4 ms·

Because, over the long term, it would reduce the selective pressure on the ability to gestate embryos in vivo, unnecessarily increasing dependence on technology

Because, over the long term, it would reduce the selective pressure on the ability to gestate embryos in vivo, unnecessarily increasing dependence on technology. We should try to avoid adding extinction to the list of consequences of the collapse of technological civilization.

mrfusion 9y ago
Providing eyeglasses reduces the selective pressure for good eyesight.
- wtbob 9y ago
  That's actually something I worry about. I'm blind without my glasses, seriously, debilitatingly blind. With them, of course, I have better-than-perfect (for some value of 'perfect') vision. Should I have children? Is it ethical to do so? I honestly don't know.
  - libc 9y ago
    What is your specific visual condition, if you don't mind my asking. Most people who I'd characterize as "debilitatingly blind" are lucky if they get any benefit from conventional eyeglasses, let alone "better-than-perfect" vision. I have a significant visual impairment myself (myopia, aphakia, and nystagmus) but I wouldn't put myself in that category.
    - wtbob 9y ago
      Astigmatism and severe myopia. They're easily correctable, but without glasses I can't see more than about three inches from my nose. At normal viewing distances I simply cannot even see things other people can see, like letters, small animals or children &c. Without glasses I'd be severely crippled. I've conducted a few experiments trying to move around in public without them, and it's beyond frightening.
      - libc 9y ago
        Thanks for sharing, and forgive my sounding skeptical. I lucked out because the aphakia and myopia sort of cancel each other out, I still need glasses but they're primarily for near-distance. If I hadn't undergone cataract surgery as an infant, I'd probably have similar challenges.
  - mrfusion 9y ago
    My view is anything we have technology to cure we shouldn't worry about. The more problems we can treat with technology the smaller the genetic search space becomes. evolution can focus just on the things we can't easily solve.
bykovich 9y ago
you're a fucking moron dude
- sctb 9y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
return0 9y ago
Can we keep talking about natural selection when may soon be able to edit our DNA, however?
derefr 9y ago
How could "technological civilization" collapse, at this point? We have extremely well-distributed records—spoken, written, digital, and more—of all of our technology and how to use it. "We forgot how" worlds are just impossible at this point, unless we all get a disease that renders us incapable of tool-usage, reading, and speech. (At which point we're not human anyway.)
- aperrien 9y ago
  Although I agree that this is unlikely, until we are multi planetary, with at least four worlds/stations, this is not the case.
  - derefr 9y ago
    To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter. † See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across. (And even that ignores the amount of "skipping ahead" that just the existing knowledge already loaded into people's heads would enable.) Unless we all got amnesia at once, and all lost the ability to read (and those who can, to read braille), we'd be back to civilization before the generation was over—and back to simple longevity-extending practices like freezing sperm and ova long before that.
    - serf 9y ago
      >To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Technology onset: Grey-goo type scenario Human onset: massive cultural shift to demonize knowledge. It's happened before. It didn't wipe all technology away, but it slowed progress to a stand-still.
serf 9y ago
I think that's a fascinating concept for a hard-fiction author to go nuts with.
ryan_j_naughton 9y ago
This is such a naive understanding of human history. The defining breaking point between the Homo genus and our ape ancestors is tool use 1-2 million years ago. Those tools (and our subsequent use of fire) enabled us to dramatically reduce the size of our digestive tract. We get more energy from our food and spend less resources to digest it because of cooking, a technology. We have thus evolved wherein we are not capable of surviving on an entirely non cooked diet that we would gather ourselves (the energy input to gather the food plus the energy to digest the raw food is too high -- cooking makes it feasible with our technologically adapted digestive tract). Yet no one worries about us going extinct if we were to lose access to fire or cooking utensils -- because we can recreate them with ease. Thus, the concern shouldn't be dependence on a technology but on the ease of us losing that technology. Nonetheless, I agree that this technology is much easier to lose than fire or cooking knowledge.

mrfusion 9y ago

Providing eyeglasses reduces the selective pressure for good eyesight.

wtbob 9y ago
That's actually something I worry about. I'm blind without my glasses, seriously, debilitatingly blind. With them, of course, I have better-than-perfect (for some value of 'perfect') vision. Should I have children? Is it ethical to do so? I honestly don't know.
- libc 9y ago
  What is your specific visual condition, if you don't mind my asking. Most people who I'd characterize as "debilitatingly blind" are lucky if they get any benefit from conventional eyeglasses, let alone "better-than-perfect" vision. I have a significant visual impairment myself (myopia, aphakia, and nystagmus) but I wouldn't put myself in that category.
  - wtbob 9y ago
    Astigmatism and severe myopia. They're easily correctable, but without glasses I can't see more than about three inches from my nose. At normal viewing distances I simply cannot even see things other people can see, like letters, small animals or children &c. Without glasses I'd be severely crippled. I've conducted a few experiments trying to move around in public without them, and it's beyond frightening.
    - libc 9y ago
      Thanks for sharing, and forgive my sounding skeptical. I lucked out because the aphakia and myopia sort of cancel each other out, I still need glasses but they're primarily for near-distance. If I hadn't undergone cataract surgery as an infant, I'd probably have similar challenges.
- mrfusion 9y ago
  My view is anything we have technology to cure we shouldn't worry about. The more problems we can treat with technology the smaller the genetic search space becomes. evolution can focus just on the things we can't easily solve.

bykovich 9y ago

you're a fucking moron dude

sctb 9y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

return0 9y ago

Can we keep talking about natural selection when may soon be able to edit our DNA, however?

derefr 9y ago

How could "technological civilization" collapse, at this point? We have extremely well-distributed records—spoken, written, digital, and more—of all of our technology and how to use it. "We forgot how" worlds are just impossible at this point, unless we all get a disease that renders us incapable of tool-usage, reading, and speech. (At which point we're not human anyway.)

aperrien 9y ago
Although I agree that this is unlikely, until we are multi planetary, with at least four worlds/stations, this is not the case.
- derefr 9y ago
  To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter. † See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across. (And even that ignores the amount of "skipping ahead" that just the existing knowledge already loaded into people's heads would enable.) Unless we all got amnesia at once, and all lost the ability to read (and those who can, to read braille), we'd be back to civilization before the generation was over—and back to simple longevity-extending practices like freezing sperm and ova long before that.
  - serf 9y ago
    >To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Technology onset: Grey-goo type scenario Human onset: massive cultural shift to demonize knowledge. It's happened before. It didn't wipe all technology away, but it slowed progress to a stand-still.

serf 9y ago

I think that's a fascinating concept for a hard-fiction author to go nuts with.

ryan_j_naughton 9y ago

This is such a naive understanding of human history. The defining breaking point between the Homo genus and our ape ancestors is tool use 1-2 million years ago. Those tools (and our subsequent use of fire) enabled us to dramatically reduce the size of our digestive tract. We get more energy from our food and spend less resources to digest it because of cooking, a technology. We have thus evolved wherein we are not capable of surviving on an entirely non cooked diet that we would gather ourselves (the energy input to gather the food plus the energy to digest the raw food is too high -- cooking makes it feasible with our technologically adapted digestive tract). Yet no one worries about us going extinct if we were to lose access to fire or cooking utensils -- because we can recreate them with ease. Thus, the concern shouldn't be dependence on a technology but on the ease of us losing that technology. Nonetheless, I agree that this technology is much easier to lose than fire or cooking knowledge.