Evolution is nothing more than dumb luck trial and error. There has to be a better way. I remember a quote from Gattaca "I not only think we will tamper with Mother Nature. I think Mother wants us to."
It would be folly to think that we know how to improve the Human genome. I don't think we understand enough of how the genome works. We certainly can't predict how genetic changes will affect an organism. But I'd like to think that someday we will get there
I agree with you that purposeful gene editing ought to be better than random evolution at the individual level.
However, grand parent raises a good point about reduced diversity, which is bad at the species level. There is really no way to guard against this because:
1. Even though diversity is good at the species level to safeguard against future disaster, everyone will race to have the same set of (currently) desirable traits. Framed another way, since human genetic diversity is a public goods, few people will help maintain it at the cost of their own benefit
2. While we could theoretically understand the genome in full, I'd argue it's impossible to foresee all the potential disasters that can wipe out a genetically homogeneous humankind.
> everyone will race to have the same set of (currently) desirable traits
I think it is not the case. Just on Earth you need different traits due to different climates and life conditions. Once we start really colonizing our solar system what makes humans better on some rock will be different for another or just for space: weaker heart, better bone density, some myopia could be useful to limit the currently known effects of 0G.
I find the argument about reduced diversity to be way too optimistic (or pessimistic ?) about people’s will and might to change their genes.
To draw a parralel, esthetic chirurgy is wildly available at relatively reduced risks, and it’s not like every bloke and their dog goes to have a face lift, even if it’s understood that a better appearance would have benefits.
Or even thinking about the core group of people who refuse to vaccinate. There’s just no way a medical practice is applied to the totality of a population, even by law.
it’s not like every bloke and their dog goes
to have a face lift
Right, but society has a conflicted history with beauty - some parts of our culture like and reward beauty, other parts curse the vain and superficial - and especially with people making uncommon efforts to improve their looks.
Not so with being born charismatic, tall, smart, healthy and with a full head of hair.
Exactly, just look what happened with dog breeding and how many breeds now suffer from significant genetic defects due to trying to breed desired traits.
The defects are largely a result of the limited capabilities of the breeding process (cross animals with a trait, hope that not too much other stuff comes along for the ride).
A fun angle: genetic engineering will eventually enable us to correct many of the problems in purebred animals. They are often good targets for even a limited genetic engineering capability (where the pure bred population has a high frequency of a single defective gene).
Some of the problems with dog breeding are due to the inefficiency of he breeding process, but others are simply the direct biomechanical consequences of the desired traits; for example the neotenous compressed faces of many lapdog breeds have consequences for mastication, respiration, and orbit shape that can't really be addressed without relaxing our selection for that particular look or accepting other tradeoffs.
The opposite is true - transportation has increased diversity. The American Indians suffered due to a lack of exposure to diseases (smallpox) common in Europe due to their relative isolation
a lack of diversity is only really bad in a changing world. however humans have made the world far more stable than before, and as we move our civilization into space, we'll find likely more stability (in the long run)
> humans have made the world far more stable than before
You must be kidding. Humans have changed their environment almost beyond recognition. We may already have broken ourselves, look at birth rates in the most industrialized countries.
The potential disasters can be man-made as well. Therefore, even though we're increasingly better at taming the vagaries of nature, we're increasingly at the mercy of our fellow men.
We can't even make it on Earth without horribly fumbling it, how would moving out to dead rocks help?
This is how we play for time, this is the whimpering with which we fade out. Looking straight at the iceberg, saying "it'll probably transform to cotton candy if we hit it fast enough". The drunk captain and the armed guards letting no sane person near the bridge is how you know everything is fine.
I'd like to think someday AI will help us make those technical decisions, even though we won't fully understand them because the human brain simply can't process the multi-dimensional complexity that a computer theoretically handles no problem. That leaves a lot of room for fear-mongering, but one man's utopia is another man's dystopia, I suppose.
As long as humans benefit, I say it's a worthwhile goal to at least explore. If that leads to the extinction of the human race through genetic defect or similar existential tragedy stemming from this, then maybe we just weren't cut out for this gig and should go the way of the dodo. Maybe on another planet, a higher intelligence will figure out how to peacefully coexist with an intelligence of their own creation/modification. Maybe this is just all an inevitable aspect of the evolutionary algorithm at work; who are we to think we can avoid it?
I've seen a number of articles that there is suspicion that AI (ie., ML'd coefficients in a set of matrices) just reinforces already held prejudices in certain cases which do not actually jive with the facts. How are we to know the AI won't make decisions based on current prejudices that end up also dooming mankind in the future?
And those are definitely valid concerns. And if those 'bugs' aren't preventable or fixed, I guess the question then becomes: whose irrationality kills everyone first, human's or machine's? Perhaps the situation is inevitable, just part of the Great Filter that decides which intelligence-type survives the birthing process into post-evolution. If machines don't threaten our very survival, something (or someone) else will.
Perhaps prejudices may be unavoidable in any intelligence, since we build stereotypes as predictive models and ML makes similar abstractions and assumptions which influence perception and predictions. Tangentially related, when TBI patients whose emotional centers are impaired, so is their ability to make decisions [1]. Building a decision-making network without an emotional center may be impossible, since the two seem to be naturally correlated. It's probable an AI won't ever truly be 'emotional,' at least not in the near term.
So, in the end, it's reasonable to assume that the AI of the future that can crunch these complex problems won't tell people the answers, they will merely provide possible solutions with varying likelihood of success depending on goals and constraints. In the end, we will have to decide our own fate, and my point is maybe we don't have control over deciding our fate either way--such is the nature of fate.
Considering we are reinventing that same process with black boxes of statiscal correlation engines - there’s a lot to be said about trial and error at scale and over massive time scales.
Not to mention this all occurs with co-evolving systems and predators/prey dynamics.
Nature invented higher intelligence because of how it could outperform instinct. Gene editing is the improvement to evolution by random variation. Just don’t expect a free lunch.
I agree with most of what you say. We know of no "better way". Nature is infinitely more intelligent. If Nature wanted us to not know or do something, we would not have been able to. Our ability to edit genes is a result of Nature's willingness to let us experiment. We still have very little understanding of what genes are or how Nature edits them for evolutionary purposes.
One thing that I know is that ethics have no meaning in Nature's eyes.
Just tell it like you mean it and replace Nature with God in your message.
Even if it is intelligent with a purpose, it would have made us with all our capacities. An important one being able to make tools and soon alter voluntarily our genes. Humans are not some superior or inferior beings outside of Nature. They're part of it as are all they produce.
There is some indications that organisms have ways of controlling evolution to some extent. Certainly, organisms have ways of increasing or decreasing how many mutations they accrue depending on environmental signals.
“Outdo” has multiple meanings, but pure engineering has made us go faster, fly higher, and survive worse cold, than anything purely evolved.
And if you mean purely organic items, not engineered, then you still need to explain the sense of “outdo”, because GM foods outdo non-GM foods in many ways we care about (e.g. bacterial rennet replacing cow stomach in cheese making, outdoing it by cost-efficiency and coincidentally making more cheeses suitable for vegetarians).
Edit: just to add, I wouldn’t accept “we have not done it from scratch yet” as a valid argument that we cannot do better than natural selection, any more than I would accept ”$person has not yet fabricated a CPU” as an argument that $person can’t code better than at least one professional CPU designer.
Irrelevant. I thought that would’ve been clear from me using the comparison as an example of a bad argument.
Also, not even correct, assuming I have been correctly informed that simulated evolution is used for some optimisations of e.g. precise physical transistor placement.
Are you sure you mean vegetarian and not vegan? Vegetarian cheese is pretty much the default in UK supermarkets these days, and almost nobody even knows that things like Parmesan are non-vegetarian.
Vegan cheese, on the other hand… oh dear.
I try it sometimes; vegan cheddar-alike tastes like vanilla ice cream that refuses to melt, but vegan feta-alike sort-of works.
We are in the infancy of genetic manipulation. A working understanding of CRISPR only developed in the past few years. There were some significant hurdles to getting to that point.
In the coming decades, we shall be programming genes like we program computers. We'll model organisms, formulate changes, simulate the formulated changes, then create the genetic "programs" (really, life forms) using some kind of biological gene expresser.
Right now we're in something akin to the vacuum tube era of computing where you need to be a government or a large corporation to do more than just tinker. As with computers, those barriers to entry will not remain in place for very long.
I'm not saying that we're going to be writing genetic Perl scripts. I'm saying that the basics of looking at genetically-based organisms as a type of programming/engineering is inevitable.
You may not have an "if" statement, but you have genetic segments than can cause the synthesis of a protein when present. You may not have goto statements, but you have stop codons that end the processing of the creation of a protein.
Read up on the genetic engineering solutions already being created regarding how payloads are created in bacteria, how they're delivered to target cells, how the payloads are activated, etc. These are step-by-step processes with conditional behaviors, loop-like replication of processes, spawning of processes, subroutine-like embedded processes, etc.
Genetic programming will be similar to computer programming in ways. It will be different in ways. But the arc of progression of how we start off with huge barriers to entry and little understanding to where we eventually manipulate genetics cheaply and trivially are inevitable.
Do you really think we can transfer the usual edit, compile, run, rinse and repeat workflow to genetic engineering?
From the perspective of the majority it's an acceptable tradeoff to sacrifice a few thousand humans for the benefit of billions. It could even cause less suffering than natural selection.
I still wouldn't want to be one of those pre release versions...
Do you mean why don't we have gray or green goo? The thing that outreproduce and outsurvive biological organisms. Maybe because engineers optimize for other things usually.
It would be folly to think that we know how to improve the Human genome. I don't think we understand enough of how the genome works. We certainly can't predict how genetic changes will affect an organism. But I'd like to think that someday we will get there