Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama

I mostly have slippery slope concerns here. Once you've given the government the right to choose some -- any -- characteristics of your children, I fear the list of these characteristics can only expand.

I read the abstract. The link says they do 50,000 SNP's with their chip in the dairy industry. 23andMe does hundred thousands of SNPs according to their website.

They do some statistics with that data because to see which SNPs are important but otherwise I don't see what they do much different.

You're right. I meant the mean-- I've corrected it.

In this case they would have to change already existing law in a way that is blatantly against the interests of the majority and manage to do so it globally - because if any country defects from a policy of limiting top mods to the upper class, every country has to, or get buried 20 years later. This is not a winnable political struggle.

Can you think of an even better coordination strategy than mine?

Why are you calling your suggestions a "coordination strategy"? As far as I can see you are suggesting top-down policies enforced by the usual state enforcement mechanisms. You are talking in the language of "require", "forbid", "regulate" -- that's not coordination, that's the usual command-and-control.

Sure. One thing I might mention to someone with that utility function is that if humanity gets destroyed by an enhanced psychopath, that will probably happen right around the same time that enhanced scientists would be working to speed technological progress. So even someone with a relatively myopic utility function will in many cases favor caution.

I get the idea that FAI takes more intelligence than AGI, as AGI might be able to be brute-forced by reverse-engineering the brain or evolutionary approaches, whereas de novo AI is far harder, let alone AGI. This would mean that increasing intelligence would make the world safer. I don't see why enhanced psychopaths are more likely than enhanced empaths.

If you're the kind of person who gives up when faced with hard challenges, that's fine; I guess we're just different in that way.

No, I'm certainly not, however I am realistic and I do prioritise. I don't think the risk from genetic enhancement is all that great, and indeed it may be a net positive.

Anyway, so I think that mandatory enhancement is not going to be popular. However, other ideas do seem more plausible:

One way to prepare might be differential technological development. In particular, maybe it's possible to decrease the cost of gene editing/selection technologies while retarding advances in our knowledge of which genes contribute to intelligence.

So, this is a reasonable idea. Governments could prioritise research into stopping diseases above increasing intelligence, and indeed this is likely to be the case anyway, as this is less controversial. Increasing compassion or even docility could also be prioritised above increasing intelligence.

extend the benefits of designer babies to everyone for free regardless of their social class.

This is also a good idea. It seems inevitable that some of the rich will be early adopters before the technology is cheap enough to be made free to all. However, the cost of sequencing has been going down 5x per year, meaning that it is likely to quickly become widely available.

Overall, I would say the best strategy seems to be to take a more libertarian than authoritarian approach, but try to funnel money into researching the genetics of various antisocial personality disorders, try to make the technology free, and either don't patient the genes or ensure that the patients don't last that long.

I appreciate specific criticisms but if you're just going to be generically demoralizing, I don't usually find myself getting a lot out of that.

Apologies if I've been sounding demoralising, that's not my intention. I think your comments on this subject are interesting, and I've upvoted them, but since I find I have more to say about points I disagree with than points I agree with, in general I might tend to sound more critical than I actually am.

I'll reply to the rest of your comment later, and find something positive to say.

You probably think the pro-science side is weak

I don't think the "sides" here will have a "pro-science" and "anti-science" labels. The dispute is going to be, as usual, about power, money, and values.

Do you want to be specific about what failure modes you forsee?

Sure. CASSANDRA MODE! X-)

I foresee first a blank prohibition based on the "we have a nice business going on here, this shit sound scary and, worse, capable of inducing serious socio-political changes -- let's just forbid it all". Then I foresee a gray market developing for the children of the rich and famous and the regulators turning a blind eye to it. Then I foresee the gray market becoming so widespread it will become impossible to ignore it any more, so the regulators will come up with regulations to safeguard public safety and morality. These will initially take the negative form as bans on certain types of modifications. Eventually they will add mandatory modifications ("This is just like vaccines! Are you anti-science?! Don't you want the best for your children?") which is where things will start to get really iffy. If the society manages to get through this without the wheels flying off (I'm not holding my breath) we'll probably get to the "everything not forbidden is mandatory" stage.

Is that specific enough?

Of course the "pro-science" side looks like it's winning. One aspect of winning is the ability to have yourself declared "pro-science" and even have government agencies re-write past data to support your argument.

To get a more objective view, let's look at past government interventions, for example, the history of government nutrition policy is full of the "pro-science" side winning with bad science and imposing it on the public.

How about you explain why your definition of "individuality" is something anyone should care about.

At this point I should admit I have not really invested an immense amount of time into figuring this out, but still may be useful: when we value something merely because it is different or because it was freely chosen, it suggests it is not much better than other things or else we would like it for its actualy betterness. So people may customize their body or car to look a bit different than most others so that they can show they are different individuals (cue Life of Brian here) or that they choose some things autonomously instead of accepting the default choice, but all these things are not so important.

However when something is important we usually want it the best, we don't want 100 different ways of manufacturing nails just that every factory can play special snowflake, we want one most efficient way and every factory adopting it. When things matter, and some things are better than others, then reasonable people don't play special snowflakery and don't go for an individual, custom solution just to show off their non-conformism.

So I have a generic vision of reasonable people wanting to do things the best way, uniformly, but when something does not matter much or one way is not so much better than the others then they relax the unformity and it is okay to play special snowflakery and customize everything and express our oh so awesome nonconformism in them.

I think this must make sense, I am just not so sure anymore that it is really relevant to the question. As I have to admit things like memories do not fall either of these buckets. As for overriding my personality, well, if highly inefficient ways of dealing with some problems are considered part of one's personality (i.e. habits) why do you think I am even here on LW? That is pretty much the whole point. This whole website is all about trying to get as close to the self-rewriting AI as our biological hardware allows.

Go back a couple of hundred years. Define the defect as "lack of belief in Jesus Christ". It qualifies under your criteria.

For every gene we could search for the best one that's out there and exchange the human version with it.

This would be an extraordinarily bad idea especially from yeast in particular. 'Best' is contextual.

Yes. At least a choice is offered. Current EU level taxes, although fairly insane (€3-€7 a pack on the average and without the taxes it would be under 50 cents), are still low enough to compete with the black market, the black market did not get very big yet. So this is more or less inside normalcy.

When a choice is not offered, such as the categorical ban of smoking at bars in most EU countries, the typical choices are to either to engage in something illegal and black-marketish, or to obey, and to obey has two versions, either to go there for a drink and not smoke, or to not go at all.

The difference between the two that the outcomes of the first are fairly calculable, predictable, and easily amendable. You can notch up a Pigovian tax until you notice the black market is too big of an annoyance, then turn it down a notch or two. The second option leads to unpredictable chaos, anything from bars closing down to public parks becoming impromptu drinking and smoking avenues.

So for the sake of a predictable order, it would be safer if bans would be replaced with special taxes that allow more granularity, such as allowing smoking in a bar that pays hazard pay and extra health insurance to the waitstaff. The market can price that in. While the non-smokers can enjoy lower prices in the smoke-free establishments who can compete better this way. Again the goal would be to fine-tune it until you reach a balance where both types of establishments flourish.

Now I realize there is something weird calling a plan that involves the governmental micromanagement of market libertarian-ish, but the point is it is still more so, still more market oriented, than categorical bans.

Also the legal use being restricted from more and more spaces.

Given that I can't even legally grow genetically engineered plants on my balcony in most of Europe. growing genetically engineered humans is likely not something we will allow.

That's why genetically engineered Chinese will soon buy Europe and turn it into a theme park. With authentically unenhanced natives, no less.

It's easy to write the laws, but it may be hard to enforce them.

It isn't easy to identify people who are just modified to be in the upper end of normal human capacities.

Is there anything that would prevent that number from increasing?

Who exactly in society is supposed to have an incentive to produce "docile" people

Those who have power.

Also, you haven't explained why a "docile" citizenry is a bad thing. Personally, I'm leaning towards it being a good thing, especially if enforced universally.

I think we are going to have a radical values-based disagreement about that.

in the sense that they prefer reading over loud parties

That's not what "docile" means.

If we're going to be developing future technologies that increase existential risks, making humans more socially well-adjusted and free of criminal tendencies sounds great. But there's the problem that politicians against this change may refer to it as making humans more "docile".

Sounds horrible to me, but you know what? I'll exacerbate your optics problem and just call the end result "genetic slaves".

If politicians want to be in charge of a "docile" citizenry, changing the genes of newborn babies is not going to help with that, since by the time the newborns are grown up the politicians will be out of office.

I don't think your model of politicians is very good if you think that they only care about what happens when they are in office.

Maybe we can stop sneaking in connotations and debate things on their merits

Reducing testosterone would be a way to make people less aggressive. Even if it does reduce criminality, there a price to pay.

If politicians want to be in charge of a "docile" citizenry, changing the genes of newborn babies is not going to help with that, since by the time the newborns are grown up the politicians will be out of office.

China has already used selective breeding to breed very tall basketball players.

I expect the people reading Less Wrong are substantially more "docile" than members of the general public in the sense that they prefer reading over loud parties and rarely get in to fights.

Shouldn't enjoyment of reading and loud parties be largely orthogonal? Personally I enjoy reading and raves and fighting (martial arts grappling, not pub brawls). But more to the point, I'm not sure this is the right definition of docile - books are far more dangerous than rock concerts.

I do however agree that its not obvious whether a "docile" citizenry is a bad thing.