SneerClub

The French urologist by day eugenicist transhumanist crank by night Laurent Alexandre had an interesting perspective on the subject fifteen years ago. We should do eugenics and edit our brains to be better so as to counter the emergence of Artificial Intelligence. The robots will replace us if we don't do rigorous embryo selection.

Incidentally he also warns that a modern day Stalin in possession of neuromachines and gene editing technologies would create what he terms "neuro-gulags".

I don't remember seeing Lesswrongers play with these sorts of ideas, which is a little surprising. But they're reluctant to diminish the AI's omnipotence I imagine.

I've played Geneforge. This is going to go badly for everyone involved.

Help an unaligned cigar smoking super boss baby got out in Chicago and put that baby's spell on me to force me to work at a paperclip factory :(

We do not understand genetic code as code. We merely have developed some statistical relations between some part of the genetic code and some outcomes, but nobody understands the genetic code good enough to write even the equivalent of "Hello World!".

Gene modification consists of grabbing a slice of genetic code and splicing it into another. Impressive! Means we can edit the code. Doesn't mean we understand the code. If you grab the code for Donkey Kong and put it into the code of Microsoft Excel, does it mean you can throw barrels at your numbers? Or will you simply break the whole thing? Genetic code is very robust and has a lot of redundancies (that we don't understand) so it won't crash like Excel. Something will likely grow. But tumors are also growth.

Remember Thalidomide? They had at the time better reason to think it was safe then we today have thinking gene editing babies is safe.

The tech bros who are gene editing babies (assuming that they are, because they are stupid, egotistical and wealthy enough to bend most laws) are not creating super babies, they are creating new and exciting genetic disorders. Poor babies.

My favorite comment in the lesswrong discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies?commentId=oyDCbGtkvXtqMnNbK

It's not that eugenics is a magnet for white supremacists, or that rich people might give their children an even more artificially inflated sense of self-worth. No, the risk is that the superbabies might be Khan and kick start the eugenics wars. Of course, this isn't a reason not to make superbabies, it just means the idea needs some more workshopping via Red Teaming (hacker lingo is applicable to everything).

If we're casting eugenics warriors, at least Ricardo Montalban had some bodacious pecs

I feel coding people like they're software might not be much better than coding software to pretend it's people

Don't get sucked into a eugenics cult

"Fund my company and your child might live to adulthood and/or have sperm that glows green."