health over generations until the problems become apocalyptic.
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection, which unlike AI-powered robots has the perk of existing and already being cheap enough to be accessible for middle class people if they so choose. Even in the current form it'd be trivial for western government to subsidize usage for poor people (though I think there is enough slack to make it much, much cheaper to begin with through scaling).
Agree on the Ukraine war & on the problem of extremely fertile ultra-conservative populations, though.
IVF costs 10-30k per cycle, with a success rate of around 20-30%. There are around 3.5 million births per year in the US. Even discounting sequencing costs (you want whole genome? Just a SNP chip?), assuming I'm understanding you correctly, won't your program have a roughly hundred billion/year budget? Not to mention that many women don't want to do ivf.
I don't think it's necessary to use for every birth, just consistent usage for people who struggle with pregnancy in the first place & people with certain known problems (I'm deliberately vague here because I think there is a wide range of reasonable policies that should be subject to debate by both the public and experts to collectively find out what we find or find not adequate to select against) is likely to be sufficient to make effective dysgenics per generation almost zero or even turn it around. Many dysfunctions and abnormalities impact fertility, so even just better embryo selection for those that already use IVF is imo likely to impact dysgenics more than you'd naively expect. From the initial data I've seen, simple general-health PGS is likely to even substantially improve the chances for a successful pregnancy beyond what the existing standard tests do, so it's win-win for absolutely everyone.
My first rough idea is something like this:
I think such a program would be very cost-effective initially as mainly people who already have family histories take it up + those struggling to get pregnant. Over time, success and normalisation would increase the take-up and hence costs, but - and here you can call me out I guess - I think the scaling will more than make up for it. Remember, dysgenics is a pretty slow long-term problem, it's fine if it takes some time, as long as we get the process started and don't just completely ignore it.
In my ideal future, it's completely normal and free for everyone to have access to their own genome through ultra-deep WGS, access to several different risk scores for various diseases, abnormalities and dysfunctions for themselves, there is simple, accessible software that can estimate the joint risk for the same things for the offspring of any two people, and there are clear, commonly agreed guidelines when embryo-selection is subsidized or free for you (ideally with a linear or a multi step function instead of a simple free vs full price). All in addition to full-price IVF/embryo selection for those who don't agree with guidelines and want to select for the things they personally care about. And in think this ideal future is actually possible even just with the current technology level.
Thanks for the reply, and sorry for being slow to get back to you. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, just understand what you're really proposing.
For the record, I briefly looked into embryo screening when I was trying to have children but it seemed like we're not quite there yet. And IVF is such a pain in the ass that the only people who really go through with it really want a child.
I'm seeing only around 2% of people use IVF; why would you think they're the main potential drivers of (hypothetical) dysgenics? Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics. Note also that prenatal screening can have a pretty drastic effect, although I suppose many of the disorders you catch would be individuals who wouldn't go on to reproduce regardless so you may discount them.
I can believe it.
I've mostly focused on Mendelian disorders, but would you still be able to generate a PGS with whole exome? Or are you just looking for Mendelian diseases? Most of the well-validated genes are already tested for, whereas the disorders with a couple dozen known patients are more likely to just return VUS (variants of unknown significance) which aren't really actionable.
I'm sure scale-up will factor in somehow, I just have no idea what order of magnitude to expect. The sequencing costs would probably scale. Analyzing the data and other bullshit probably wouldn't, unless we can get AI integrated into the healthcare system in some form or another. Hiring thousands of bioinformaticians, clinicians, nurses, lab techs, etc. would be a nightmare.
I'm not against what you're saying in broad strokes; I think something like this is coming sooner or later. I think it'll look a bit different than you outline, but maybe that's just splitting hairs. We'll almost certainly have the technology in place long before the public is anywhere close to accepting genetically engineered babies. It doesn't help that the godmother of CRISPR is profoundly decelerationist.
No problem, as you see I can be even slower, especially over the weekend when I'm barely touching my computer.
On my side, I also looked into embryo screening for our first child, and I briefly worked for an embryo screening company in the past. Similar to my proposal, I'd advise people to get themselves sequenced if they can afford it, and that they only should do embryo screening if there are specific reasons, such as that they already do IVF anyway or that they have higher risks for a serious disease based on their preliminary screening, score low on a general health PGS, etc. Btw, I'm also not opposed to germ cell selection since this came up somewhere else, but I'm not aware of this being an actual possibility at the moment.
As I wrote, I'd also advice people with a bad general health PGS/high risk for specific diseases etc. to get embryo screening, on a similar magnitude to the number of people who get IVF. So I don't think the IVF population is THE only main driver. But I do think the IVF population is very disproportionally an issue because they consistently have a much higher risks for almost every genetic/biological abnormality and this is often the reason for the pregnancy to fail in the first place. Sometimes because the parents are already unknowing carriers of something, sometimes the parents are even noticeably disabled themselves, and sometimes because the mother simply waited far too long (40+ the disability risk for children goes through the roof that mostly are down to genetics). On the other point, despite the cliche that someone like me who believes in HBD and advocates embryo screening necessarily thinks that everything is genetics, I'd actually still attribute ~50% of most things to environmental effects. "Welfare queens", by the usual definition, are actually capable of work, they merely refuse to. And they very disproportionally are part of a culture that tolerates or even encourages this behaviour. I consider dysgenics, which actually makes you less capable of working, a related but not entirely identical issue.
The most comprehensive currently available risk scores I'm aware of, such as genomic prediction's embryo health score or the UKBB PGS release, are just based on genotyped SNPs or WES at best. WGS (ideally including SVs) would be optimal of course, but isn't really sufficiently available. You don't need to only look at monogenic/mendelian disorders. It works fine in practice for most reasonably common polygenic attributes/diseases, because even if you have an attribute that is associated with, say, 10.000 variants, then not a single of those needs to be significant for the score as a whole to be significant. But it's true that very rare diseases are still a problem. But also by definition they're not actually the most pressing issue, so it's fine if we can't act on them for the time being.
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And that’s interesting because as far as I can tell, the high TFR for very low incomes is driven by illegals picking fruit and Hasidic Jews not wanting day jobs, Shaniqua in the ghetto having 5 children was a 90’s stereotype and not one with a huge amount of basis in present-day fertility rates.
Instead the bigger driver of dysgenics looks to be the divergence between the TFR’s of college and high school educated women(I think the above replacement TFR for women with less than a high school diploma is mostly confounders and that it’s a small enough population for that to be the case).
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