Embryo selection may move from disease screening to enhancement

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:15:58

   way of thinking about our plates in the universe how do we get here we were talking about where's your line yeah okay is there a line that you have from uh gmo people to uh ivf shouldn't happen do you have a do you have an ethical line for that yeah um i definitely think that we can be very defined around the crisper stuff where we can turn we can change a gene to make someone healthier or enhanced and i actually i don't have a philosophical disagreement with giving someone the ability to not just like turn off disease, but to say, hey, I want this person to have the trait that they didn't randomly get from me or like inherit. I think that's fine.

2. 1:16:41

   How do you stop people? I mean, no parents. But by the way, I'll say there's like, there's a whole bunch of therapeutic treatments that we're doing now that are doing what I described in that final stage with an adult human. Like folistatin stuff? Right. i was in uh prospero with the guys when brian johnson got that right and so you could take that is a gene that makes a protein that you're you know you could theoretically use mrna to do it but it but it's short-lived and you could put a plasmid a gene and put it in your body and it will make a protein that gives you strength yeah whatever it is that is like nursery school go to like university phd level and what we're learning about all the interaction between all the proteins is we could come up with a set of genes that if I put them into you,

3. 1:17:24

   they will make you 100 times smarter. Would you get that shot? I would. I'm choosing for me. I think what becomes interesting is when parents are choosing for their kids. I think that's right. I think that's the right philosophical framing. Yeah. Look, if you've got this technology and it's available to be elected in the same way as we don't let people get tattoos before they're 18 or whatever, then all right.

4. 1:17:49

   so for me currently uh johnny from heresite uh who again i can't fucking shout out enough like he's so good at communicating this stuff and heresite rules um that line up to embryo selection so i'm happy i i see no philosophical issue with uh choosing from the harvest you've already done ivf's already been and gone perhaps that's a bit of anchoring bias for me that i might have thought twice about what IVF meant had I been born a hundred years ago, but it's here. And I can't go back. I can't cognitively take myself out of it. I think up to the point where here's your 15, pick from your 15, we're already eyeballing it. That seems to compel me in the direction that this is already being done. When it gets to, we're going to choose from the genes that you could have had. Then when it gets to, we're going to change them. And then when it gets to,

5. 1:18:40

   we're going to create them that i'm uh as yet uh morally unconvinced right so you can you can pick but you can't change right and i think that's probably where we are today and maybe we're maybe you're a little more progressive like than most people i would say i think most people would still object to that i think the overton window changes when if if the the solution i offered you where i give you a shot that puts a plasmid which is a gene in your body or integrates that plasmid into your cells because i do think that's ultimately where that age reversal stuff is going to come from i think we're going to end up putting a series of genes in plasmids into our body they're going to go into our cells and they're going to self-regulate those cells to make them live forever um when we end up doing that as a mainstay and everyone's getting that

6. 1:19:25

   shot and everyone's living forever and that becomes kind of a thing that everyone's like yeah of course we're boosting our lifespan with these genes like this totally makes sense that's when people say well if we're doing it to ourselves and we're all doing it like why don't we just do it to every embryo and that's when people will start to and that that's probably many decades from now but i think that's where you can start to think about how the overton window shifts at what point when it becomes less about this like that is crazy because if everyone's doing it as an adult and it's totally safe and normal and it extends lifespan and bring it back down to doing it for the children uh yeah i get the sense that But any ickiness that people have around embryo selection, specifically for positive traits, everybody's already pretty much on board with embryo selection against negative traits, right? Huntington's, etc. The Ashkenazi community are already very deep in this because of their genetic profile. I think very quickly, all of the people who either are blank slatists, deny behavioral genetics, don't think heritability is a thing, think that embryo selection for IQ is just rebranded eugenics.

7. 1:20:26

   all of those people typically quite well educated uh probably quite liberal and left-leaning they care about the outcomes that their kids get and if these slightly more right of center fucking hicks that have managed to cobble 15 grand together to get their ivf done and then a little bit more to get herocyte or somebody else to to do the the um profiling if their kids are out stripping theirs in school and in sports because well the their immune function was the best of the ones that were available. And there's lowered rates of autism, or there's lowered rates of ADD, or there's lowered rates of depression. They've got a happier, more flourishing life.

8. 1:21:02

   I think very quickly, parents are going to look at it and go, well, why did I read all of those parenting books? Why did I work so hard to try and give my kids the best future that I could? And I'm now leaving behind. Jeffrey Miller said this fucking great quote. It's like every single parenting book on the planet could be replaced with the power of one behavioral genetics book. that your kids are made up of the raw materials of the person that you make them with, that is infinitely, not infinitely, sorry, that would be incorrect.

9. 1:21:33

   50% of everything you are on average is genetically inherited, including your psychological profile, and for physical traits, significantly more. Like, very unlikely you're going to be born black with two white parents. Therefore, if you just understand the behavioral genetics of the situation, I think that lots of people are going to get on board. Yeah, that's right. And as soon as it becomes a competitive game, this race to the top, not race to the bottom is going to happen. And people are going to go, well, now the thing that's interesting, I think is cool. Two wrinkles that I spoke to Johnny about the last time we sat down. First one is basically buyer's remorse from parents.

10. 1:22:08

    This sense that because I was so consciously involved in the decision to choose this child, if any negative outcomes occur because of that kid, I think that there's the potential for parents to blame themselves or for the kid to blame the parents if they were to find out. And the second one that I think is kind of interesting is parents are likely to regress. or converge on a small bucket of traits that they think would be optimal to give their kid.

11. 1:22:36

    But Spencer Greenberg did this fantastic study, huge, big study. IQ is not, it is moderately, negatively correlated with life satisfaction. Higher IQ, lower life satisfaction. And you have to assume people with higher IQs are less likely to go to jail, less likely to be addicted, less likely to be homeless, more likely to get married, more likely to complete a high-powered degree. um okay so all of those things would increase life satisfaction so the impact of iq on life satisfaction is so negative that it offsets the objective life improvements that you get from being smarter right so which parent if you look at this dashboard all of the things being equal is not going to choose the smarter kid now if you had the option to boost the the kid's iq by 200 because the world is different with super intelligence so if you have digital super

12. 1:23:27

    intelligence in the world it's a very different world than we live in today it's not just competing with each other it's about finding a place in the world with the super intelligence and we're all going back and forth to mars and traveling the universe and figuring out quantum shifts in the universe like all the the things that i think are pioneering in the next century um that becomes a different and more important framing at that point because you don't want to end up being one of the people or you don't want your kids to be disadvantaged in a world where there's this pervasive super intelligence that everyone's using and accessing and turning on and turning off as they need it to do the things they want to do in the world. And that's the right way to think about super intelligence, not controlling us. It's how do we use it? And you have to have

13. 1:24:08

    a degree of control over knowing where do you want to go with it? What do you want to do with it?