What I am looking forward to is when someone tries to start cloning process on a human being.
When I was a kid, in 1990s, there was a lot of fuss around cloning. Most people rejected it as unethical. I wonder how far the state of the art has come since then in cloning technology.
I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal or atleast live longer lives.
It would take extreme idiocy to think that this is morally sound. There is no defensible argument for treating a human clone as anything less than human.
That's not how cloning works. Clones aren't empty husks full of free organs ripe for the taking, any more than non-clones are. Even if you could create a clone without a brain, it's still hard to condone. If an anencephalic fetus miraculously grew to 24 years of age, would people post a "free organs" sign on him and lay him down on their lawn? Gonna have to say... probably not.
Cloning people for harvesting organs doesn't really make that much sense: it'll take many years to grow the organs to the size needed to be useful as replacements.
We're already working on growing (or even 3D-printing) replacement organs without the human; that avoids ethical problems, but it also doesn't require the huge investment in time and resources needed to grow clones of yourself and raise them to adulthood. They'll probably have this technology ready for prime-time before they could have human cloning working plus have those clones grow to late adolescence.
That's my point. We don't need "the island"; when we've worked out the genetic issues with cloning, we'll already know how to just grow organs on-demand. The whole clone thing doesn't make that much sense when you look at it that way; it would cost a fortune to raise a human to adulthood just for organ harvesting, plus garner all kinds of ethical problems and controversy and protesters etc. No one's going to protest organ-growing or 3D-organ-printing except maybe a few religious nuts.
And with the clone, what happens when you harvest its heart (killing it), and now you need a lung? Or you harvest one thing, and then get injured and need that same part, but you didn't have multiple clones lined up? With organ-printing, you just make the organ you need when you need it.
We still don't have truly 100% working clones; we tried with a sheep a while ago and it wasn't 100% and died early. However, we're already experimenting with 3D-printing organs.
I think as far as current tech goes, even if somebody gets 100% cloned, their mind (data in the brain) would still be different. That of course is when The 6th Day[0] (Brain data copy + clone) will never become a reality.
> [In the 90s] most people rejected it as unethical.
I don't understand this. If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical. It's not like non-clones get a choice in whether or not they want to exist. Why would we treat clones differently, anyway?
> I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal
Sounds like you are confusing classes with instances. If every human is a different class, the class gets to potentially live forever, but each instance of the class still goes through the lifecycle. It's not like the consciousness of a previous instance is copied to a later instance. Each instance presumably gets its own state.
In people's minds, cloning = a person walks into a machine and two exact copies walk out. If you instead framed it as birthing a child who was exactly like you, I'm sure the perception would be a lot different.
Yes. The word "clone" has been so abused by popular media that people have wild misconceptions and objections. We should call them "elective identical twins."
> In people's minds, cloning = a person walks into a machine and two exact copies walk out.
I highly doubt this is even close to true. Most people are smart enough to know that cloning has something to do with "modifying the egg and sperm and growing the baby". That's literally all they have to know to not think the absurd thing you mentioned. What you've described is "teleportation gone wrong" which is complete and utter science-fiction, and most people know that. I would even go further and say that most people are familiar with Dolly and already know cloning to be possible.
Plus, they are already familiar with twins (about two pairs per high-school) which is natural cloning. You'd have to be living under a rock to think twins share the same mind.
At the very most, I think people expect clones to look like identical twins (correcting for age difference), and perhaps share that same level of average personality similarity. That's still an overestimate, since identical twins get very similar epigenetic and usually environmental pressures. But it's a pretty reasonable thought, and very different from "cloning is what they showed in Star Wars".
I'm by no means an expert, but I really don't think it would take much. Cloning is being used in polo[1], which suggests that it isn't terribly difficult. Once you have the egg cell you just use in vitro fertilization, which has been possible for decades.
It's also worth noting that in the U.S. neither therapeutic nor reproductive cloning are banned at the Federal level, although reproductive cloning is banned in ~15 states. So any scientist participating would not be breaking any laws.
Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if some wealthy people have cloned themselves in secret. I imagine that there are a decent number of scientists who wouldn't find it unethical.
> If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical.
I've seen three popular takes on this, leaving aside religious objections and confused "cloning is a matter replicator" opinions. Two were practical, and so are probably settled, and one is, um, stupid.
- A major concern in the 90s was that clones would have serious health problems which wouldn't be obvious until later in life. That was based on health problems in Dolly and some other large mammal clones, plus concerns about telomere shortening when replicating from adult cells. I don't know if the telomere issue was ever settled, but with more evidence large-mammal clones seem to have normal health outcomes and lifespans, so I think the debate is largely dead.
- The next was that living clones would be placed in untenable positions, being judged by their genetic predecessor or being brought into existence "for a purpose" like donating bone marrow to a sibling or even 'recreating' a deceased child. All of which seems true, but no more applicable to clones than twins or younger siblings.
- The last was that creating life in unnatural ways is inherently immoral. Which I find laughable from anyone who isn't appealing to a religious prohibition (or similarly concrete ethic, Kant would have opposed it), but which was absolutely a major point of debate. By 2001, Leon Kass was heading up the President's Council on Bioethics and advocating this position. He variously argued against the inherently unnatural nature of cloning, its possible effects on overpopulation, its ability to create true "single parent children", and its dissociation of sex from procreation. He also opposed in vitro fertilization and intentional life extension, so he was an internally-consistent idiot, but I'm still convinced it's just the naturalistic fallacy redefined as a moral code.
(A final fear I've seen more recently is that extremely widespread cloning opens the door to monoculture disease risks and Muller's ratchet from mutation load. Which is again probably true, but not at all an inherent issue.)
> That was based on health problems in Dolly and some other large mammal clones.
This is the only potentially viable argument IMHO.
> brought into existence "for a purpose" like donating bone marrow to a sibling
This is untenable! Are people really stupid enough to consider slavery 2.0? At best, this sounds like some science fiction movie where people have 1800s education. "Growing a human to steal its organs" is laughable.
> If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical.
A child of rape has the same rights as someone who isn't a child of rape, but rape is still unethical. The equality of the rights granted to a person who is a product of an act indicate nothing about the ethics of the act.
> A child of rape has the same rights as someone who isn't a child of rape, but rape is still unethical
Cute, but irrelevant. Please tell me how something not too different from in-vitro fertilization is comparable to someone forcing themselves onto another person and giving them PTSD.
> The equality of the rights granted to a person who is a product of an act indicate nothing about the ethics of the act.
I'll clarify: Combining inanimate objects in a way that leads to the birth of a child, who has the same rights, is not unethical. Sexual reproduction utilizes biological pathways to achieve the exact same result. Why is an "artificial" (whatever that means) pathway unethical, exactly?
Part of ethics also has to do with the resources. With our current state of the art cloning frankly sucks. Cloning Steven Hawkings just gets you a baby who will certainly get very sick. Even cloning livestock becomes unethical because of the sheer pointless indulgence. You are basically better off with sexual reproduction unless you want to attempt resurrection of dead species incubated by their nearest kin which adds further complications to get one let alone sustainable numbers.
A vaccine with a 10% chance to kill someone but protect from a widespread disease killing 99.99999% of the infected and exposes it to 20 other people under even strictest quarantine measures it becomes ethical to dose everyone against their will at the risk of literal decimation because the alternative is so much worse. A vaccine against the common cold with a 1% chance of death becomes a no for everyone and a maybe for immunocompromised if the chance of a lethal cold is higher and if it works for them in the first place.
It's going to be depressing if we get to a point where the next generation is vastly superior both in intelligence and physical fitness. Mind you, still great for humanity, but depressing to have missed out on that. We may be considered primitive compared to humanity in a few centuries.
IMHO that next generation is going to seriously need it; the world has grown very dense with information and distractions - much more than when we were younger or our parents. They're going to need that extra concentration to filter out all the garbage..and I sure hope they can discern fake information from real information because it will be everywhere by the time they come of age.
If anything, we're the lucky ones to see these problems grow from the start. The ones after us will be in the deep end right from the start.
Humans today are vastly superior in intelligence to humans centuries ago. Physical fitness, maybe not. Anyway, why be depressed? Would Columbus be depressed to know that if he had lived a few centuries later, he could have just flown around the world on a plane instead of going on his big adventure to confirm his big claim? The guy got to go on an adventure that he firmly believed in.
Be content with who you are and where you are, and find your calling to go farther and higher if you can't be content. Just... no reason to be depressed.
Today we have the benefit of knowledge and training. Do we have more innate intellectual horsepower?
Speaking of more horsepower, could manufactured eugenics come at a cost of unintended side effects? How would we be benchmarking horsepower? Would we have the foresight to know some improvements would come at a cost of others? Would an intellectual arms race sacrifice traits such as altruism or curiosity or creativity for more easily measurable traits?
It's better for you to reply to the parent, rather than me. I was simply discussing the absurdity of being depressed at missing out on the future, not the validity, ethics, or consequences of modifying intelligence.
Take that with a grain of salt. According to IQ scores, the average person in the 1930s was within one standard deviation of litetally being retarded, and when Feynman was alive, he was a mere two standard deviations above the norm.
Personally I dont believe IQ correlates with g. And anyways, how can you even define g in the first place, let alone IQ? There seems to be some colloquial tautology here: Ddoing so by defining it as IQ, then testing for IQ and calling that g. It is ridiculous.
From Wikipedia:
>Ulric Neisser estimated that using the IQ values of 1997, the average IQ of the United States in 1932, according to the first Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales standardization sample, was 80. Neisser states that "Hardly any of them would have scored 'very superior', but nearly one-quarter would have appeared to be 'deficient.'" He also wrote that "Test scores are certainly going up all over the world, but whether intelligence itself has risen remains controversial."
We have no idea how that's gonna play out. We always think in terms of linear extrapolation, when in reality every new development eventually veers off into unintended consequences and totally unforeseen societal directions. Nobody in the nineteen sixties foresaw where computers where going. They thought Multivac paradise. We got the Facebook nightmare. Nobody in the eighteenth century saw past the exiting novelty of self driving carriages to the unliveable infernos we have let our cities turn into today. Nobody foresaw the overwhelming cultural rifts eventually resulting from universal wealth and mass education.
A new race of superhumans may vanquish Everything Bad That Ever Was™, or they may blow up the universe. We just don't know.
>Nobody in the nineteen sixties foresaw where computers where going. They thought Multivac paradise.
If you're referring to giant computers that took up a room, they really weren't that far off with that vision. Sure, a modern laptop computer or even smartphone has more computing power than an old mainframe, but we still have giant room-sized systems, but today we call them "server farms" or "datacenters".
> It's going to be depressing if we get to a point where the next generation is vastly superior both in intelligence and physical fitness
"intelligence and physical fitness" are overrated. Think of a generation without mental illnesses. People that is balanced and happy. People that has no malignant fobias and does not get fat just because does not know when to stop eating.
You are still right, that they should also be smarter and healthier and better looking that us if they can. But I see a bigger change if we adress our mental problems first.
Given the correlation between mental health, intelligence and physical health are all large and positive selecting for one is likely to lead to large improvements in the others.
I understand this feeling. But the glass half full perspective might be that these newer, smarter humans would have the ability to make faster progress on anti-aging and gene therapies which we could use to catch up.
I think there is a theory about our brains being limited in volume due to birth and that further increases are unlikely. Likewise, I doubt you could significantly increase athleticism.
We could use it to remove defects and certain predispositions though to fine tune our genetic code.
C-sections are really hard on a woman's body. Regular pregnancies are too, but C-sections leave them with a horrible scar and a giant cut across their abdominal muscle fibers, in the wrong direction, that never heals properly.
I think we are already at this stage. Just compare someone with PhD in physics against someone with just a basic high school education. This is a gap that very, very few people are able to cross.
One may say that, intellectually, the humanity is already split into two unequal parts - less than 1% of, let's say, intellectually capable people, and the rest (I belong to the rest).
It is important for us (the rest) to let the 1% work and drive the progress, and not to interfere. Unfortunately, this too requires effort, so the end result is... you know, just turn on the TV.
To me, the whole point of humanity is to leave your children better off than you were. If we can do this at a genetic level that would be a boon, but I expect we are just going to be removing genes that lead to higher probability of illness.
I’m glad that governments are cautiously allowing progress in gene editing even in human embryos instead of taking a hardline stance or outright banning the practice. Gene editing in human embyros is controversial to say the least but it has shown great promise in the last couple of years. It would be great to see the US get on board and allow the use of public funds for this research.
It is interesting to note that Japanese popular fiction (especially various anime) often has human genetic modification as a central theme. Non-Japanese popular fiction does as well, but my perception is that it's not to the same extent and quantity. I am curious how much popular fiction influences people's comfort level with the concept. Or is there more prevalence of these themes in popular fiction because the people are more comfortable with it? Does life imitate art, or is it the other way around?
Or my perception could be completely off. It happens. :)
I also wonder what role religious backgrounds of different countries might have in this. Are Christians more likely to have a religious opposition to human genetic modification (such as on the grounds of "playing God") than Shintoists and Buddhists might be? (I suspect the answer is "Yes", but I don't know enough about Japanese religions to be confident in that answer.)
If this leads to "enhanced" humans, I wonder how countries will react to competition from modified humans that can better compete.
The human race is in the unfortunate position of needing global regulation, and having a push back against globalization.
I don't know if the path of corporate globalization we are on can help either. We need a non-profit approach to global regulation of technologies like genetic engineering, self driving vehicles, and AI deployment because each of these has the potential to completely reshape the human condition.
I wonder if countries could cooperate on issues like this in a meaningful way. Can we come up with a sufficient momentum without drivers like profit or fear? Both of these drivers should ideally drive rational people to take action on these issues, but I think the perceived difficulty is what makes us ignore it. We need to clarify a path to profit and security for people to see taking action on this as an option they can take.
I'm an intern at a software company, what can I do? I'm struggling with choosing between the long term and the short term. The wide view and the narrow focus. For now, I'm building the scaffolding of my life, so that when I see an option that has better tradeofs between these I can take it and build something.
I think we need a total re-evaluation of human rights for the modern age. I'm not terrified of technology or this technology in particular. Just this technology existing within the current power structures of our society.
We will soon come to the point of realisation that billions of humans are superfluous, and that the lands they occupy would be better off as huge nature parks. Any critical farming or mining operations can be carried out mostly by robot labour and a few genetically uplifted human engineers.
The same way that uneducated and less nourished compete basically. We didn't burn down colleges because education is unfair to the uneducated.
We have had that and to some a degree being able to escape regulation a very good thing. Under that kind of thinking we need to ban farm mechanization because having a peasantry not preoccupied by labor intensive farming is dangerous. Just look at the cousin to that framework with the War On Drugs. Not only deciding prohibition on a larger scale would work but to research alone - psychedelics have proven useful for PTSD and we could have had widespread responsible treatment by the 80s at latest if we were really cautious about deployment. The petty evil of the motivation of the war on drugs against political enemies while leaving veterans from an extended war untreated because of it. I have seen many fearmonger that humanity isn't ready for the responsibility these advances - I say humanity isn't ready to restrain itself responsibly.
The ethical implications of this road are appalling.
I read comments here on this thread and people are amazed that they will become irrelevant to next-gen super-humans. As if this the only possible outcome. What I see is that people are blind to something that will come back to bite really hard.
Was it unethical for Homo Sapiens to out-compete Neanderthals? Same concept applies here. It is merely the continued advancement of humanity biologically and genetically.
New technologies face the same risk when unproven. Capitalism has a simple solution to that - people just stop buying them if they turn out to be worse than what was on offer before.
In the future, genetic enhancements will be available in a regulated competitive marketplace, and the ones that have unforseen bad consequences will fall out of favour.
What if some enhancement gets applied to (virtually) everybody and side effects are learned only when it's too late? Naturally there's a big, uncontrolled variety of possible changes and natural selection comes into play. Meanwhile gene editing is prone to become a monoculture.
You're purposefully ignoring the comment you're responding to. That's not the implication here. The opposite to genetically engineering super humans is to genetically engineer slaves that do whatever you tell them because they are not considered "human". The equivalent would be to enslave the Neanderthals because they are not "human".
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadWhen I was a kid, in 1990s, there was a lot of fuss around cloning. Most people rejected it as unethical. I wonder how far the state of the art has come since then in cloning technology.
I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal or atleast live longer lives.
I don't think its outside of the realms of possibility for the mega-rich. Grow a clone for 20 years, and transplant your brain into a fresh body.
We're already working on growing (or even 3D-printing) replacement organs without the human; that avoids ethical problems, but it also doesn't require the huge investment in time and resources needed to grow clones of yourself and raise them to adulthood. They'll probably have this technology ready for prime-time before they could have human cloning working plus have those clones grow to late adolescence.
If not, just stick all the clones somewhere and have them sit around waiting until their organs are needed. ie. the movie "The Island"
And with the clone, what happens when you harvest its heart (killing it), and now you need a lung? Or you harvest one thing, and then get injured and need that same part, but you didn't have multiple clones lined up? With organ-printing, you just make the organ you need when you need it.
We still don't have truly 100% working clones; we tried with a sheep a while ago and it wasn't 100% and died early. However, we're already experimenting with 3D-printing organs.
Here is a video about cloning dogs you may interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmHYUvmiXQI
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0216216/
I don't understand this. If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical. It's not like non-clones get a choice in whether or not they want to exist. Why would we treat clones differently, anyway?
> I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal
Sounds like you are confusing classes with instances. If every human is a different class, the class gets to potentially live forever, but each instance of the class still goes through the lifecycle. It's not like the consciousness of a previous instance is copied to a later instance. Each instance presumably gets its own state.
I highly doubt this is even close to true. Most people are smart enough to know that cloning has something to do with "modifying the egg and sperm and growing the baby". That's literally all they have to know to not think the absurd thing you mentioned. What you've described is "teleportation gone wrong" which is complete and utter science-fiction, and most people know that. I would even go further and say that most people are familiar with Dolly and already know cloning to be possible.
Plus, they are already familiar with twins (about two pairs per high-school) which is natural cloning. You'd have to be living under a rock to think twins share the same mind.
I am still curious whether some rogue scientist has tried to clone humans.
It's also worth noting that in the U.S. neither therapeutic nor reproductive cloning are banned at the Federal level, although reproductive cloning is banned in ~15 states. So any scientist participating would not be breaking any laws.
Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if some wealthy people have cloned themselves in secret. I imagine that there are a decent number of scientists who wouldn't find it unethical.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Cambiaso#Cloning
I've seen three popular takes on this, leaving aside religious objections and confused "cloning is a matter replicator" opinions. Two were practical, and so are probably settled, and one is, um, stupid.
- A major concern in the 90s was that clones would have serious health problems which wouldn't be obvious until later in life. That was based on health problems in Dolly and some other large mammal clones, plus concerns about telomere shortening when replicating from adult cells. I don't know if the telomere issue was ever settled, but with more evidence large-mammal clones seem to have normal health outcomes and lifespans, so I think the debate is largely dead.
- The next was that living clones would be placed in untenable positions, being judged by their genetic predecessor or being brought into existence "for a purpose" like donating bone marrow to a sibling or even 'recreating' a deceased child. All of which seems true, but no more applicable to clones than twins or younger siblings.
- The last was that creating life in unnatural ways is inherently immoral. Which I find laughable from anyone who isn't appealing to a religious prohibition (or similarly concrete ethic, Kant would have opposed it), but which was absolutely a major point of debate. By 2001, Leon Kass was heading up the President's Council on Bioethics and advocating this position. He variously argued against the inherently unnatural nature of cloning, its possible effects on overpopulation, its ability to create true "single parent children", and its dissociation of sex from procreation. He also opposed in vitro fertilization and intentional life extension, so he was an internally-consistent idiot, but I'm still convinced it's just the naturalistic fallacy redefined as a moral code.
(A final fear I've seen more recently is that extremely widespread cloning opens the door to monoculture disease risks and Muller's ratchet from mutation load. Which is again probably true, but not at all an inherent issue.)
This is the only potentially viable argument IMHO.
> brought into existence "for a purpose" like donating bone marrow to a sibling
This is untenable! Are people really stupid enough to consider slavery 2.0? At best, this sounds like some science fiction movie where people have 1800s education. "Growing a human to steal its organs" is laughable.
A child of rape has the same rights as someone who isn't a child of rape, but rape is still unethical. The equality of the rights granted to a person who is a product of an act indicate nothing about the ethics of the act.
Cute, but irrelevant. Please tell me how something not too different from in-vitro fertilization is comparable to someone forcing themselves onto another person and giving them PTSD.
> The equality of the rights granted to a person who is a product of an act indicate nothing about the ethics of the act.
I'll clarify: Combining inanimate objects in a way that leads to the birth of a child, who has the same rights, is not unethical. Sexual reproduction utilizes biological pathways to achieve the exact same result. Why is an "artificial" (whatever that means) pathway unethical, exactly?
A vaccine with a 10% chance to kill someone but protect from a widespread disease killing 99.99999% of the infected and exposes it to 20 other people under even strictest quarantine measures it becomes ethical to dose everyone against their will at the risk of literal decimation because the alternative is so much worse. A vaccine against the common cold with a 1% chance of death becomes a no for everyone and a maybe for immunocompromised if the chance of a lethal cold is higher and if it works for them in the first place.
* The draft is of guidelines that are not legally binding
* This was previously completely unregulated before
* The proposed guidelines encourage embryo research
* The proposed guidelines restrict manipulation of human embryos for reproduction
Also:
> Japan’s draft guidelines will be open for public comment from next month and are likely to be implemented in the first half of next year.
If anything, we're the lucky ones to see these problems grow from the start. The ones after us will be in the deep end right from the start.
Be content with who you are and where you are, and find your calling to go farther and higher if you can't be content. Just... no reason to be depressed.
Today we have the benefit of knowledge and training. Do we have more innate intellectual horsepower?
Speaking of more horsepower, could manufactured eugenics come at a cost of unintended side effects? How would we be benchmarking horsepower? Would we have the foresight to know some improvements would come at a cost of others? Would an intellectual arms race sacrifice traits such as altruism or curiosity or creativity for more easily measurable traits?
It seems very likely. Though not from genetic improvements. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Personally I dont believe IQ correlates with g. And anyways, how can you even define g in the first place, let alone IQ? There seems to be some colloquial tautology here: Ddoing so by defining it as IQ, then testing for IQ and calling that g. It is ridiculous.
From Wikipedia:
>Ulric Neisser estimated that using the IQ values of 1997, the average IQ of the United States in 1932, according to the first Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales standardization sample, was 80. Neisser states that "Hardly any of them would have scored 'very superior', but nearly one-quarter would have appeared to be 'deficient.'" He also wrote that "Test scores are certainly going up all over the world, but whether intelligence itself has risen remains controversial."
Who is going to build more fit Thomas Paines or Edward Snowdens, and under which powrer structures would they be allowed to?
If you're referring to giant computers that took up a room, they really weren't that far off with that vision. Sure, a modern laptop computer or even smartphone has more computing power than an old mainframe, but we still have giant room-sized systems, but today we call them "server farms" or "datacenters".
"intelligence and physical fitness" are overrated. Think of a generation without mental illnesses. People that is balanced and happy. People that has no malignant fobias and does not get fat just because does not know when to stop eating.
You are still right, that they should also be smarter and healthier and better looking that us if they can. But I see a bigger change if we adress our mental problems first.
Intelligence Predicts Health and Longevity, but Why? http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004...
In a few centuries we might call the two camps Eloi and Morlocks.
We could use it to remove defects and certain predispositions though to fine tune our genetic code.
But I remain skeptical about any super humans.
C-sections make that limit obsolete.
It will raise questions over whether non-upgraded humans are obsolete...
One may say that, intellectually, the humanity is already split into two unequal parts - less than 1% of, let's say, intellectually capable people, and the rest (I belong to the rest).
It is important for us (the rest) to let the 1% work and drive the progress, and not to interfere. Unfortunately, this too requires effort, so the end result is... you know, just turn on the TV.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Or my perception could be completely off. It happens. :)
The human race is in the unfortunate position of needing global regulation, and having a push back against globalization.
I don't know if the path of corporate globalization we are on can help either. We need a non-profit approach to global regulation of technologies like genetic engineering, self driving vehicles, and AI deployment because each of these has the potential to completely reshape the human condition.
I wonder if countries could cooperate on issues like this in a meaningful way. Can we come up with a sufficient momentum without drivers like profit or fear? Both of these drivers should ideally drive rational people to take action on these issues, but I think the perceived difficulty is what makes us ignore it. We need to clarify a path to profit and security for people to see taking action on this as an option they can take.
I'm an intern at a software company, what can I do? I'm struggling with choosing between the long term and the short term. The wide view and the narrow focus. For now, I'm building the scaffolding of my life, so that when I see an option that has better tradeofs between these I can take it and build something.
We have had that and to some a degree being able to escape regulation a very good thing. Under that kind of thinking we need to ban farm mechanization because having a peasantry not preoccupied by labor intensive farming is dangerous. Just look at the cousin to that framework with the War On Drugs. Not only deciding prohibition on a larger scale would work but to research alone - psychedelics have proven useful for PTSD and we could have had widespread responsible treatment by the 80s at latest if we were really cautious about deployment. The petty evil of the motivation of the war on drugs against political enemies while leaving veterans from an extended war untreated because of it. I have seen many fearmonger that humanity isn't ready for the responsibility these advances - I say humanity isn't ready to restrain itself responsibly.
I read comments here on this thread and people are amazed that they will become irrelevant to next-gen super-humans. As if this the only possible outcome. What I see is that people are blind to something that will come back to bite really hard.
How can you know that the result is an advancement and not a regression?
Others are blind to the fact that history was not only roses and fun and people justified a lot of atrocities with "progress".
In the future, genetic enhancements will be available in a regulated competitive marketplace, and the ones that have unforseen bad consequences will fall out of favour.
Capitalism doesn't either. Capitalism answers to profits and not necessarily to _everybody_'s profits.
I would think the arguments on the value of the unborn fetus vs the value to society are very similar.
personally - it correlates for me. I’m in favor of both.