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Comment by crazynick4 | Hacker News Reader

> I am not sure this argument works, because it's continuation is that "they also brought us autism inducing vaccines, cancer inducing wifi, and potato fish hybrids that are evil in some vague way".

Just because wifi doesn't induce cancer doesn't mean it's a good idea to have plastic leeching into our water. I don't see the correlation.

Also, I should add that messing with the balance of an ecosystem can have drastic unforeseen consequences. China decided to get rid of sparrows (or some other small bird) mid-20th century, and for the next few years they were struck with famine because there were no birds left to control the locust population, which then multiplied out of control.

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There can be unforeseen consequences, that's why nobody advocates to just randomly create gene drives for all the insects. The targeted species of mosquito is not the only one, it is an invasive species in many places, and everywhere there are other mosquitos that can take its place.

Should we use gene drives to eliminate species with caution? Of course! But does that mean we should not even think about it just because there may be unforeseen consequences (or as the grandparent comment says: because it is invented by scientists who also invented plastic, which other people used as cheap water bottles, and there is an unconfirmed hypothesis about it being bad)?

I think the answer to this question is clearly no, and the way the grandparent comment is written is simply antiscience fear-mongering.

nobody banned thinking or communicating about technological possibilities, and it is healthy to communicate concerns

I just think that there needs to be significantly more caution - almost a pathologically high amount of caution.

Think of it from a software engineering perspective. All the unit tests that are done to ensure 100% code coverage, all the testing in identical staging environments, and yet we still have to revert sometimes, once the code is in production.

And this all still happens in environment where the code is something we wrote ourselves, is properly and thoroughly documented, with all dependencies and relationships clearly defined. And still, major problems happen but it's nice that we can just go to Git and try again.

With genetic engineering, the genetic code was not written by us, has zero documentation, the relationships are left for us to figure out, and there's no proper staging environment with a working ecosystem for us to test things in. We basically deploy straight to production after a few unit tests. So, yes, definitely I don't think there is currently enough caution being taken.

Of course, the reality is that genetic engineering won't stop, not until we shoot ourselves in the foot a few times and people realize the seriousness of it.

not only is the comment about China accurate it elicits a great point.

to add in a Hayek quote

>The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.'

there is a great podcast from Econtalk [0] talking about this in detail that I highly recommend a listen if you are not familiar with it.

back to the point, these changes have unforeseen consequences, some may be good but some could cause a new type of famine or disease that could have devastating consequences. I do not think this point can be overstated.

[0] https://www.econtalk.org/frank-dikotter-on-maos-great-famine...

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