You mean the documentary unnatural selection. I have seen it, but I recall something quite different. He did infact advocate that at some point people will use this technology without understanding it. It surely feels like a premature opinion, but in retrospect people use many life changing technologies without understanding them either
Does everyone understand what they eat? how electricity works? how their smartphone works? the drugs their doctor prescribes?
True, but you always have to balance them with the potential issues that could arise. I don't understand how drugs works, and that's why I need a doctor's prescription to take them. Many people don't know much about electricity, and that's why there are laws regulating how electric wirings have to be made and that say that only trained electricians can do wirings in homes. Many people don't understand how smartphones work, but what's the greatest damage that can result from this and how likely is it to happen?
I was looking to wire up some solar panels to a cottage in the countryside. Since municipal regulations didn't apply, provincial ones did, which were that if you've built the structure for your own occupancy and follow the electrical code, this is completely legal.
So the code applies, but it's not restricted to trained electricians in some cases.
Same goes for drugs in much of the world. Personally I think it's a little ridiculous people need to get a script for stuff like viagra or tretinoin or finasteride.
It becomes almost farcical when online clinics exist which will do a consultation without obtaining medical records or even seeing you via video and write you a script. Or that celebrities can get private doctors who will write them whatever. Or when you consider most countries outside NA and the EU where you can get pretty much whatever you want OTC.
Not to mention you can order TONS of different research chemicals and "nootropics", completely legally, online.
If you were to pass a regulation that was essentially "only registered genetic engineers can experiment in any way with this" it would be way more restrictive than anything we have for pharmaceuticals, or even domestic electricity.
What you're suggesting would be on par with regulations for nuclear technology. IDK seems maybe a bit excessive...
When you start playing with genetic engineering directly, you're stepping out of your co-evolved "common sense" space into a much more vicious domain, and you get a double-whammy in that not only is this space much more vicious, you are also very very much trying to interact it with intuition built by interactions completely unsuitable for it.
No, people do not understand what they eat, how electricity works, or how their smartphone works, but they are co-evolved with all those things. You are not co-evolved with the results of genetic engineering. You are also not co-evolved with raw exposure to the space of all possible drugs, which is why I left that one out of my list. Notice the incredibly more strict protocols our society uses around those than we use for food, electricity, or smartphones, because we are not co-evolved with arbitrary drug chemicals. None of the other three things are unregulated by any stretch of the imagination, but neither are they regulated to the extent that pharmaceuticals are.
Genetic engineering has a degree of danger beyond anything you are co-evolved with. I'm not directly arguing very much further than "you can't analogize it with anything you are familiar with"; it's a rich question. From a certain point of view (and a pretty good one at that) my entire point is that the question is exponentially more complicated than you are giving it credit for; I'm not trying to actually answer it, implicitly or otherwise. I mean "exponentially" quite carefully and mathematically; part of the co-evolution is that it selects a much, much smaller subset of possibilities out of the full exponential space, resulting in a much smaller "space of interest".
- it is immoral to genetically experiment on others (especially children) without their consent.
- individuals should have the right to attempt to genetically engineer themselves if they wish: if they understand and accept the risk society should not seek to stop them.
I'm also curious if there are any scenarios where this might be used on a host and an infectious agent is present in the host which shares the right cut point to create some unknown mutation. It's probably 1 in a million, if it's even possible. But it's interesting to think about.
Correcting germ line issues could still be preformed by some trained person to avoid potentially making things worse.
Human mutations arise in two major settings: the germline and soma. Germline mutations occur in sperm, eggs, and their progenitor cells and are therefore heritable. Somatic mutations occur in other cell types and cannot be inherited by offspring. Somatic and germline mutations matter in health and disease.
https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
We don’t allow anyone and everyone to play around with nuclear technology. I wish no one had ever played with nuclear technology. We would have avoided a lot of harm already caused. And a lot of harm that is surely yet to come, because ‘yet’ is a very long time. Infinite even.
And maybe nuclear genetics will nonetheless develop in the hands of power seeking governments. But it’s still better than Steve from 2 streets over accidentally unleashing a strain of resistant bacteria on the neighborhood.
And yet, computers are extremely powerful tools, arguably the most powerful we have created.
And look what free access to them has accomplished... Sure, it has caused quite a bit of cyber crime, but it's all balanced out by a massive amount of open and freely exchanged innovation.
Now imagine an alternate history where we somehow restricted access to programming to people with computer science degrees working under registered companies... I think that history would be pretty regressive.
So I think your reaction is understandable, I share it, but also hold some significant doubts.
To my shame, I almost did when I was fucking around with a microcontroller hooked up to some fairly powerful motors.
Not everyone uses code to make smartphone apps and video games, or computer applications. A vast amount is used to control everything from your car to your toaster :/
edit: Oh, I also botched the charging for some lithium ion cells and caused them to combust.
Shit, now I feel like I'm refuting your point about death-by-C++, but also supporting that we need more regulations to protect against idiots like myself.
True, and hopefully after the Therac-25 incident we learned that, while it is generally fine having people playing with programming, for certain applications it is best to leave it to professionals with a deep understanding of what they're doing.
>Shit, now I feel like I'm refuting your point about death-by-C++, but also supporting that we need more regulations to protect against idiots like myself.
Yes, we likely need more regulation, at least for safety critical applications (but I don't know if those are already in place).
Even just having an expert level in any one of those pieces is a serious undertaking.
Similarly, albeit to a vastly greater degree, nobody entirely understands the multitude of cellular machinery, their interactions, their chemical processes, or encoding, in any species. Even 50% in a single organism is probably lifetimes away.
So yeah, biohackers are equal parts arrogant, reckless, and stupid... Life should be given appropriate respect, and it's hard to see how "DIY bioengineering" doesn't spit in the face of that.
Yet I would hate to see a future where people are barred from their own physiology, their own code. Removing your right to mess with your own life just seems authoritarian and oppressive to me, at the most fundamental level.
Editing OTHER people's genome should be highly regulated, as well as anything that has the potential to reproduce outside a controlled environment. This of course includes microbes within your own body, viral infections, gut bacteria, etc.
But I think people not being able to edit their own code is horrifically dystopian. Should probably be a requirement that you also have your reproductive rights removed too though, since your descendants wouldn't have a say.
This is a hysterical overreaction to what I said. First of all, no one is stopping you for editing your own code - you can stand out in the sun all day and pick up point mutations until they kill you. Go to the gym, and your body will start upregulating certain protein factors to repair muscle. Change your diet and your gut microbiome will change. If you can find some radioactive rocks, you can really go to town! No one is stopping you.
What I am saying is that you are so grossly underinformed about the complexity of the genome and human biochemistry, that to even compare it to computer architecture can only be described as arrogance. People who alter their genomes in any measurable way will mostly suffer greatly and die a painful death, so yeah, it should probably be regulated to professionals for the foreseeable future.
> Editing OTHER people's genome should be highly regulated, as well as anything that has the potential to reproduce outside a controlled environment. This of course includes microbes within your own body, viral infections, gut bacteria, etc.
What happens if a virus picks up your mutation and spreads it throughout the population?
I respect them.
I joined a biohacker Discord a while ago out of curiousity.
One of the channels was dedicated to getting a Chinese company to synthesize a pipeline pharmaceutical that was being researched in mice by some company. The people in the channel didn't want to wait for the human trials to experiment on themselves.
Long story short, they got a synthesis and paid thousands to confirm its purity. Several people took it and experienced some extremely concerning, potentially life threatening side effects. I noped out of the Discord because I didn't want to be associated with that group in any way after watching how they operated.
Genetic engineering is a whole new level of potential problems.
There are reasons why medical development takes time and money. And why rare diseases are underserved. And no amount of "disruption" is going to change the simple question of cost in that equation. So if VCs want to change that, they can simply use some of their "free" billions to fund proper development and research.