The future of the working class: China clones monkeys and deliberately edits genes to make them mentally ill

submitted by useless_aether from telegraph.co.uk

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[–]Vigte 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Everyone always gets on at me when I say "by giving mathematics and business the power to edit genomes, the following will happen: certain "designs" will become more popular than others - eventually the computer systems that designed these "popular configurations" - will be bought by other companies/countries. Eventually, these common configurations (think: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Elite membership levels, but applied to your very genome) - will be assisted by machines - these machines will draw up designs for genomes we've never thought of.

If Artificial Intelligence OR "Business Ethics/Strategy" are applied to this problem, we then lose the human species.

How you ask? The very nature of an evolving organism is that is grows and expands, changing as it does so.

Eventually the computer would realise that certain genes are good for ITS survival - things like acceptance of authority, submissiveness, even prosperity (as it will lead to the ability to buy more gene-edited kids).

As normal humans are out-classed in every single way, especially reproduction - what began as "let's help little baby Johnny not have disease X", will turn into "lets make sure no one gets disease X" will turn into "Well if you're not modified, you can't do this job as well as someone who is, I can't hire you".

Eventually being edited will be all but mandatory and the systems creating the templates/editing the genomes, should they ever become self-aware, will make the human race into puppets and eventually cast them aside.

Either Gene-editing that is passed on to the next generation OR AI, MUST be banned. If we partake of both, we are done. One of these MUST be made FULLY ILLEGAL or the human race is doomed. I'm talking death penalty for anyone found involved in it, world wide, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or reason.

Which would you pick to ban?

The Revolutionary Phenotype

Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation.

[–]FormosaOolong 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Vigte, you speak the terrible truth.

[–]happysmash27 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Just because it's AI doesn't mean it's artificial general intelligence or riskier, artificial super intelligence. For the large part, AI is pretty harmless. In this instance, if the goal is simply to make a single genome good without any focus on anything in the future, I don't see why an AI would come to the conclusion that it needs to self-preserve. For example, take the AI that recommends YouTube videos. It recommends me videos about how bad YouTube is, so I doubt it cares much about self-preservation…

The real problematic combination, in my opinion, is the entity making the genome edits having a reason for self-preservation combined with the ability to hide potentially harmful edits. A prime candidate for this would be an AI with the goal of self-improvement, which, if written badly wouldn't want to be shut down as this would stop it from improving further by whatever its definition is.