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 war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
People underestimate the ease with which large manufacturers like e.g. e-car makers could turn out million-strong robot armies once there's a good design.
Let's not get into what absolute craziness it'd be if you had bomb-chucking autonomous drones that'd fly to a supply truck, take a small bomb, swap battery, fly back & toss bomb accurately at a target and repeat.
Once you take out air defense cannons, which by necessity are >500kg and more and need engines, the enemy is extremely dead.
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
In addition to No_one's fleets of bomb-droppers, spotters and kamikaze drones, I'll add self-propelled artillery pieces, minelaying artillery like Russia used to great effect, traditional high-altitude airpower, ballistic missiles, SAMs and some low-altitude drones carrying longer-range missiles like Hellfires (do we really need a whole Apache gunship anymore?) Maybe some tracked vehicles with LMGs to escort the vulnerable heavier vehicles against anything that slips through. These all seem fairly open to mechanization, at least more than legged infantry. There would be great dividends in fire control, coordinates of enemy targets would go from drone spotter to robotic artillery at machine speeds.
Jamming would be one countermeasure, yet jammers put out a great big 'here I am' signal. That's begging for an anti-radiation missile or artillery fire, just like how radar-guided SAMs need to watch out. Jamming would be a useful tool but not necessarily a hard counter. In Ukraine, drones can drop bombs from above the effective range of ECM mounted on vehicles, or fly in on a ballistic trajectory after control is lost.
Such robotic forces would probably flounder in urban warfare, where line of sight is low and there's plenty of cover available. Nothing stops them laying siege though. Relying on a central computing/data processing post is also a risk, I'm envisioning a huge truck or armoured train full of expensive compute. I suppose you could put a lot of air defence and guards nearby though.
Perhaps the biggest risk is cyberwarfare, losing command and control over one's robots.
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
You are describing an artillery shell.
So long as artillery shells can't by themselves hold positions and police an area infantry will remain the sole reason any other military implement exists.
There is this myth that has captured the imagination of American aligned armies after the cold war, that air superiority or any other kind of area denial of that sort means anything by itself.
The lesson of all of the recent American defeats is that if you don't have grunts patrolling some territory unmolested, you don't hold shit. You're just having an extended operation behind enemy lines.
Maybe robots will one day have the flexibility to act as grunts, but so long as they're still, in any mass producible form, glorified fire support, you still need infantrymen.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
No_one 10mo ago
Neither do modern kamikaze drones that are built in significant scale like we're talking about here. The thermals alone would be more expensive than the whole thing.
Besides, reconnaissance is not a primary goal of warfare, and has long escaped the sole magisteria of grunts.
Satellites are rare, planes won't spot sneaky units and can be shot down anyway.
Drones with good thermals at say, company level are a complete change of the meta.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
No_one 10mo ago
You already know what I'm going to say: the variants that have good optics are not kamikaze unless they're purpose built to destroy HVTs and are therefore not what we're talking about.
Smart artillery shells are a boutique implement, anything at that price is cool tech that's situationally useful but not meant for mass.
And my concern is that the nature of war is mostly defined by mass.
You're right to say that company level reconnaissance has been greatly improved and that it's a game changer. I would never deny (relatively) cheap optics isn't an important development.
Everyone is saying this is why Ukraine is an artillery war, because both sides have almost total information.
But again none of that is really what we're talking about when we talk about autonomous warfare. Because none of that changes the game in ways that create a novel equilibrium. We're just back to a state where defense has a large advantage and firepower beats maneuver. Which is certainly a change, but not one that has much to do with automation or robots in character.
Infantry absolutely are needed right now, for urban warfare, for reconnaissance, for fighting in forests. I've made posts about how the US needs infantry and recruits in the combat arms generally.
Where the US went wrong in its desert wars was that it went in without a clear plan of what to do after ejecting Saddam/Taliban from power. The political skills just weren't there to follow up victory on the ground. It's not that there was a shortage of infantry but that infantry weren't committed in a well-considered campaign with the right goals. They pumped a grossly corrupt and incompetent Afghan govt full of money, allied with the child rapist elements of the country - yet the goal was to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. In Iraq they were catching and releasing terrorists (or torturing them in ways that made Arabs very angry). That doesn't fit with the war goal! The US is just really bad at a certain kind of martial imperialism, the British or Romans were much better at this kind of thing.
What I'm talking about is future conventional war, between serious countries that know what they're doing. A war with proper, realistic, military goals can be fought with firepower alone. In Desert Storm (a masterpiece in how wars should be fought), the firepower intensive elements of the Coalition won the victory, infantry were barely needed. There were some special forces that did useful work, some infantry engaged with their anti-tank weapons but it was mostly won by airpower, artillery and armour. There was a clear plan - thrash the Iraqi army on the battlefield till they leave Kuwait.
Holding positions - what does this mean? Sitting in a trench or hiding in a forest with rifles and ATGMs, ready to pop out and attack hostiles as they approach. Robots can do that in the future. Put an LMG on a little tracked vehicle or a bulked up Boston Dynamics bot, add some optics and that can hold positions fine, with the right software. Landmines can hold a position. You could leave some kamikaze drones in a forest on standby mode, they could potentially hold a position. Urban warfare makes things harder of course.
Policing is a different problem to these battlefield issues and the very name implies it's something for civilian police or military police, not infantry.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
RandomRanger 10mo ago·Edited 10mo ago
Policing is a different problem to these battlefield issues and the very name implies it's something for civilian police or military police, not infantry.
I understand it's categorically different when we're talking about combat, but to this particular issue it's significant because it draws the boundary of things that robots can't do.
The reason robots are not going to replace the infantryman at the margins is because they, in their current incarnations, are incapable of improvisation or dealing with general problems. They are indeed just a more sophisticated version of a mine.
And no, a mine can't hold a position. It can slow the enemy, it can increase attrition, it can funnel the enemy where you want him or free up your forces to be used elsewhere. It can do a lot of useful things, but it can't hold a position.
Loitering munitions can probably even make what used to be static defense a lot more mobile, but mobile or not it's still a castle/trap. You need men behind those supposedly automated defenses or the enemy is going to exploit it because robots can't adapt on the fly and can be jammed or sidestepped. Even drones can do so a lot less than actual boots on the ground.
Look at Hamas' low tech tour de force which was all against state of the art automated defenses. It's emblematic of what you do to deal with that kind of thing: you find some exploit, sit on it for a while, and nullify the defenses all at once when the enemy expects they're solid.
Put an LMG on a little tracked vehicle or a bulked up Boston Dynamics bot, add some optics and that can hold positions fine, with the right software
I'm well aware of what can be done, friend of mine actually writes that exact kind of software. And it's not magic, it's just a much more annoying claymore at the end of the day. Bots don't dig foxholes or deal with complex terrain very well. Their best use is in in freeing up hands to do other things.
I'm skeptical you could effectively use automated turrets on the battlefield in a way that wouldn't eventually be nullified because I think the environment is too chaotic.
What do you mean by holding a position? Entrenched infantry slows down the enemy, inflicts losses, funnels them where you want them. The primary difference is that infantry is mobile, yet drones can also be mobile. Engineering vehicles can dig earthworks suitable for tanks. A mini-tank could presumably go hull-down, though it seems most threats come from above these days.
What good are entrenched infantry going to be when a swarm of kamikaze drones fly down into their trenches at 3 in the morning?
Assuming we've got them all linked up to an AGI performing the role of brigade command, robotic forces could adapt and execute plans, counter exploits. Wearing weird camouflage patterns probably wouldn't work on a decent AGI - if all else fails they could use thermal imaging. Palantir has already made a test LLM for quickly organizing strike missions, I see no reason why machines couldn't execute tactics. The speed and coordination of an unmanned force would be extremely impressive. Commanders are deluged in information from all the sensors in modern warfare, machines are best at managing a tsunami of data and providing quick answers. The gains in cost-efficiency and speed will probably outweigh the loss in human flexibility for most environments. I'll admit that infantry will be better in urban environments for a long time to come. But everyone seems to agree that urban environments are hellish to fight in, it might be easier to encircle and siege them out.
Jamming isn't a foolproof answer. The transmitter will be lit up for artillery or missile fire. Some weapons could be designed to go into an autonomous mode if they lose connection to command and control.
Look at Hamas' low tech tour de force which was all against state of the art automated defenses
Au contraire, the problem was that the human guards were understrength and unprepared due to the holiday. Arrogance and complacency was their core problem. They had a bunch of sensors but relied on a response force of human soldiers that simply wasn't there. There weren't any landmines beneath the fence (or certainly not enough to impede Hamas planting explosives there). There wasn't a response force ready to go, they planned assuming a 24-hour warning time to deploy.
For at least three months prior to October 7, the soldiers recalled reporting information on Hamas operatives conducting training sessions multiple times a day, digging holes and placing explosives along the border.
However, when presenting the evidence to their senior officers, they were ignored, and the information was not passed further up the chain of command.
While there were three infantry battalions and one tank battalion positioned along Gaza’s border, stated the report, a senior military officer estimated that perhaps half of the 1,500 soldiers were away.
Now maybe an AI-based combat system would also have failed here, yet the humans certainly didn't cover themselves in glory. Sensors are useless if the humans don't listen to them and aren't prepared to act. They missed the warnings, they fielded understrength forces, they waited too long to deploy and were uncoordinated in their initial attacks (since divisional HQ was directly attacked). Hamas also made good use of drones to defeat turrets and armour, which doesn't necessarily counter my argument.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
RandomRanger 10mo ago·Edited 10mo ago
What do you mean by holding a position?
Continuously effect control in the tactical sense "maintain physical influence over a specified area to prevent its use by enemy or to create conditions necessary for successful friendly operations" as the Americans put it.
But we're about to get in pedantic debates about things being tools of control instead of effecting control in and of themselves, because the real disagreement we are having, I think, is as to considering automated systems as agents. I do not think it is wise to do so.
the problem was that the human guards were understrength and unprepared due to the holiday
I think this is the key to what I'm saying. The fact that the human element failed is evidence that it is still and will probably remain crucial to effective operations even in a world with drones.
If drones were effective on their own and could replace the infantryman, the lack of intelligence would not have mattered as the automated defenses could have adapted to the breach. But machines are not generally intelligent so they can't do that, you need some human to figure it out before he gets killed, and the fewer humans you have right next to the problem the harder it is to figure things out on the fly.
I do not mean to imply that automated systems won't play a big part as a force multiplier in wars current and future. I only mean to assert that you're not going to be able to remove the humans from direct battlefield involvement without compromising capability to an unreasonable degree.
This is why I've long prognosticated that flesh and blood pilots would continue to exist in significant numbers even as drones become more sophisticated. There's just too many situations where looking at the objective or the enemy with your eyes and making a decision right there and then beats interpreting a camera feed, even with how sophisticated modern sensors are.
And ground combat is a lot more chaotic and difficult to parse so I intuit it's even less likely.
Another factor we haven't really discussed is how fragile all this equipment is. For all the fictional cachet robots get for being indestructible machines of death, they are surprisingly brittle and needy. If we had to bet on who survives continuous shelling for the longest, I'm not sure I'm putting my money on the high tech stuff. Even if it's a more morally acceptable loss, obviously.
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 number of Ultra Orthodox and the number of Amish in the US is actually pretty similar (~400k). Good tfr estimates for both are fraught (both populations are actually experiencing falling birthrates) but many estimates are similar. Of course, neither the Amish or the Ultra-Orthodox in their current forms will ever be the majority in the US because their cultures will undergo huge changes as they become large shares of the population (as they already are in Israel).
A much larger Amish population will necessarily experience urbanization and the cultural and economic change that will follow, and a much larger ultra orthodox population will become more splintered and atomized, and as more men labor (or spend any time) beyond the kollel the whole institutional structure of that society will begin to crumble in places. In both cases, birthrates will fall (as they already are).
Every estimate I have even seen shows an Hasidic doubling every 20-22 years. From 2006 to today. In Israel the Haredi double every 16 years. I have never seen anything even vaguely hinting at the population not doubling that quickly. Do you have a source for why it’s fraught or were you just saying that? It’s actually surprisingly easy to do a head count on how much the ultra orthodox are increasing.
their cultures will undergo huge changes
We have much evidence that this will not be the case. Both Amish and Hasidim have high retainment rates of 85-95% which have not slowed due to any technological advance, and I recall reading that the Amish have a higher retainment now than in the 60s. The ultra-orthodox in America are centered in literally the most culturally diverse and dense part of the country, NYC and neighboring towns, and this has not stopped their increase.
Youre right that the Amish threat can be ignored — at most they will be a large peasant class with little political or financial power, and their way of life conflicts with urban living. But this is not so for the ultra orthodox. The way the community works is that the wealthy landlords and financiers etc disperse their funds to the poorer members who spend their time studying Talmud etc. There’s no shortage of wealthy ultra orthodox doing this. And they are also expanding their influence in shipping, I recall reading that 15% of all Amazon fulfillment in the US is done by ultra orthodox. So there’s no conceivable economic hindrance to their growth minus perhaps an anti-Hasidic boycott movement which I suppose is not out of the question in the future.
I recall reading that 15% of all Amazon fulfillment in the US is done by ultra orthodox
Isn’t Amazon fulfillment mostly contracted out to gig work? Seems a natural economic niche for people with incredibly specific and annoying religious rules governing their every action.
Sorry I think I got it wrong, they aren’t the drivers (haha) but the third party sellers / middle men. Apparently they have pretty insular marketing conferences and organizations to help other ultra orthodox enter this niche. But yeah this makes sense for them if they have to pray a number of times a day and can’t work around women. I was primarily mentioning this as an example of the sustainability of the ultra orthodox economy in light of their growth.
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).
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
The obesity pandemic is also trivial to solve with people eating less. Mass migration would be easily solved if a wall would be build at the Mexican border.
Even if an easy solution is known, even if the solution is proven to work, it can be very very hard, often impossible, to implement it.
In the blink of an eye, the price dropped from ridiculous to well worth it, in India of all places. Fucking give the people killing themselves with food the pills to stop them wanting to.
Even if the price stays high, it doesn't have to get much cheaper for the cost-benefit to be grossly positive from the reduced healthcare costs for the fat and sick.
This is not impossible, or even very hard to implement. Negotiate costs. Make insurance cover it, if they don't make a rational decision to do so. Buy it from countries where it's cheaper.
Fucking give the people killing themselves with food the pills to stop them wanting to.
Not pills, it's an injection. You try finding different places on your stomach to stab yourself weekly 😁
Plus, there are side-effects. Some people react so badly that they can't stay on the medications. If you're lucky, you'll just end up constipated because of the mechanism of action, which is to slow down the passage of food through the digestive system. If you're extra lucky, you get the "not wanting to eat so much" side-effect, but not everybody does get that.
Not pills, it's an injection. You try finding different places on your stomach to stab yourself weekly
No, it's not necessarily injections, you can quite literally get Semaglutide in oral form. I was looking up formulations for my mom yesterday.
Plus, there are side-effects. Some people react so badly that they can't stay on the medications. If you're lucky, you'll just end up constipated because of the mechanism of action, which is to slow down the passage of food through the digestive system. If you're extra lucky, you get the "not wanting to eat so much" side-effect, but not everybody does get that.
Sigh. Everything has side effects. For semaglutide, they're not particularly noteworthy, regardless of your personal bad luck with it.
I didn't know about the oral formulations, the only ones I've encountered for both Ozempic and Trulicity have been the injectables, (ouch ouch ouch), and even then supply was intermittent because demand outstripped it (particularly for those looking for quickie weight loss).
India makes half the pharmaceuticals you consume in the West, be they cheap or expensive. So it's not surprise I can get it for next to nothing, especially in bulk. So could anyone really, depending on their appetite for Chinese grey markets.
Oral formulations of semaglutide are less effective than a jab, but they're also cheaper, and you can just take more of them.
The long and short (and thin) of it is that it works for most people, and for those it didn't work on/couldn't tolerate it, there are both similar drugs that are likely better at the weight loss deal, and tens of billions of dollars being spent finding more.
Mass migration wouldn’t be solved with a wall because a large number of illegal immigrants (obviously more if the illegal land crossing route was closed) come legally and then overstay tourist or student or other visas. And, of course, a wall wouldn’t affect legal immigration.
The obesity pandemic is being solved as we speak with the new generation of appetite suppressant drugs. It will take time, but ultimately the market is generating the solution.
As soon as embryo selection for positive traits is possible, everyone except some religious extremists and the dirt poor (who should and in many nations will get it for free) will do it because parents have a biological drive to advantage their children in any way they can.
As soon as embryo selection for positive traits is possible, everyone except some religious extremists and the dirt poor (who should and in many nations will get it for free) will do it because parents have a biological drive to advantage their children in any way they can.
Designer babies seem like they’ll suppress the birthrate further among the sorts who do it for the same reason ultraselective preschools and the like to, leading to a natural selection effect towards tabooing it.
This is not true in practise. Parents who go for antenatal screens don't abort on a whim because the kid isn't just right, even in IVF, those who want kids almost always accept the first viable pregnancy with no obvious abnormalities.
They don't get into a tizzy about finding the absolute best, just the best of what's at hand.
In practice, the "my child must be perfect" mentality seems to lead to people hating the idea of parenting and not wanting to have kids- that's the reason for east Asia's anomalously low birthrates. It's hyper-k selection and human beings really hate hyper-k selection. Embryo selection feeds into that mentality for obvious reasons and I find it dimly hilarious that the modern west is selecting for religious fundamentalism so strongly. In 2260 or whenever star trek was supposed to be set the stereotype of whites will be dogmatic, socially conservative, and highly natal.
That isn't what would suppress the birthrate, but rather changing the burden of action from having to end a pregnancy, toward having to take (non-fun, non-instinctual) action to begin a pregnancy.
Likewise, I would expect implants to suppress the birth rate vs oral contraception, because the implant has to be intentionally removed by a doctor, while the pill might just run out or be forgotten (or "forgotten" with some subconscious drive toward having children).
See, I think it's all moot because human labor will shortly cease to matter. But ignoring that:
The people who are opting for pregnancy in a considered manner, especially those who want to go through IVF and potentially embryo selection, want a baby more than is the norm, or they wouldn't bother. People who adopt instead of accepting being childless probably want kids more than average after all.
Likewise, I would expect implants to suppress the birth rate vs oral contraception, because the implant has to be intentionally removed by a doctor, while the pill might just run out or be forgotten (or "forgotten" with some subconscious drive toward having children).
My exam in about a dozen hours leaves me well prepared to field that point. You know why implants are offered in the first place? It's precisely because they reduce unwanted births.
Some poor 18 year old girl is scared of being knocked up? We give her an IUD. A 26 yo woman, we ask her if is planning a family. No? Or a 36 yo who says she's got 3 kids and not one more? Then an IUD, or perhaps an implant, which can be trivially removed for any reason, let alone if they desire kids.
Leaving aside total birth rates, where I expect changes to be minor, this is also helping mitigate dysgenics. A lower class girl with low time preferences has far lower odds of being knocked up again by her deadbeat boyfriend, and then has every opportunity to remove it when she legitimately feels ready.
See, I think it's all moot because human labor will shortly cease to matter.
Labor isn't the only reason it can be good to have children and grandchildren. Maybe they'll be good, interesting people. Human labor would also cease to matter if there were no humans, but most people don't want that.
The people who are opting for pregnancy in a considered manner, especially those who want to go through IVF and potentially embryo selection, want a baby more than is the norm, or they wouldn't bother.
Yes, and that's fine, if someone is already doing IVF, then embryo selection makes sense. I was pushing back about the claim above that "everyone except some religious extremists and the dirt poor (who should and in many nations will get it for free) will do it," which sounds awfully extreme, and I would certainly not want that to become a base level expectation at anywhere near our current level of technology.
I wasn't necessarily saying that IUDs and implants are bad, just that any impediment that requires expert removal will likely reduce births.
Anecdote: despite being 32 and married when I had my first child, I would probably not have had children if I had to intentionally make plans about it ahead of time, vs putting off turning in the renewal paperwork for the oral contraception. We got stable jobs and house because we had a child, not the other way around. Otherwise, we would probably still be wandering around erratically employed and houseless.
This is the kind of marginal situation pro-natalists seem most interested in pushing on. People who are basically pro-social, educated, able to form a stable relationship, mid twenties or older, but aren't in any hurry to settle down and have kids, because that would be a hard change. Short time preference selects for irresponsibly having sex without forethought or precautions. Long time preference selects for planning for and then having the number of kids the person actually wants. But there are a lot of people in the middle who don't necessarily want to raise a baby in the medium term, because babies are hard, but kind of know it would be better to form a family than not.
Every additional thing we feel like we need to do before feeling ready for children is a roadblock to having children at all. So fertility goes down when women are expected to go to college and get a decent job before having children. And again if they're doing self actualization stuff, traveling, training for marathons, doing advocacy, or whatever else and getting social approval for it. And again if they need an unusually excellent partner, a house with a yard, to pay for private school. It would almost certainly go down again if they needed to go to a clinic multiple times to also choose the most excellent possible combination of their genetic potential.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2rafa 10mo ago
Why not germ cell selection for positive traits? I’m one of those “religious extremists” who believes creating new people just to throw most of them in the trash is evil incarnate made more evil by its banality, and I’d have no problem picking the right sperm and egg to combine and grow.
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Notes -
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.
People underestimate the ease with which large manufacturers like e.g. e-car makers could turn out million-strong robot armies once there's a good design.
Let's not get into what absolute craziness it'd be if you had bomb-chucking autonomous drones that'd fly to a supply truck, take a small bomb, swap battery, fly back & toss bomb accurately at a target and repeat.
Once you take out air defense cannons, which by necessity are >500kg and more and need engines, the enemy is extremely dead.
this is a quite significant thing to assume to exist soon
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
In addition to No_one's fleets of bomb-droppers, spotters and kamikaze drones, I'll add self-propelled artillery pieces, minelaying artillery like Russia used to great effect, traditional high-altitude airpower, ballistic missiles, SAMs and some low-altitude drones carrying longer-range missiles like Hellfires (do we really need a whole Apache gunship anymore?) Maybe some tracked vehicles with LMGs to escort the vulnerable heavier vehicles against anything that slips through. These all seem fairly open to mechanization, at least more than legged infantry. There would be great dividends in fire control, coordinates of enemy targets would go from drone spotter to robotic artillery at machine speeds.
Jamming would be one countermeasure, yet jammers put out a great big 'here I am' signal. That's begging for an anti-radiation missile or artillery fire, just like how radar-guided SAMs need to watch out. Jamming would be a useful tool but not necessarily a hard counter. In Ukraine, drones can drop bombs from above the effective range of ECM mounted on vehicles, or fly in on a ballistic trajectory after control is lost.
Such robotic forces would probably flounder in urban warfare, where line of sight is low and there's plenty of cover available. Nothing stops them laying siege though. Relying on a central computing/data processing post is also a risk, I'm envisioning a huge truck or armoured train full of expensive compute. I suppose you could put a lot of air defence and guards nearby though.
Perhaps the biggest risk is cyberwarfare, losing command and control over one's robots.
You are describing an artillery shell.
So long as artillery shells can't by themselves hold positions and police an area infantry will remain the sole reason any other military implement exists.
There is this myth that has captured the imagination of American aligned armies after the cold war, that air superiority or any other kind of area denial of that sort means anything by itself.
The lesson of all of the recent American defeats is that if you don't have grunts patrolling some territory unmolested, you don't hold shit. You're just having an extended operation behind enemy lines.
Maybe robots will one day have the flexibility to act as grunts, but so long as they're still, in any mass producible form, glorified fire support, you still need infantrymen.
Artillery shells don't have thermals and can't report what's going on under them.
Neither do modern kamikaze drones that are built in significant scale like we're talking about here. The thermals alone would be more expensive than the whole thing.
Besides, reconnaissance is not a primary goal of warfare, and has long escaped the sole magisteria of grunts.
They're already in use.
The recon drone has good thermals, costs less than smart artillery shells, the fpvs have shitty. (looks like 320x240) or less.
Lancet UAV has a thermals variant.
Satellites are rare, planes won't spot sneaky units and can be shot down anyway. Drones with good thermals at say, company level are a complete change of the meta.
You already know what I'm going to say: the variants that have good optics are not kamikaze unless they're purpose built to destroy HVTs and are therefore not what we're talking about. Smart artillery shells are a boutique implement, anything at that price is cool tech that's situationally useful but not meant for mass. And my concern is that the nature of war is mostly defined by mass.
You're right to say that company level reconnaissance has been greatly improved and that it's a game changer. I would never deny (relatively) cheap optics isn't an important development. Everyone is saying this is why Ukraine is an artillery war, because both sides have almost total information.
But again none of that is really what we're talking about when we talk about autonomous warfare. Because none of that changes the game in ways that create a novel equilibrium. We're just back to a state where defense has a large advantage and firepower beats maneuver. Which is certainly a change, but not one that has much to do with automation or robots in character.
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Infantry absolutely are needed right now, for urban warfare, for reconnaissance, for fighting in forests. I've made posts about how the US needs infantry and recruits in the combat arms generally.
Where the US went wrong in its desert wars was that it went in without a clear plan of what to do after ejecting Saddam/Taliban from power. The political skills just weren't there to follow up victory on the ground. It's not that there was a shortage of infantry but that infantry weren't committed in a well-considered campaign with the right goals. They pumped a grossly corrupt and incompetent Afghan govt full of money, allied with the child rapist elements of the country - yet the goal was to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. In Iraq they were catching and releasing terrorists (or torturing them in ways that made Arabs very angry). That doesn't fit with the war goal! The US is just really bad at a certain kind of martial imperialism, the British or Romans were much better at this kind of thing.
What I'm talking about is future conventional war, between serious countries that know what they're doing. A war with proper, realistic, military goals can be fought with firepower alone. In Desert Storm (a masterpiece in how wars should be fought), the firepower intensive elements of the Coalition won the victory, infantry were barely needed. There were some special forces that did useful work, some infantry engaged with their anti-tank weapons but it was mostly won by airpower, artillery and armour. There was a clear plan - thrash the Iraqi army on the battlefield till they leave Kuwait.
Holding positions - what does this mean? Sitting in a trench or hiding in a forest with rifles and ATGMs, ready to pop out and attack hostiles as they approach. Robots can do that in the future. Put an LMG on a little tracked vehicle or a bulked up Boston Dynamics bot, add some optics and that can hold positions fine, with the right software. Landmines can hold a position. You could leave some kamikaze drones in a forest on standby mode, they could potentially hold a position. Urban warfare makes things harder of course.
Policing is a different problem to these battlefield issues and the very name implies it's something for civilian police or military police, not infantry.
I understand it's categorically different when we're talking about combat, but to this particular issue it's significant because it draws the boundary of things that robots can't do.
The reason robots are not going to replace the infantryman at the margins is because they, in their current incarnations, are incapable of improvisation or dealing with general problems. They are indeed just a more sophisticated version of a mine.
And no, a mine can't hold a position. It can slow the enemy, it can increase attrition, it can funnel the enemy where you want him or free up your forces to be used elsewhere. It can do a lot of useful things, but it can't hold a position.
Loitering munitions can probably even make what used to be static defense a lot more mobile, but mobile or not it's still a castle/trap. You need men behind those supposedly automated defenses or the enemy is going to exploit it because robots can't adapt on the fly and can be jammed or sidestepped. Even drones can do so a lot less than actual boots on the ground.
Look at Hamas' low tech tour de force which was all against state of the art automated defenses. It's emblematic of what you do to deal with that kind of thing: you find some exploit, sit on it for a while, and nullify the defenses all at once when the enemy expects they're solid.
I'm well aware of what can be done, friend of mine actually writes that exact kind of software. And it's not magic, it's just a much more annoying claymore at the end of the day. Bots don't dig foxholes or deal with complex terrain very well. Their best use is in in freeing up hands to do other things. I'm skeptical you could effectively use automated turrets on the battlefield in a way that wouldn't eventually be nullified because I think the environment is too chaotic.
What do you mean by holding a position? Entrenched infantry slows down the enemy, inflicts losses, funnels them where you want them. The primary difference is that infantry is mobile, yet drones can also be mobile. Engineering vehicles can dig earthworks suitable for tanks. A mini-tank could presumably go hull-down, though it seems most threats come from above these days.
What good are entrenched infantry going to be when a swarm of kamikaze drones fly down into their trenches at 3 in the morning?
Assuming we've got them all linked up to an AGI performing the role of brigade command, robotic forces could adapt and execute plans, counter exploits. Wearing weird camouflage patterns probably wouldn't work on a decent AGI - if all else fails they could use thermal imaging. Palantir has already made a test LLM for quickly organizing strike missions, I see no reason why machines couldn't execute tactics. The speed and coordination of an unmanned force would be extremely impressive. Commanders are deluged in information from all the sensors in modern warfare, machines are best at managing a tsunami of data and providing quick answers. The gains in cost-efficiency and speed will probably outweigh the loss in human flexibility for most environments. I'll admit that infantry will be better in urban environments for a long time to come. But everyone seems to agree that urban environments are hellish to fight in, it might be easier to encircle and siege them out.
Jamming isn't a foolproof answer. The transmitter will be lit up for artillery or missile fire. Some weapons could be designed to go into an autonomous mode if they lose connection to command and control.
Au contraire, the problem was that the human guards were understrength and unprepared due to the holiday. Arrogance and complacency was their core problem. They had a bunch of sensors but relied on a response force of human soldiers that simply wasn't there. There weren't any landmines beneath the fence (or certainly not enough to impede Hamas planting explosives there). There wasn't a response force ready to go, they planned assuming a 24-hour warning time to deploy.
SIGINT apparently wasn't working on holidays: https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-israeli-intel-unit-wasnt-operational-on-october-7-due-to-personnel-decision/
Now maybe an AI-based combat system would also have failed here, yet the humans certainly didn't cover themselves in glory. Sensors are useless if the humans don't listen to them and aren't prepared to act. They missed the warnings, they fielded understrength forces, they waited too long to deploy and were uncoordinated in their initial attacks (since divisional HQ was directly attacked). Hamas also made good use of drones to defeat turrets and armour, which doesn't necessarily counter my argument.
Continuously effect control in the tactical sense "maintain physical influence over a specified area to prevent its use by enemy or to create conditions necessary for successful friendly operations" as the Americans put it.
But we're about to get in pedantic debates about things being tools of control instead of effecting control in and of themselves, because the real disagreement we are having, I think, is as to considering automated systems as agents. I do not think it is wise to do so.
I think this is the key to what I'm saying. The fact that the human element failed is evidence that it is still and will probably remain crucial to effective operations even in a world with drones.
If drones were effective on their own and could replace the infantryman, the lack of intelligence would not have mattered as the automated defenses could have adapted to the breach. But machines are not generally intelligent so they can't do that, you need some human to figure it out before he gets killed, and the fewer humans you have right next to the problem the harder it is to figure things out on the fly.
I do not mean to imply that automated systems won't play a big part as a force multiplier in wars current and future. I only mean to assert that you're not going to be able to remove the humans from direct battlefield involvement without compromising capability to an unreasonable degree.
This is why I've long prognosticated that flesh and blood pilots would continue to exist in significant numbers even as drones become more sophisticated. There's just too many situations where looking at the objective or the enemy with your eyes and making a decision right there and then beats interpreting a camera feed, even with how sophisticated modern sensors are.
And ground combat is a lot more chaotic and difficult to parse so I intuit it's even less likely.
Another factor we haven't really discussed is how fragile all this equipment is. For all the fictional cachet robots get for being indestructible machines of death, they are surprisingly brittle and needy. If we had to bet on who survives continuous shelling for the longest, I'm not sure I'm putting my money on the high tech stuff. Even if it's a more morally acceptable loss, obviously.
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The number of Ultra Orthodox and the number of Amish in the US is actually pretty similar (~400k). Good tfr estimates for both are fraught (both populations are actually experiencing falling birthrates) but many estimates are similar. Of course, neither the Amish or the Ultra-Orthodox in their current forms will ever be the majority in the US because their cultures will undergo huge changes as they become large shares of the population (as they already are in Israel).
A much larger Amish population will necessarily experience urbanization and the cultural and economic change that will follow, and a much larger ultra orthodox population will become more splintered and atomized, and as more men labor (or spend any time) beyond the kollel the whole institutional structure of that society will begin to crumble in places. In both cases, birthrates will fall (as they already are).
Ultra Orthodox was actually ~700000 in 2020, per wikipedia.
They seem to be about one generation ahead of the Amish, both doubling a bit quicker than every 20 years.
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Every estimate I have even seen shows an Hasidic doubling every 20-22 years. From 2006 to today. In Israel the Haredi double every 16 years. I have never seen anything even vaguely hinting at the population not doubling that quickly. Do you have a source for why it’s fraught or were you just saying that? It’s actually surprisingly easy to do a head count on how much the ultra orthodox are increasing.
We have much evidence that this will not be the case. Both Amish and Hasidim have high retainment rates of 85-95% which have not slowed due to any technological advance, and I recall reading that the Amish have a higher retainment now than in the 60s. The ultra-orthodox in America are centered in literally the most culturally diverse and dense part of the country, NYC and neighboring towns, and this has not stopped their increase.
Youre right that the Amish threat can be ignored — at most they will be a large peasant class with little political or financial power, and their way of life conflicts with urban living. But this is not so for the ultra orthodox. The way the community works is that the wealthy landlords and financiers etc disperse their funds to the poorer members who spend their time studying Talmud etc. There’s no shortage of wealthy ultra orthodox doing this. And they are also expanding their influence in shipping, I recall reading that 15% of all Amazon fulfillment in the US is done by ultra orthodox. So there’s no conceivable economic hindrance to their growth minus perhaps an anti-Hasidic boycott movement which I suppose is not out of the question in the future.
Isn’t Amazon fulfillment mostly contracted out to gig work? Seems a natural economic niche for people with incredibly specific and annoying religious rules governing their every action.
Sorry I think I got it wrong, they aren’t the drivers (haha) but the third party sellers / middle men. Apparently they have pretty insular marketing conferences and organizations to help other ultra orthodox enter this niche. But yeah this makes sense for them if they have to pray a number of times a day and can’t work around women. I was primarily mentioning this as an example of the sustainability of the ultra orthodox economy in light of their growth.
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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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The government spends $120bn a year on food stamps, which is much less net positive than this program.
I also wouldn't describe that program as 'trivial.'
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The obesity pandemic is also trivial to solve with people eating less. Mass migration would be easily solved if a wall would be build at the Mexican border.
Even if an easy solution is known, even if the solution is proven to work, it can be very very hard, often impossible, to implement it.
The Obesity epidemic is, in fact, easy to solve.
Start handing out Ozempic.
In the blink of an eye, the price dropped from ridiculous to well worth it, in India of all places. Fucking give the people killing themselves with food the pills to stop them wanting to.
Even if the price stays high, it doesn't have to get much cheaper for the cost-benefit to be grossly positive from the reduced healthcare costs for the fat and sick.
This is not impossible, or even very hard to implement. Negotiate costs. Make insurance cover it, if they don't make a rational decision to do so. Buy it from countries where it's cheaper.
Not pills, it's an injection. You try finding different places on your stomach to stab yourself weekly 😁
Plus, there are side-effects. Some people react so badly that they can't stay on the medications. If you're lucky, you'll just end up constipated because of the mechanism of action, which is to slow down the passage of food through the digestive system. If you're extra lucky, you get the "not wanting to eat so much" side-effect, but not everybody does get that.
No, it's not necessarily injections, you can quite literally get Semaglutide in oral form. I was looking up formulations for my mom yesterday.
Sigh. Everything has side effects. For semaglutide, they're not particularly noteworthy, regardless of your personal bad luck with it.
I didn't know about the oral formulations, the only ones I've encountered for both Ozempic and Trulicity have been the injectables, (ouch ouch ouch), and even then supply was intermittent because demand outstripped it (particularly for those looking for quickie weight loss).
India makes half the pharmaceuticals you consume in the West, be they cheap or expensive. So it's not surprise I can get it for next to nothing, especially in bulk. So could anyone really, depending on their appetite for Chinese grey markets.
Oral formulations of semaglutide are less effective than a jab, but they're also cheaper, and you can just take more of them.
The long and short (and thin) of it is that it works for most people, and for those it didn't work on/couldn't tolerate it, there are both similar drugs that are likely better at the weight loss deal, and tens of billions of dollars being spent finding more.
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Mass migration wouldn’t be solved with a wall because a large number of illegal immigrants (obviously more if the illegal land crossing route was closed) come legally and then overstay tourist or student or other visas. And, of course, a wall wouldn’t affect legal immigration.
The obesity pandemic is being solved as we speak with the new generation of appetite suppressant drugs. It will take time, but ultimately the market is generating the solution.
As soon as embryo selection for positive traits is possible, everyone except some religious extremists and the dirt poor (who should and in many nations will get it for free) will do it because parents have a biological drive to advantage their children in any way they can.
Designer babies seem like they’ll suppress the birthrate further among the sorts who do it for the same reason ultraselective preschools and the like to, leading to a natural selection effect towards tabooing it.
This is not true in practise. Parents who go for antenatal screens don't abort on a whim because the kid isn't just right, even in IVF, those who want kids almost always accept the first viable pregnancy with no obvious abnormalities.
They don't get into a tizzy about finding the absolute best, just the best of what's at hand.
In practice, the "my child must be perfect" mentality seems to lead to people hating the idea of parenting and not wanting to have kids- that's the reason for east Asia's anomalously low birthrates. It's hyper-k selection and human beings really hate hyper-k selection. Embryo selection feeds into that mentality for obvious reasons and I find it dimly hilarious that the modern west is selecting for religious fundamentalism so strongly. In 2260 or whenever star trek was supposed to be set the stereotype of whites will be dogmatic, socially conservative, and highly natal.
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That isn't what would suppress the birthrate, but rather changing the burden of action from having to end a pregnancy, toward having to take (non-fun, non-instinctual) action to begin a pregnancy.
Likewise, I would expect implants to suppress the birth rate vs oral contraception, because the implant has to be intentionally removed by a doctor, while the pill might just run out or be forgotten (or "forgotten" with some subconscious drive toward having children).
See, I think it's all moot because human labor will shortly cease to matter. But ignoring that:
The people who are opting for pregnancy in a considered manner, especially those who want to go through IVF and potentially embryo selection, want a baby more than is the norm, or they wouldn't bother. People who adopt instead of accepting being childless probably want kids more than average after all.
My exam in about a dozen hours leaves me well prepared to field that point. You know why implants are offered in the first place? It's precisely because they reduce unwanted births.
Some poor 18 year old girl is scared of being knocked up? We give her an IUD. A 26 yo woman, we ask her if is planning a family. No? Or a 36 yo who says she's got 3 kids and not one more? Then an IUD, or perhaps an implant, which can be trivially removed for any reason, let alone if they desire kids.
Leaving aside total birth rates, where I expect changes to be minor, this is also helping mitigate dysgenics. A lower class girl with low time preferences has far lower odds of being knocked up again by her deadbeat boyfriend, and then has every opportunity to remove it when she legitimately feels ready.
Labor isn't the only reason it can be good to have children and grandchildren. Maybe they'll be good, interesting people. Human labor would also cease to matter if there were no humans, but most people don't want that.
Yes, and that's fine, if someone is already doing IVF, then embryo selection makes sense. I was pushing back about the claim above that "everyone except some religious extremists and the dirt poor (who should and in many nations will get it for free) will do it," which sounds awfully extreme, and I would certainly not want that to become a base level expectation at anywhere near our current level of technology.
I wasn't necessarily saying that IUDs and implants are bad, just that any impediment that requires expert removal will likely reduce births.
Anecdote: despite being 32 and married when I had my first child, I would probably not have had children if I had to intentionally make plans about it ahead of time, vs putting off turning in the renewal paperwork for the oral contraception. We got stable jobs and house because we had a child, not the other way around. Otherwise, we would probably still be wandering around erratically employed and houseless.
This is the kind of marginal situation pro-natalists seem most interested in pushing on. People who are basically pro-social, educated, able to form a stable relationship, mid twenties or older, but aren't in any hurry to settle down and have kids, because that would be a hard change. Short time preference selects for irresponsibly having sex without forethought or precautions. Long time preference selects for planning for and then having the number of kids the person actually wants. But there are a lot of people in the middle who don't necessarily want to raise a baby in the medium term, because babies are hard, but kind of know it would be better to form a family than not.
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That would be my expectation as well.
Every additional thing we feel like we need to do before feeling ready for children is a roadblock to having children at all. So fertility goes down when women are expected to go to college and get a decent job before having children. And again if they're doing self actualization stuff, traveling, training for marathons, doing advocacy, or whatever else and getting social approval for it. And again if they need an unusually excellent partner, a house with a yard, to pay for private school. It would almost certainly go down again if they needed to go to a clinic multiple times to also choose the most excellent possible combination of their genetic potential.
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Why not germ cell selection for positive traits? I’m one of those “religious extremists” who believes creating new people just to throw most of them in the trash is evil incarnate made more evil by its banality, and I’d have no problem picking the right sperm and egg to combine and grow.
Sure, I should probably have said ‘designer babies’ or whatever to include that whole category of possibilities.
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