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SquirrelInHell comments on Now is the time to eliminate mosquitoes - Less Wrong Discussion
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Note that with a goal to eliminate a species completely, the longer you wait to get experience and perfected technology, the better.
A major screw up in such a case would be some random factor, mutation etc. preventing us from wiping all mosquitoes, and leaving a group that would be resistant to current gene-drive technology.
I don't know enough about gene-drives to suggest how it might happen - but the point is that there are always "unknown unknowns".
That smaller group would then quickly spread and replace the previous population, and would be harder to deal with.
Repeat a few times, and you have gradually nudged the population of mosquitoes to be resistant to our attempts to eliminate it.
It's possible that waiting longer and using a better technology in the first strike, would have solved the problem cleanly.
True if gene drive is like antibiotics, but is it? Every day we wait 1,200 people die of malaria because of delay, a price worth paying if, but only if, you get some significant benefit from waiting. Another big "unknown unknown" is what other viruses mosquitoes will put in us if we don't quickly eliminate them.
I remember having a similar discussion about HIV and anti-retroviral drugs.
In short, it's an easy position to take if you and the people you care about aren't currently in the firing line and making policy choices on assumptions about future discoveries that we can't guarantee is ethically problematic.
I agree with you 100%, and I'm not really advocating to put anything off based on my argument. I am merely bringing it up to address it properly, i.e. be aware when a trade-off is being made on this scale.