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The most impactful technology that will ever exist is "engineering human beings". This becomes possible as we identify genes for things like intelligence and w

The most impactful technology that will ever exist is "engineering human beings". This becomes possible as we identify genes for things like intelligence and with CRISPR. Intelligence is of course huge. Trustworthiness is huge. Probably 20% of GDP is related to trust whether it's paying for security, police, the military, $100s of billions of excess health care spending from over-billing and over-testing. I think engineered human super-intelligence will have inestimably more impact than AI...but it enables AI because in a world of a few billion Leonardos, everyone will have figured out ways to solve repetitive work.

cLeEOGPw 9y ago
So far intelligence don't seem to be as one-sidedly positive trait as it seems for most here. With increased intelligence comes increased risk factors of many diseases like depression, anxiety, bipolar, and many others. That means that less intelligent people have actually more reliable brain health than more intelligent. So unless this problem is solved, simply adding the genes that, among other things, increase IQ, can backfire in unforeseen ways. Another thing is more intelligent people are predisposed to be less reproductive. In this way lesser intelligence is a balancing force for mental health and survival of species.
Joeri 9y ago
We don't need smarter people, we need better ethics. Many of the monsters from history were highly intelligent. Many of the world's problems have ready solutions which are not applied because people are being clever. Think of intelligence as a force multiplier, if you apply it to a bad person they become a terrible person. It would be disastrous to start genetic engineering for intelligence prior to tackling the ethics problem. The biggest issue with better ethics is that we can't define them, so we couldn't optimize for them. Nobody agrees on what a good person is because nobody agrees on the meaning of good. But meanwhile the real world outcomes are decidedly not good.
- wiz21c 9y ago
  spot on
- sleepychu 9y ago
  As you approach the limit of intelligence the danger that you'll realise altruism works for the whole but not the individual must increase, right?
  - brlewis 9y ago
    Are you saying that as people get smarter they're less likely to think satisfaction in life comes from being someone who makes the world better? That they're more likely to think that satisfaction in life comes from getting more stuff than the next guy?
    - sleepychu 9y ago
      I think if you engineer for maximum intelligence, yes. I want to make the world better but it's a bad use of my time from an individual perspective.
- narrator 9y ago
  Elitism needs people to be unequal. That will weaken as an ideology when people can copy each other's genes. Inequality might still be retained by carefully guarding information and knowledge that confers an advantage.
  - andai 9y ago
    Oh man, I can't wait to go to jail and/or be deleted when I reincarnate with pirated DNA.
    - croon 9y ago
      Real life rogueli[k|t]e.
- Kostic 9y ago
  It seems to me that you are arguing for wisdom. Ethics are a product while wisdom is an ability, like intelligence.
- dmichulke 9y ago
  Being 'bad' is IMO a consequence of two things: - You can be bad (i.e., lack of consequences) - You want to be bad (i.e., some sort of reinforcement, often $). Now both of these are de facto there if you become a high level politician and that's IMO the reason for real world outcomes [...] decidedly not good
  - mtreis86 9y ago
    Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle. Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time. Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries. This is too complex of a concept to limit it to two coinciding factors, IMO we are all all of these things in differing quantities. Hopefully people learn that the consequences of bad actions are rarely beneficial long term and develop processes to mitigate.
    - croon 9y ago
      > Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it. > Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle. Sure, but that's almost exclusively due to mental illness, not "rationality". > Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time. Survival is reinforcement. > Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries. Mostly because closer to the limit means more reinforcement. Simple risk/reward. I want to think that being good is non-religiously rewarded (ie. in this life), but I'm not entirely sure that's true. I think it takes effort not to take unethical shortcuts or make profitable but hurtful decisions.
      - chestervonwinch 9y ago
        >> Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. > So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it. Says Dylann Roof (convicted of mass shootings at a church in South Carolina), "I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry."
- zxcb1 9y ago
  It would really be interesting to know if there was a correlation between genes and ethics.
  - pas 9y ago
    There is. The question is how much. There are various studies regarding this, I haven't read them (any of them): https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=heritability+of+moral+standards&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&oq=heritability+of+moral https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=heritability+of+moral+s...
- afarrell 9y ago
  Many of the monsters from history also operated in a world order which rewards monstrous behaviour and kills Ned Stark.
- ajuc 9y ago
  Very intelligent monsters in very intelligent society are still less of a problem, than very intelligent monsters in an average society.
- obstinate 9y ago
  I see this error so often on hn. You say, "we don't need x, we need y." When in reality we need neither, and both would be highly beneficial.
- mr_overalls 9y ago
  This is a false choice. Society would almost certainly benefit from a larger proportion of highly intelligent people, and doubly so if they were also engineered with a genetic predisposition toward cooperation and prosocial behavior.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Almost certainly not. That gives us 'politically correct police states'. Put everybody in a rubber room and make sure they are nice to one another. A recipe for the downfall of society, collapse of the economy, end of social evolution. Its complicated to nation-build. Any that work now, do so because of competition and selection. Remove that with 'intelligent design' and all adaptation stops. Fitness plummets.
    - mr_overalls 9y ago
      I suppose the devil is in the details. I'm not thinking of something like the genetically engineered humans of Brave New World, where docility is hard-wired into the lower classes. I'm thinking more along the lines of attenuating certain (hypothetical) genetic contributors to antisocial personality disorder, violent psychosis, etc. Not engineering docile perfection, just less of the obviously really bad stuff. Edit: I do share your concerns about stopping Darwinian selection, though. Choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact.
      - Danihan 9y ago
        >choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact. lol, that's a great line.
      - ansible 9y ago
        ...in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217... If we don't achieve a technological singularity in the next couple decades, I doubt that an alien invasion will be a worry a couple centuries from now. I say this because of impending ecological collapse, which will end human civilization as we know it... if not humanity in total. And I'll save for another time a rant about how expensive it is for anything to cross interstellar distances. At most we'll see a self-replicating probe that tries to subsume all matter in the solar system, the "invaders" won't physically travel here.
- zach 9y ago
  I have good news: if we get smarter people, it seems that we may get better ethics too. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2741266_code247572.pdf?abstractid=2656755&mirid=1&type=2 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2741266_cod...
- pas 9y ago
  Smarter people will be at least harder to propagandize, brainwash and so on.
  - Joeri 9y ago
    Actually, there is a lot of literature that indicates the opposite. Informing people of bias makes them more susceptible to it (by making them better at rationalizing away their bias). And the backfire effect causes people to become more certain of wrong opinions when presented with evidence to the contrary. The idea that intelligence produces rationality is a myth.
    - pas 9y ago
      Sure, probably there is a valley. But it'd be pretty strange that IQ would not correlate with real world adaptation efficiency. After all, intelligence is useless if you can't use it to better navigate the world, because it itself misleads you (then you are better off with just fight-or-flight instincts). And probably tendency for rationality has a genetic component too.
- ucontrol 9y ago
  I'd say we need both.
  - devcpp 9y ago
    Good thing we can max out all the good genes. I suppose it will have secondary effects but in small steps it should work.
btbuildem 9y ago
Ethics too -- lest we get super good at fucking each other over.
jly 9y ago
I strongly agree with you on this being one of the most impactful technologies the world has ever seen. In fact, it may be the only thing that prevents the destruction of our species from our own selfish actions. Humans are proving to not be sustainable, precisely because we have been designed altogether too well by natural selection to be selfish and guided fundamentally to maximize our inclusive fitness. Even displays of incredible human altruism are ultimately forms of very clever genetic selfishness. Combine these facts with our current state of technology, and this is a perilous situation that no amount of cultural evolution is going to resolve. Intelligence and trustworthiness are not what you're looking for. Obviously we would love to engineer humans to be healthier, smarter, etc, but these do little to enhance our long-term survivability in the face of human on human and human on environment domination that we see today. What we are most in need of is to engineer a more compassionate human than exists now, by modifying key genes for species-typical behavior. All humans have a tremendous and largely unconscious ability to tune out highly-destructive socioecological acts. We might expect these problematic genes to occur with little variation across all human populations.

cLeEOGPw 9y ago

So far intelligence don't seem to be as one-sidedly positive trait as it seems for most here. With increased intelligence comes increased risk factors of many diseases like depression, anxiety, bipolar, and many others. That means that less intelligent people have actually more reliable brain health than more intelligent. So unless this problem is solved, simply adding the genes that, among other things, increase IQ, can backfire in unforeseen ways. Another thing is more intelligent people are predisposed to be less reproductive. In this way lesser intelligence is a balancing force for mental health and survival of species.

Joeri 9y ago

We don't need smarter people, we need better ethics. Many of the monsters from history were highly intelligent. Many of the world's problems have ready solutions which are not applied because people are being clever. Think of intelligence as a force multiplier, if you apply it to a bad person they become a terrible person. It would be disastrous to start genetic engineering for intelligence prior to tackling the ethics problem. The biggest issue with better ethics is that we can't define them, so we couldn't optimize for them. Nobody agrees on what a good person is because nobody agrees on the meaning of good. But meanwhile the real world outcomes are decidedly not good.

wiz21c 9y ago
spot on
sleepychu 9y ago
As you approach the limit of intelligence the danger that you'll realise altruism works for the whole but not the individual must increase, right?
- brlewis 9y ago
  Are you saying that as people get smarter they're less likely to think satisfaction in life comes from being someone who makes the world better? That they're more likely to think that satisfaction in life comes from getting more stuff than the next guy?
  - sleepychu 9y ago
    I think if you engineer for maximum intelligence, yes. I want to make the world better but it's a bad use of my time from an individual perspective.
narrator 9y ago
Elitism needs people to be unequal. That will weaken as an ideology when people can copy each other's genes. Inequality might still be retained by carefully guarding information and knowledge that confers an advantage.
- andai 9y ago
  Oh man, I can't wait to go to jail and/or be deleted when I reincarnate with pirated DNA.
  - croon 9y ago
    Real life rogueli[k|t]e.
Kostic 9y ago
It seems to me that you are arguing for wisdom. Ethics are a product while wisdom is an ability, like intelligence.
dmichulke 9y ago
Being 'bad' is IMO a consequence of two things: - You can be bad (i.e., lack of consequences) - You want to be bad (i.e., some sort of reinforcement, often $). Now both of these are de facto there if you become a high level politician and that's IMO the reason for real world outcomes [...] decidedly not good
- mtreis86 9y ago
  Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle. Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time. Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries. This is too complex of a concept to limit it to two coinciding factors, IMO we are all all of these things in differing quantities. Hopefully people learn that the consequences of bad actions are rarely beneficial long term and develop processes to mitigate.
  - croon 9y ago
    > Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it. > Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle. Sure, but that's almost exclusively due to mental illness, not "rationality". > Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time. Survival is reinforcement. > Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries. Mostly because closer to the limit means more reinforcement. Simple risk/reward. I want to think that being good is non-religiously rewarded (ie. in this life), but I'm not entirely sure that's true. I think it takes effort not to take unethical shortcuts or make profitable but hurtful decisions.
    - chestervonwinch 9y ago
      >> Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. > So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it. Says Dylann Roof (convicted of mass shootings at a church in South Carolina), "I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry."
zxcb1 9y ago
It would really be interesting to know if there was a correlation between genes and ethics.
- pas 9y ago
  There is. The question is how much. There are various studies regarding this, I haven't read them (any of them): https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=heritability+of+moral+standards&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&oq=heritability+of+moral https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=heritability+of+moral+s...
afarrell 9y ago
Many of the monsters from history also operated in a world order which rewards monstrous behaviour and kills Ned Stark.
ajuc 9y ago
Very intelligent monsters in very intelligent society are still less of a problem, than very intelligent monsters in an average society.
obstinate 9y ago
I see this error so often on hn. You say, "we don't need x, we need y." When in reality we need neither, and both would be highly beneficial.
mr_overalls 9y ago
This is a false choice. Society would almost certainly benefit from a larger proportion of highly intelligent people, and doubly so if they were also engineered with a genetic predisposition toward cooperation and prosocial behavior.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Almost certainly not. That gives us 'politically correct police states'. Put everybody in a rubber room and make sure they are nice to one another. A recipe for the downfall of society, collapse of the economy, end of social evolution. Its complicated to nation-build. Any that work now, do so because of competition and selection. Remove that with 'intelligent design' and all adaptation stops. Fitness plummets.
  - mr_overalls 9y ago
    I suppose the devil is in the details. I'm not thinking of something like the genetically engineered humans of Brave New World, where docility is hard-wired into the lower classes. I'm thinking more along the lines of attenuating certain (hypothetical) genetic contributors to antisocial personality disorder, violent psychosis, etc. Not engineering docile perfection, just less of the obviously really bad stuff. Edit: I do share your concerns about stopping Darwinian selection, though. Choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact.
    - Danihan 9y ago
      >choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact. lol, that's a great line.
    - ansible 9y ago
      ...in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217... If we don't achieve a technological singularity in the next couple decades, I doubt that an alien invasion will be a worry a couple centuries from now. I say this because of impending ecological collapse, which will end human civilization as we know it... if not humanity in total. And I'll save for another time a rant about how expensive it is for anything to cross interstellar distances. At most we'll see a self-replicating probe that tries to subsume all matter in the solar system, the "invaders" won't physically travel here.
zach 9y ago
I have good news: if we get smarter people, it seems that we may get better ethics too. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2741266_code247572.pdf?abstractid=2656755&mirid=1&type=2 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2741266_cod...
pas 9y ago
Smarter people will be at least harder to propagandize, brainwash and so on.
- Joeri 9y ago
  Actually, there is a lot of literature that indicates the opposite. Informing people of bias makes them more susceptible to it (by making them better at rationalizing away their bias). And the backfire effect causes people to become more certain of wrong opinions when presented with evidence to the contrary. The idea that intelligence produces rationality is a myth.
  - pas 9y ago
    Sure, probably there is a valley. But it'd be pretty strange that IQ would not correlate with real world adaptation efficiency. After all, intelligence is useless if you can't use it to better navigate the world, because it itself misleads you (then you are better off with just fight-or-flight instincts). And probably tendency for rationality has a genetic component too.
ucontrol 9y ago
I'd say we need both.
- devcpp 9y ago
  Good thing we can max out all the good genes. I suppose it will have secondary effects but in small steps it should work.

btbuildem 9y ago

Ethics too -- lest we get super good at fucking each other over.

jly 9y ago

I strongly agree with you on this being one of the most impactful technologies the world has ever seen. In fact, it may be the only thing that prevents the destruction of our species from our own selfish actions. Humans are proving to not be sustainable, precisely because we have been designed altogether too well by natural selection to be selfish and guided fundamentally to maximize our inclusive fitness. Even displays of incredible human altruism are ultimately forms of very clever genetic selfishness. Combine these facts with our current state of technology, and this is a perilous situation that no amount of cultural evolution is going to resolve. Intelligence and trustworthiness are not what you're looking for. Obviously we would love to engineer humans to be healthier, smarter, etc, but these do little to enhance our long-term survivability in the face of human on human and human on environment domination that we see today. What we are most in need of is to engineer a more compassionate human than exists now, by modifying key genes for species-typical behavior. All humans have a tremendous and largely unconscious ability to tune out highly-destructive socioecological acts. We might expect these problematic genes to occur with little variation across all human populations.