Cf. https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/09/dangers-of-deferrence.html https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jzy5qqRuqA9iY7Jxu/the-problem-of-graceful-deference-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zLG2DnJw6oEZqAgaE/tools-for-deferring-gracefully
TsviBT
Karma: 340
FAQ: Isn’t AGI coming too soon for reprogenetics to help?
Berkeley Genomics Project seeking hires (and collabs)
I’m talking both about politics, but also and mainly about the technical plan.
As a first draft, roughly, I think the speculation is worthwhile IF AND ONLY IF it’s in a context where it will then be followed up by maker/breaker investigation, on the question of “whether / how this can actually lead to SHIA in the real world”. This includes going back and forth between skeptically searching for flaws, and optimistically searching for workarounds/alternatives/reasons for hope. It also includes thinking about the whole process of getting to the working tech, including
would this even increase intelligence meaningfully, and how would we know
getting researchers and funding for the research at various stages
having intermediate feedback on success
questions about how society will receive it—researchers, regulation, funding, and deployment are all related to this, so if you’re so dismissive of these questions that you don’t consider them at all, there’s a significant chance you’re just barking up the wrong tree in terms of actually getting this done
What I mean is, what’s been tried regarding using bacteria as persistent delivery mechanisms in the brain.
You’re talking about revascularization? It’s interesting, but would need a lot of fleshing out.
To step back a bit, I appreciate you thinking about these things and proposing ideas, but in order to make something actually work, I think there has to be a lot more in depth exploration. In particular, there’d have to be iterative maker/breaker investigation of the idea. In other words, I think you should argue against your own idea, then improve the idea and counterargue in favor, then critique the new version again, and repeat. Then for some ideas, you might actually convince yourself that the idea isn’t that workable or promising; for other ideas, you might be able to make a more convincing case and/or put together a promising version of the project.
It’s not the higher intelligence that’s bad, it’s the forced breeding or other dangerous experiments on much smarter animals.
to learn many things that could be applied to humans
Like what?
cell therapy
Possibly. I’m not so clear what’s going on with the experiments. The one you cite that has a healthy animal getting smarter also states “Mice allografted with murine GPCs showed no enhancement of either LTP or learning.”, which suggests the same wouldn’t work with humans. Possibly you could do it with gene-edited human neurons / stem cells. But it feels super speculative whether that would improve much. But maybe.
brain surgery
Like what? Which ones plausibly significantly increase intelligence?
Note that this has significant risks and huge resulting difficulties. People generally don’t want to offer crazy elective risky surgeries.
(I general I don’t much buy “try it on animals and see what works” because of the issue where human brains are exceptional, and where we wouldn’t have a great way of testing intelligence in animals IIUC.)
directed evolution of brain microbes
This is possibly interesting, but it would need more argument / detail. At the moment, mainly I’d view it as an interesting vector for gene editing a bunch of neurons. I’m skeptical of things like “add a bunch of BDNF” increasing intelligence much, but I could maybe be convinced otherwise.
Probably for me to want to suggest that someone fund a project on this, you’d need an expert on board, who can explain well what’s been tried, what the bottlenecks are, what you’re going to try that’s different, why it would plausibly work, why it would be able to support the cargo, what the cargo is supposed to do, etc.
directed evolution and selective breeding of smarter animal populations
I’m not sure I get the point of this. If you succeed, then now you’re doing horribly unethical+immoral experiments on intelligent conscious beings at a significant scale with little benefit. In terms of genetics, we already know enough about the polygenic architecture of intelligence to probably get to world-class-genius levels. On my view, making that feasible for many people / whoever wants, is more important (and easier and safer and more likely to work) than pushing much past that, if that’s relevant.
(I also do not in fact belief you can evolve an animal population to be human-level intelligence within a couple decades. If it’s, say, chimps, then even leaving aside ethics, you have only a few generations. If it’s, say, mice, then you’re probably really far from having genius mice.)
Further, I don’t see much intermediate benefits, whether financial or scientific.
To be clear, it’s worthwhile to test out strong reprogenetics on animals; but that’s in part because you’re skipping the intermediate generations, and instead just seeing if you can directly vector a trait by vectoring the genome based off polygenic scores from the current population.
One thing that’s unclear to me is whether attempts to use AI systems to augment human capabilities in these domains is in-scope or whether the round is focused on direct enhancement of these capabilities.
The round is SFF’s, so I can’t speak to the round in general.
Personally, I’m open in principle to this, but it would have a high burden of proof.
Do you think it’s plausible that timelines might be long on our current path or are you more hoping that there’s a pause that provides humanity with more time?
Both. Pause is important. With or without a pause, I don’t think that confident short timelines make sense. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sTDfraZab47KiRMmT/views-on-when-agi-comes-and-on-strategy-to-reduce and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5tqFT3bcTekvico4d/do-confident-short-timelines-make-sense
Something faster than reprogenetics would be nice, I just don’t see a way that seems likely to work.
you think that we need enhanced capabilities to succeed at alignment even if current timeline projections makes this appear challenging
I think alignment is probably extremely difficult, and we would have a relatively better chance with more brainpower, though maybe not a high chance. For why I think it helps X-risk, see https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2025/11/hia-and-x-risk-part-1-why-it-helps.html (though see also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4K6ikQtHxcG49Tcn/hia-and-x-risk-part-2-why-it-hurts).
SFF’s HSEE grant round; human intelligence amplification projects I’d like to see
I’m not sure how to work out a version that’s appropriately on-topic for the conference, but if there is such a version, I’d be eager to have someone who can explicate concerns around racism as it relates to reprogenetics give a talk. I sent several invitations in related veins but haven’t gotten such a great showing on that front. If you have suggestions, feel free to LMK here or in DM.
What would you say to a potential attendee who has a legitimate interest in reprogenetics’ emancipatory capacity, but is concerned
To answer the question very literally, I would love to talk to such a person as much as they’re willing, to better understand their experiences / reasons / etc.; I wouldn’t necessarily be able to address everyone’s concerns a priori given my current level of understanding.
In what follows I’ll try to answer generically anyway:
is concerned that the conference will be taken over by discussions of human biodiversity
A few points:
Event experience. I imagine such a person might be worried about non-speaker attendees, and their ideologies and behaviors, and the resulting culture at the conference. I’m not totally sure what to say about this.
It would not be feasible, let alone advisable, for me to try to filter attendees based on their personal views on some issue. There may be one or two hundred attendees, or more. I am the sole full-time organizer, with much appreciated but part-time support from Kali.
Beyond feasibility, I don’t know if this is advisable. I would instead intend to simply make the conference be what it is supposed to be, in terms of having good and good-hearted speakers and attendees; if there are racists who are hoping to all get together and, IDK, do whatever they do, then I would intend and hope that they would just lose interest. This is a conference for science, technology, fertility, ethics, building, etc. I think that trying to police people’s attendance at an event based on their private views (if that’s the proposal) is generally toxic as well as high-cost.
In accordance with that intention, I am putting most of my recruitment efforts into finding high-quality expert academic speakers as well as speakers from pioneering tech companies, and I will be pushing for more junior scientists to attend.
Further in accordance with that intention, I would ask people with a stake in reprotech and reprogenetics—serious scientists, parents, industry people, serious bioethicists, good-hearted altruists, etc.--to attend, and invite others to attend, and give voice to good visions for these technologies.
That said, I do reserve the right to reject some attendees, and am willing to do so, including on the basis that they’re advocating racism, racist political stances or policies, white supremacy, etc. Speakers and attendees agree to this code of conduct in order to register: https://www.reproductivefrontiers.com/code-of-conduct So, if an attendee is going around advocating for deporting brown people or something, I would be likely to have them leave.
There are a few specific people who I would preemptively reject from attending and refund their ticket, on various grouds such as advocating racism.
Event goals. I’m in charge of the schedule, and both my personal and my professional goals are to help support the field of advanced reprotech and reprogenetics, by making the field well-resourced, sane, momentum-ful, lively, convivial, welcoming, in order to emancipate and empower future children. (With one major personal background motivation being HIA for reducing X-risk.) These goals push pretty strongly against having the field be related to racism or other extremist views.
Event topics.
Human biodiversity (real or imagined) is pretty much entirely off-topic for this conference.
The only relevance I’m aware of is the fact (IIUC; not an expert) that polygenic predictors trained on individuals from one ancestry group tend to transfer imperfectly to individuals from another ancestry group. (This could be for any number of reasons, some known and some unknown, e.g. different linkage disequilibrium patterns between causal variants and SNPs within different ancestry groups; environments that discriminate based on ancestry group and thereby induce different gene-outcome causal pathways; etc.) For that reason, there is a potential inequality of access to reprogenetics (and generally to genetic medicine) between ancestry groups, which argues e.g. for a better understanding of causality in genes and for more diverse data collection.
Because human biodiversity is off-topic, there won’t be talks on that topic. I suppose a speaker could “go rogue” or something. Then they wouldn’t be invited back.
Event speakers.
Dr. Anomaly is speaking because he’s the spokesperson for Herasight, an embryo screening startup that is unique in offering polygenic predictions for the expected IQ of embryos. His talk is about informed choice in polygenic embryo screening.
Prof. Hsu spoke last year because he’s an expert on using big data for polygenic prediction, and he’s the founder of Genomic Prediction, the first company to offer polygenic embryo screening. He gave a talk on the genomics of traits, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n64rrRPtCa8 Nothing about race as I recall.
If a speaker were to propose to give a talk about race differences or something, I would reject that talk, but of course none have done so.
Past event experience.
I was quite busy with operations, so I did not have a great finger on the pulse of last year’s event. I regret that and will aim to do the opposite this year, though will realistically still be quite busy. So I can’t speak all that well to what it was like.
That said, my conversations were generally about fieldbuilding and science and technology and similar.
Attend the 2026 Reproductive Frontiers Summit, June 16–18, Berkeley
You may be right, IDK. Will have to think more.
I’m not sure I’m in favor of a liberty as broad as what’s proposed in the links. Personally, I’d guess that for this to be acceptable (and adopted by institutions), we should initially propose the technology for less controversial goals, like removing diseases or promoting health. Increasing intelligence might also be a potentially non-controversial goal. But proposing to act immediately on personality and more “trivial” traits might backfire. I think a trajectory like that would be more effective in practice.
For the sake of honesty, and since everyone will be thinking about all those traits anyway, I think we may as well just have the discussion now. People are generally actually pretty open to talking about these things, I think.
It’s not some secret topic. There’s tons of academic papers in mainstream journals discussing all sorts of ethical, moral, social, regulatory, technical, scientific, and practical aspects of various sorts of reprogenetics and advanced ARTs (PGT, embryo editing, gamete selection, IVG, even ectogenesis and cloning). There’s even an academic paper looking at the mathematics of chromosome selection! People run big polls of the public’s opinions about these things; there are national and international committees (scientific, governmental) discussing how to regulate these technologies; there are panel discussions, talks at conferences, statements by advocacy groups, etc. There’s a lot of work to be done in clarifying, improving, and advancing these discussions, but it’s not like some alien taboo topic.
If you meant in terms of the actual rollout, I’m not sure. It’s true that people are more worried about cognitive traits (including intelligence) and appearance stuff than decreasing disease. My current guess is that people are less actually taking a strong reasoned-out stance against increasing intelligence, and rather they are just not sure how to separate out that use from other worse uses, but really I should talk to more people who actually hold various positions like this.
Intuitively I don’t get what’s so bad about affecting appearance, except for the runaway competition thing where everyone wants tall sons. But non-intuitively, I can also see that this would be a vector for “soft eugenics”; e.g. in a racist society parents could be diffusely pressured into making their kid lighter-skinned (cf. “face bleaching”). Part of my thinking here, is that genomic liberty works in the context of multi-generational feedback. In that context, it seems better to err on the side of more liberty rather than less, because we can regulate later when we see that things are going wrong, but deregulating is hard because you aren’t getting feedback about how the de-regulated version would go. (Cf. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation.html#habermas-and-multigenerational-feedback )
A vision of genomic emancipation based on freedom of choice and plurality might work in the democratic West, but other states don’t necessarily see those as values, so it seems unlikely they would adopt a similar vision.
This might be right. I’m really unsure what would happen. I’m also not sure if this should be a crux.
I do, though, think it’s much better for reprogenetics to be developed in a strongly liberal democracy first, so that a good version of a society with reprogenetics can be worked out. Say what you will about it, but AFAIK the US is the most successfully diverse / pluralistic state in history, maybe by far, in terms of global languages, cultures, ethnicities, religious beliefs and practices, political views, etc. (Some empires are contenders, maybe; but that’s by conquering many nations and then in some cases being nice. India is highly diverse, but I think it’s not globally diverse in the same way.) I think an awesome liberal pluralistic version of reprogenetics is going to be hard to beat. (“Eugenics with Chinese characteristics”, as it were.)
I’m not sure they would do much, because AFAIK they already aren’t doing much. They already could do coercive person-wise eugenics, and AFAIK they aren’t? I guess in some cases, actual genocides could be motivated by eugenical reasoning? Of course, the Nazis were. If they wanted to do somewhat less coercive but still coercive eugenics, they could force IVF and preimplantation genetic testing on their subjects, but they aren’t AFAIK. Presumably the incentive (real or perceived) would increase as the effectiveness of reprogenetics increases, though, so this pattern could change. I would imagine that it’s ~inherently difficult to regulate reproduction, however. Like, what are you going to do? Stop people from screwing? You can do it, but you have to get really violent on a mass scale. (I hope this isn’t taken as a dismissal; I mean this as my first reaction in a conversation, to elicit a more specific plausible scenario. I’ve talked to at least one person living in an oppressive regime who was worried about the regime doing population control—specifically, controlling genetics of personality.)
Regarding whether this should be a crux, I’m also unsure. In general, I’m not trying to be straightforwardly (/naively/myopically) consequentialist. In other words, I wouldn’t simply count up the nations that would do a big bad thing with tech, and the ones that would do a big good thing, and then see which amounts to more. For one thing, it feels weird to think that I’m going to not use some technology to help my own child, just because you might use that technology to harm yours. I would also want to think about the longer term; the liberal pluralistic version could help usher in a great future (as part of broader progress), and I want to hasten that—I don’t think we want to progress at the rate of the least moral country, or something. IDK.
All that said, I do think we should work on international regulatory regimes for reprogenetics. I think there are probably some core aspects of genomic liberty that could be reasonably instituted at the international level, that might significantly alleviate these risks. For example “No regime should ever coerce any of its subjects to have children” or “No regime should ever coerce any of its subjects to have certain personality traits”. These might be hard to formalize / operationalize. Would take more work.
Another avenue is professional and scientific norms within those communities. These technologies take a lot of technical and scientific know-how. As an example, different ancestry groups—at least at the moment—need to collect genome data and construct new PGSes in order to use polygenic reprogenetics. (This isn’t a good thing because it can lead to unequal access, and hopefully it can be attenuated by better genetics models.) Another My point is just that this is an example where a country can’t just snaps its fingers and implement this stuff without some buy-in from scientists etc. Another example is that IVF is not trivial to do; you need ultrasound, medication expertise, anesthesiologists, and a surgeon. Another example: IVG would likely take quite a while to scale up and innovate so strongly that it’s a routine thing (I’m just guessing, here; are there cases where complex stem cell differentiation is done routinely in many many labs?).
There are also probably at least a few cases where the scientific community could avoid certain advances, or keep them private, at least partly / for some time. For example, I’d oppose doing any work to refine an “obedience PGS”, though it gets awkward because various things that you do want to have PGSes for could be correlated a bit with obedience. FWIW, personality seems significantly harder to model, at least for now.
All of this would make the relationship between parents and children even harder. Where before you could only blame chance for your traits, there would now be actual people responsible for many of your characteristics. This is even more true if parents choose not to modify you, leaving you at a disadvantage while everyone else “improved” their children.
I think that’s probably true in aggregate, but as someone who didn’t get reprogenetics but would like to give it to my future children, that’s a cost I’d be willing to pay. I hear that simply creating the option maybe automatically means everyone pays the cost. But I think this would prove too much? Like, it applies just as much to any new thing you create, which parents could in theory give to their kids, but might not want to.
Wouldn’t it be worth focusing, in parallel, on technologies that allow for this when someone is already an adult and can choose for themselves? Especially regarding HIA. This would solve several ethical problems, particularly the fact that it wouldn’t be a choice made by someone else. It would also be perceived as less “unnatural,” I think. In a way, people already try to do this with the limited tools we have now. I realize this is mostly a technological problem since such tech is currently “sci-fi,” but that probably won’t be the case forever.
Absolutely! I think there are several kinda-sorta-plausible paths to this. But, they’re all pretty speculative and also hard to accelerate, and in some cases potentially quite dangerous. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jTiSWHKAtnyA723LE/overview-of-strong-human-intelligence-amplification-methods Since that post, I’ve done bits of research about these on the side, but haven’t found any big updates that make it seem more feasible. One throughline is that reprogenetics is the only case where you can actually get longitudinal, end-to-end empirical data about the effects of potential interventions on intelligence and other interesting traits. You can observe actual people with different behaviors and different genes. But what are you going to do with your new brain drug that wipes out all the PNNs in someone’s association cortex? Just try it and hope that you don’t completely scramble their mind? Or try it on a chimpanzee, and hope that better termite-fishing or digit recall in chimps would translate to conceptually creative problem solving ability in humans? It coud work, but IDK. That said, there could totally be several plausible ways, and I’m interested in researching those. You do also get the advantage of slightly faster iteration cycles.
(I’ll note that I’m qualified to be a grantmaker for the area of human intelligence amplification, which many leaders in AI safety view as a crucial second or third priority behind “stop AI” and “at least try to solve alignment”. But it seems like a waste of my time to apply to be a grantmaker at CG without some indication that they’d be open to this. I did message a couple people hoping for a quick “nah” or “worth applying” but didn’t hear back.)