TIL Sam is gay
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the headline misspelled eugenics.
In before this turns into “I want my baby to have blue eyes and 150 IQ”
It’s an interesting ethical debate.
I have a hereditary condition which passes only by the X chromosome, so should I, as a man, abort a daughter? Because now the risk is too high and I’ve elected to simply not have children. It would be great if I could fix the single swapped base pair that would otherwise cause disfigurement and life-long health problems.
Yeah I’m always conflicted. Like eugenics is the end goal for these fascists but also… We should try to prevent hereditary defects rtct
The unforeseen effects should be enough to give us pause.
What do you mean with unforeseen effects in this context?
This is why billionaires should be kept away from sciences and tech but unfortunately they are all over it. The fact that these require lot of funding does not help.
High IQ would be sure nice, but has a large number of genes involved. Not that you need a high IQ as a farmer in a low technology future.
They do realize that this is how most zombie apocalypse movies start. Genetic tapering to stop diseases.
The same guy who admitted he couldn’t raise his child without ChatGPT btw.
This is a very good reminder - thank you.
Engineer some humans who can survive in zero gravity without peeing out their bone minerals. Humans who can survive hard radiation in space without having their cells crippled from destroyed DNA.
Maybe start with simple organisms. Like algae. :)
I’d just like to have to trim my nails less frequently
I’d just like to have to trim my nails less frequently
i used to think like you, then i started (ab)using my hands for activities that wear them out. Now i’m glad that they’re growing sufficiently fast to replace/renew
I see you’ve also purchased a new scratching post
Dude. How fast are your fingernails growing that it’s a problem?
I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?
He’s a bad person and he’s always lying.
It’ll only be available for the super rich, will expand to other augmentations/engineering, and will result in further reinforcing social mobility boundaries.
The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.
Generally speaking (by theory subscription), moral evaluations of an action consider the state of the agent.
“Is this a good technology?” And “Is Sam Altman doing good?” Are two radically different questions with radically different answers.
Yeah, Elysium.
“What’s bad with eugenics for the rich?”
Right. Currently the ways we avoid genetic disease are screening partners, screening IVF embryos, and in utero testing + abortion.
Because the US health care system already serves the wealthy and abandons the poor, any expensive treatments are seen as just further steps into a Gattaca future of even more dystopian disparity, especially when driven by a rich asshole personally.
Universal negativity is also kind of the norm around here. A lot of folks on Lemmy believe we are slaves sucking Satan’s cock for breakfast, and anything that isn’t a complete burn down of our system and way of life is a negative.
Is that his motivation though? Wanna make a bet that this does or doesn’t end as he says at face value?
There’s nothing uncontroversial about human genetic modification.
It’s a pandora’s box that just shouldn’t be opened.There’s nothing uncontroversial about human genetic modification.
It’s a pandora’s box that just shouldn’t be opened.writes the person who isn’t suffering because of a genetic disorder or met anybody suffering from a genetic disorder
wrong
This isn’t really an answer to the ‘universal negativity’, but for a somewhat reasonable analysis of the pros and (surprisingly high number of) cons as well as some interesting grey areas, there’s an old LWT episode on this topic: https://youtu.be/AJm8PeWkiEU
ah, ok, so GATTACA is up next. got it.
Oh hell no, don’t bring Jurassic Park to the real world, please.
(JP did this with dinos, but this is the exact thing that movie warned about, just in this case with humans instead of dinos)
Altman finds a way…
Similarly, the type of things currently going on with AI, most notably Grok being in bed with the Military, are what Terminator warns about.
-sigh- Dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction is not supposed to be an instruction manual, guys, it’s supposed to be a warning…
Warnings are usually about things that will happen, otherwise they shouldn’t be called warnings.
What I dislike is how warnings made this all look far cooler and hotter at the same time than IRL.
No no. Do it with dinos!
This is the usual front to further develop “designer baby” tech (which we already have, it’s just the use is considered unethical). Mask investment as “saving the children” and altruistic to later flip the tech to billionaire friends so they can make little aryans on a d5 roll for a an AC of 1… Much like the open that turned for profit…
If (and is a really, really big if) this open the door to a better understanding of this type of pathologies and a way to somewhat cure them, I would say that it would be for the better.
But of course I am sure it will not end this way…
I feel like this kind of thing can create a “Great Filter” situation. Tech seems to work well and most babies are genetically engineered now, but wait, why is everyone dying off before 30? Nope, it’s not the genetic engineering, and anyone who says that is a tinfoil hat wearer. Just look at all of these studies funded by big corporations and captured government agencies who have financial interests in its success—you’re not one of those anti-science idiots are you? Ok, actually, the data is in and it is the genetic engineering. Humanity is dying off, not reproducing fast enough, and will be extinct soon, but it made a bunch of billionaires even richer, so all good, right?
If that were the case, wouldn’t the ones who didn’t get the genetic engineering be far more likely to reproduce and stride along with natural selection? I have a hard time seeing that event ever happening, short of the human population en mass deciding to engineer every baby on the planet before a single generation of which could have lived life and been studied for its effects.
What I think is more likely as a great filter is humans eventually settling on the idea that organic matter is really terrible medium for life. So, something with much more longevity, strength, efficiency, and brain power gets synthesized and we move in. At a certain point, wouldn’t biological life die off because life tends to yield to its more evolved forms? If us meat bags had to compete, how could we?
and I think there are more interesting answers to the Fermi Paradox than the Great Filter. For example, the expansion of space not being something we can overcome in travel. Or, maybe the way we perceive space is just so anthropic—we’re making poor assumptions about other beings.
Suspiciously all blonde haired and blue eyed. All with reduced intelligence unless you pay a lifelong subscription.
I’m actually pro genetic engineering for this usecase. By expanding our medicine, we created an evolutionary problem: Carriers of genetic diseases keep passing their genes, passing the defects further. This will result in more and more health issues unless faulty genes themselves are fixed
There are more capable, actual medical professionals that can advance this field in a non-wallstreet all eggs in one basket kind of way.
