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Hello, everyone! I was unable to post for a while due to connection issues, but now I can. Here's something I meant to post months ago:
I think people who are worried about genetic engineering tend to be worried about all the wrong things. Often, someone says that in the future it might be possible to increase IQ or athletic ability and everyone else is worried about "playing god." But neither of those is particularly worrisome. I in fact agree with Scott Alexander that making hundred clones of Von Neumann to combat global warming might be a great idea. Dunno if it would work, but worth a try. What we should be worried about instead are attempts to alter human personality.
We know that personality is to a worryingly large part genetic. Also, I am getting the sense that pretty much no "side" that exists today is satisfied with people as they are. Nearly everyone will have interest in replacing vanilla humans with something more pliable.
Woke west will be interested in altering men to remove "toxic masculinity." Islamic countries might want to make women more submissive and thus prevent any possible future feminist rebellion (i wrote this before disturbances in Iran, so i guess I predicted something). Chinese might want to make everyone more obedient to the State.
In the west, there probably won't be any laws mandating genetic modifications of humans, but there won't be much need to be. Western helicopter parents are already looking for every advantage they can possibly get. They will pay for whatever genetic improvements necessary. And when improvements in IQ get maxed out, they will look for ways to make personality more competitive. Reducing libido is a no-brainer, not only will it make him pay more attention in school, it will also make him less likely to get in trouble with HR.
And in authoritarian countries, it will be even more simple.
This will likely be disastrous long-term. Progress happens because people are dissatisfied with the way things are and put in an effort change things. But once governments can simply replace discontent people with content ones, we'll likely see less progress. In fact, I have seen theories that proliferation of psychiatric medications is basically a weaker version of this. Some psychiatric medications are necessary, but the role of other seems to be to placate people as it costs the fraction of what an actual solutions would. Much cheaper to alter people's brain chemistry to be satisfied with depressing wagie environments than to change their depressing wagie environments. And generic engineering is potentially even more powerful.
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it is concerning that humans might be turned into docile, passive herd animals. On the other, there's no doubt that huge amounts of crime and dysfunction are caused by a small minority of humans with abnormal personalities. When you think about people who, for whatever reason, function very poorly, it's often a result of excessive neuroticism, lack of conscientiousness, or poor executive function... would it really be so 'inhuman' to live in a country like Japan?
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So the libertarian personal cobalt laced nuclear device as a deterrent really is the only way to avoid tyranny afterall?
Dunno what that even is.
A fission bomb surrounded by cobalt (59 cobalt) goes off and produces cobalt 60 whixh has a half life of 6 years and is rather deadly. Its the same as the doomsday device in Dr stranglelove. All large animal life on earth can be expectwd to die if enough cobalt 60 rains down across a large enough area.
If everyone has one of these devices then if there is tyranny the whole earth dies....
I was taking the piss, suggesting that the only alternative to tyranny was either an eternal paranoid mexican stand off with doomsday bombs or total death of the earth.
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A theoretical doomsday device that consists of an H-bomb seeded with a cobalt isotope. The cobalt decays slowly but still emits a powerful radiation, thus making the affected area uninhabitable for a century. If many cobalt bombs were detonated high in the atmosphere, it could theoretically make the entire Earth inhabitable.
As a principled libertarian I choose not to own a personal cobalt device but I support the rights of others to do so in the privacy of their own home.
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I would say you're being insufficiently transhumanist. I doubt that in the 10-30 year period it would take for such genetic engineering to become commonplace, we wouldn't have cybernetic implants to perform arbitrary modification of the human mind.
Not to mention that schools and the like would be obsolete, assuming that education as we know it even has any purpose when transhumans/AGI can do everything faster and better, let alone with the sort of intellectual bandwidth mature BCIs can provide.
(And if I'm really putting on my techno-utopian hat, I envision such a society to not have much need for, spit, HR. Or men who can't find a better outlet for their libido than ogling breasts in the office.
Not that I wear that hat all that often, I'm personally resigned to dying ignominiously within 20 years, but if we don't Great Filter our own asses with AGI, then my kids are going to get the full package with whatever tech is available.)
I think that the AGI is far less probable than genetic engineering, even fairly advanced genetic engineering. Of course, both might happen, but genetic engineering will happen hella sooner.
Oh man, I'd love to bet against you on this, assuming you aren't just talking about polygenic embryo selection which already exists. AGI is almost here, probably less than a decade to go; I'd even give >50% odds of <5 years. Even if we had comprehensive genetic engineering available tomorrow, it'll take at least 15-20 years before it could start to affect the fabric of society.
(I'm not actually going to bet for various logistical reasons, but I'd love to.)
But I appreciate and agree with your concern about the prospect of personality adjustment conditioned on the availability of genetic engineering technology.
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I think you've let your imagination run a little bit wild in this paragraph
Currently even embryo selection for higher IQ is highly controversial. And that's a quality that is nearly pure upside and has tons of evidence correlating it with greater professional and academic success. And then somehow you extrapolate this to libido reduction, a quality with an obvious cost and no clear evidence of causing greater success. Seriously, you gave a nice "just so" story but are there any actual studies correlating lower libido with higher success? If anything I might expect the opposite since higher testosterone can cause both higher libido and higher drive/willingness to take risks.
I'm sorry but I simply cannot foresee genetic semicastration becoming popular in any major group of westerners and certainly not a "no brainier".
It certainly reduces the chance of doing something stupid on the job and getting fired, as HR is tightening the reins. Depending on how much control over personality we gain we might be able to create a man that can only be aroused by working overtime and not by women. People who are essentially in love with their jobs.
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Gestures desperately at government-encouraged mass immigration and demographic replacement
This horse bolted in 1965, and you're positing "Hey maybe we should start thinking about closing the stable door" in 2023. Suffice to say, I think your concerns are obsolete, not because the solution has been found, but because the problem is a fait accompli. The Faustian Man has already been driven below replacement level, by people who cheer his demise as progress in and of itself.
I think that's apples and oranges comparison. Those immigrants still have standard human hardware, so are capable of becoming discontent (or their children are) I am not worried about that. But when you create people with customized personality, you can remove any possibility of rebellion forever.
The entire concern is rooted in disagreement over how much of our human hardware is in fact standardized.
It's standard enough. Or at least it is more standardized than it is gonna be when genetic engineering comes.
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I agree that we should consider much of psychiatry to already be touching on transhumanism and I don't see a big bright line between current "of course" medical intervention(were arm splints the first transhumanist step?) and future improvements. The best line I can see is unnecessariness but one doesn't actually need splints or to heal for that matter. I think we're going to arrive at the transhumanist future one indisputable ratchet turn at a time and my hot take is that this is probably good. Although I'll note that editing your kids to be more compliant is a pretty ghoulish idea that doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the other interventions I've mentioned.
‘Editing your kids to be more compliant’ is already a pretty big use case for psychiatry, so it’d be strange not to expect it out of genetic engineering.
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