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skeptical_lurker comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
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Indeed, however this is dependent upon utility function - many people value the people who are alive now to an extent that cannot be compensated by future lives, even if there may be many orders of magnitude more people in the future. If everyone could co-ordinate and decide to develop disruptive technologies slowly then the future would be a lot safer, but realistically this is unlikely to happen in most cases.
AGI might be an exception, as it might be such a hard problem that anyone who might solve it will understand the danger it poses. Theres no first-mover advantage to being the first to develop clippy. But genetic engineering is far simpler and far safer, and since some actor is bound to develop it, it's in everyone's interests to develop it first.
So I see what you mean in principle, but in practice I think the co-ordination problem is too hard.
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.
Clearly there are a lot of people very interested in the ethics of genetic enhancement. The current consensus among the scientific community in the West seems to be that enhancing kids is totally unethical, and gene modification techs should only be used to fix genetic diseases. In other words, currently in the West at least, there is a very strong (and effective, within the West) attempt being made to enforce coordination on this problem.
I think the current coordination strategy is a fairly hopeless one, for reasons I outlined in my post. All I'm trying to do is improve on it. Do you think I've succeeded there? Can you think of an even better coordination strategy than mine? The thing I like about my idea is that it doesn't require total coordination. It just requires that some things get discovered before other things, which is something that individual scientists can affect.
I agree that affecting the future is hard. But from my perspective (and the perspective of many other people who do think future lives are very important), it's worth attempting even if it's hard. 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. "Shut up and do the impossible" and all that--the logic is similar to that of FAI. (Challenges can be exciting; easy video games aren't always very fun.) And in some cases things can be surprisingly possible (for example, it's surprisingly easy to find the email addresses of prominent scientists online, and they also have office hours).
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.
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.
Top-down policies enforced by the usual state enforcement mechanisms are the typical way people implement coordination.
Err... No.
Top-down policies happen when voluntary coordination fails. They're generally a sign of disagreement and mistrust: building an edifice of bureaucracy so that everyone knows exactly what they're expected to do and giving others recourse when they fail to do it.
But voluntary coordination is hard, especially when it involves large groups of people, which is why we invented governments.
No. You can force people to do something you want. That's not cooperation at all, that's just plain-vanilla coercion.
I'm using the word "cooperate" in the technical sense of "cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma". In this sense it's possible for an outside force to coerce cooperation, in the same way that e.g. the government forces your neighbor to cooperate rather than defect and steal your stuff, or anti-doping agencies force athletes to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma of whether to use performance-enhancing drugs.
For the technical sense of "cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma" you need to have a prisoner's dilemma situation to start with. Once you coerce cooperation you have effectively changed the payoffs in the matrix -- the "defect" cell now has a huge negative number in it, that's what coercion means. It's not a prisoner's dilemma any more.
Huh? Why do you think I'm in a prisoner's dilemma situation with my neighbour?
If you make your child taller, your child is better off (+competitive advantages, -other disadvantages of being taller) and your neighbor's child is worse off (-competitive advantages).
If your neighbor makes his child taller, his child is better off and yours is worse off.
If you both make your children taller, the competitive advantages cancel out and you each have only the disadvantages.
Being tall is not a disadvantage even if you take away "competitive advantages" (normally tall, not freakishly tall). An arms race is a different situation that a prisoner's dilemma.
The original claim was that the neighbor might "steal your stuff" which isn't a prisoner's dilemma either.
And most importantly, I do have neighbors. I don't feel I am in a prisoner's dilemma situation with them and I suspect they don't feel it either.
Because the government altered the payoff matrix making cooperation individually preferable to defection.
Imagine you were a hunter-gatherer: within your tribe, a system of reputation and customs, with associated punishments for defectors, tended to enforce cooperation, but different tribes occupying in neighboring areas typically recognized no social obligations towards each other, and as a result all encounters were tense and very often violent, warfare and marauding were endemic.
With a modern government you can interact with most strangers from your country or most other countries with a reasonable expectation that the interaction will be peaceful and productive.
Actually some of the disadvantages of being tall would disappear (in the longish run) if everybody was tall. For example, if the average person was 1.90 m, cars would be designed accordingly and wouldn't be as uncomfortable for people 1.90 m tall.
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.
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:
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.
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 think sequencing is what lets you measure genes, not modify them.
Indeed, but I think it depends whether you used germline selection or germline modification. IIRC, in germline selection you create many embryos, sequence the genes, and select the embryo with the best genes.
Also, if the cost of sequencing goes down very fast, I would have thought this provides some evidence that the cost of modification would drop at a similar rate. Of course, there is already genetic modification of crops - do you know how that has changed in cost over time?
Good point. I don't know about crops.
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.