Japan set to allow gene-editing tools for research into early human development
nature.com
nature.com
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
* 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.