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Comment by kokotajlod | Hacker News Reader

If you read the scenario, you'll see that the regulations are mostly about what people can do with giant compute clusters, and not about the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are required to be totally transparent to the public.

As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone delivery was strangled by regulations too...? Plan A isn't a proposal to never build superintelligence, it's a proposal to build it more cautiously and transparently.

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Human cloning and genetic editing isn't stalled because we agreed it's unethical. It's not pursued because at the current level of advancements, it's pretty useless. The things we can do there are niche. It's easy to ban something that's not very useful.

If we had a way to make gene edited humans a lot smarter, a lot stronger or live a lot longer? Or a way to quick-grow human bodies to adulthood in a couple years? Capabilities that private actors or countries may want, ethics be damned? That would be closer to what we have with AI right now.

It's not useless. We know enough about DNA to be able to make better humans, but people get real squickly real fast when you talk about that. It has stalled because of that. If we go in and just check the DNA for Downs or Parkinson's, we can't have a conversation on aborting the foetus without religious beliefs coming into play. Designer children aren't a thing, despite the ability to edit DNA to do specific things. Hair and eye color are easy enough to go in and edit for. Humanity has decided to opt out of doing that for now.

Marginally better humans. And IVF paired with embryo selection is very competitive in that niche.

Now, we're getting better at predicting polygenic traits, and we're getting beefy multi-edit pipelines that might provide a meaningful advantage over embryo selection working in multiple animals. But as of yet, the advantage of genetic editing in humans over just doing aggressive IVF and dredging the embryos for desirable traits is minor.

Bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Can't advance the tech fast without actively using it, can't actively use the tech until it's advanced enough for the benefits to override ethical concerns. So it's getting there, but at a glacial pace.

> If we go in and just check the DNA for Downs or Parkinson's

You should consider reading the wikipedia page about Parkinson’s disease.

You should consider reading more deeply than Wikipedia to be properly informed on a subject. There are a handful of very rare mutations that confer a high risk of getting it that we can detect. They are very rare. This isn't the same thing as being able to give a risk score if the DNA doesn't have all the rare mutations. But the science is there for those unlucky rare cases to say there is a high chance that a specific coding of DNA will result in Parkinson's.

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