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For the reasons you suggest it's likely that any safe useful embyronic editing will make it to the global mainstream within a generation or so. This will have

For the reasons you suggest it's likely that any safe useful embyronic editing will make it to the global mainstream within a generation or so. This will have some interesting consequences for the future of our species. Greg Bear's "Sisters" (collected in "Just Over the Horizon") took a compelling angle on a world with ubiquitous genetic editing of embryos. He made a few predictions: (1) People whose parents opt out of the process will, indeed, have worse social lives, worse careers, and worse lives overall -- they will get sicker, die younger, and be less prepared for exceptional performances. Bear uses the lens of high school where everyone feels like they don't fit in but convincingly suggests that non-edited people would feel worse. (2) Most "pre-planned children" (those subject to embyronic editing) will get a combination of a handful of known safe "packages" which will probably be iterated annually by the companies who offer them. This means in practice that most people born in the same year will have many similar traits and quirks. (3) People will not, by and large, physically resemble their parents; desirable traits will include appearance. They will, however, all kind of look like one another. (4) People who opt out of the practice despite having enough money will be seen as quirky anachronisms from another era. (5) Inevitably someone will mess up and some trait will enter the mainstream which causes widespread calamity -- for example, 50% of people aged 15-16 who was built in a certain batch will suddenly die from a previously undiscovered anomaly. This will be treatable with CRISPR-style technologies and folks will rush to build a treatment the first time it happens. These mass deaths will come as a surprise because, while in some sense we know we are doing something different by imposing relatively few features on a relatively large population and by bypassing tens of generations of random mutation, we don't really understand what we're "losing" by skipping the normal process that selects for viable individuals. Bear theorizes that it's going to be important in a few decades to remember that everyone, both the pre-planned people and the unedited people, is human and deserves equal dignity as a person. He tries to end the story in an upbeat way when his protagonist addresses the surviving half of her graduating high school class: "" "This has been a bad time for all of us," she began, voice high and scratchy. She cleared her throat. "I've lost a lot of friends, and so have you. Maybe you've lost sons and daughters. I think, even from there, looking at me, you can tell I'm not ... designed. I'm natural. I don't have to wonder about whether I'll get sick and die. But I ..." She cleared her throat again. It wasn't getting easier. "I thought someone like me could tell you something important." "People have made mistakes, bad mistakes. But you are not a mistake. I mean ... they weren't mistaken to make you. I can only dream about doing some of the things you'll do. Some of you are made to live in space for a long time, and I can't do that. Some of you will think things I can't, and go places I won't ... travel to see the stars. We're different in a lot of ways, but I just thought it was important to tell you..." She wasn't following the prepared speech. She couldn't. "I love you. I don't care what the others say. We love you. You are very important. Please don't forget that." "" Not really sure what the broader lesson is, but the story stuck with me and there are a couple of specific predictions in there that will be interesting to see tested out in the next few decades.

codeisawesome 7y ago
It did make me wonder about the important aspect that the Edited humans will likely also feel Love much the same as normal humans. This might help the whole situation, if we define Love as some combination of Empathy and Desire for the other Individual to thrive (for selfish reasons). I'm trying to say that - the other way around from that speech is interesting. If the Designed decide that they Love us the Undesigned, we might be saved from destruction or even an extremely worsened life quality. There are two caveats: 1. Love could be seen as a 'weakness' and there might be a crop of super genius Designed who don't have the genes required. If it turns out that this does not impact viability for whatever reasons, natural or engineered (we design companies where we expect some geniuses to be Complete Jerks and be okay with that as long as the bottomline is improved), then the undesigned are doomed. 2. Love does not fix all problems. There are Homeless people in San Fransisco despite being surrounded by some of the smartest, richest people who also have Empathy and Love for people in their lives. But enough of these Smart Rich People would prefer the Homeless just go elsewhere rather than blot the landscape (instead of thinking about helping them) - that there's no political will to aggressively fix the problem. The Undesigned could just end up being the Homeless of the near future. Fun Times (I'm terrified).
gwern 7y ago
Bear is a good writer, but his genetics are shaky... #2 and #3 are just silly. Doing a little embryo selection or even editing is not going to lead to a race of pod people who all have the same hair style and prefer Earl Gray tea. Appearance is influenced by millions of variants, which have little or nothing to do on average to do with the variants which influence traits like intelligence (the genetic correlation is ~0 - you don't see genetic correlations between intelligence and well-predicted traits like hair or eye color being reported in the literature). Even if the same genetic variants which influence something superficial like facial bone structure also influence neurogenesis etc, any editing or selection making people more similar will just be a drop in the pond. Think about siblings: compared to 2 random people, siblings are more similar on what must be tens of millions of genetic variants, and yet, consider how completely different siblings often look, act, and turn out! (Jencks, I think, in _Inequality_ points out that there's almost as much 'inequality' in life outcomes like income within American families as there is across families.) Further, let's say that all of that turns out to be wrong; nevertheless, parental relatedness to children is desperately desired by parents and this is a major reason why sperm/egg donation are profoundly unpopular and why parents have such stringent demands of donors from banks and why people will deliberately select embryos with Huntington's and other serious disorders if the healthy embryos fail to yield a live birth. It would be entirely possible to simply tilt the selection or editing to preserve relatedness to parents on visible attributes - 'relatedness to parents' is simply yet another metric to optimize for, thrown into the stew with the usual ones, and it is one that parents will put a high value on even at the cost of some potential gains on other metrics. (#5 is also quite problematic as it assumes that completely novel edits will be done on a mass basis without any kind of testing. In reality, everyone will focus on variants that already are widespread in the population and which are already being tested in the real world. It's the rare variants which are harmful, not the common ones.)

codeisawesome 7y ago

It did make me wonder about the important aspect that the Edited humans will likely also feel Love much the same as normal humans. This might help the whole situation, if we define Love as some combination of Empathy and Desire for the other Individual to thrive (for selfish reasons). I'm trying to say that - the other way around from that speech is interesting. If the Designed decide that they Love us the Undesigned, we might be saved from destruction or even an extremely worsened life quality. There are two caveats: 1. Love could be seen as a 'weakness' and there might be a crop of super genius Designed who don't have the genes required. If it turns out that this does not impact viability for whatever reasons, natural or engineered (we design companies where we expect some geniuses to be Complete Jerks and be okay with that as long as the bottomline is improved), then the undesigned are doomed. 2. Love does not fix all problems. There are Homeless people in San Fransisco despite being surrounded by some of the smartest, richest people who also have Empathy and Love for people in their lives. But enough of these Smart Rich People would prefer the Homeless just go elsewhere rather than blot the landscape (instead of thinking about helping them) - that there's no political will to aggressively fix the problem. The Undesigned could just end up being the Homeless of the near future. Fun Times (I'm terrified).

gwern 7y ago

Bear is a good writer, but his genetics are shaky... #2 and #3 are just silly. Doing a little embryo selection or even editing is not going to lead to a race of pod people who all have the same hair style and prefer Earl Gray tea. Appearance is influenced by millions of variants, which have little or nothing to do on average to do with the variants which influence traits like intelligence (the genetic correlation is ~0 - you don't see genetic correlations between intelligence and well-predicted traits like hair or eye color being reported in the literature). Even if the same genetic variants which influence something superficial like facial bone structure also influence neurogenesis etc, any editing or selection making people more similar will just be a drop in the pond. Think about siblings: compared to 2 random people, siblings are more similar on what must be tens of millions of genetic variants, and yet, consider how completely different siblings often look, act, and turn out! (Jencks, I think, in _Inequality_ points out that there's almost as much 'inequality' in life outcomes like income within American families as there is across families.) Further, let's say that all of that turns out to be wrong; nevertheless, parental relatedness to children is desperately desired by parents and this is a major reason why sperm/egg donation are profoundly unpopular and why parents have such stringent demands of donors from banks and why people will deliberately select embryos with Huntington's and other serious disorders if the healthy embryos fail to yield a live birth. It would be entirely possible to simply tilt the selection or editing to preserve relatedness to parents on visible attributes - 'relatedness to parents' is simply yet another metric to optimize for, thrown into the stew with the usual ones, and it is one that parents will put a high value on even at the cost of some potential gains on other metrics. (#5 is also quite problematic as it assumes that completely novel edits will be done on a mass basis without any kind of testing. In reality, everyone will focus on variants that already are widespread in the population and which are already being tested in the real world. It's the rare variants which are harmful, not the common ones.)