From The Latecomer, Issue I, Speculations, October 24, 2023:
The Future of Intelligence: An Interview with Steve Hsu
Stephen Hsu is a professor of physics at Michigan State University, and Founder of a number of tech startups such as Genomic Prediction, Othram, and Superfocus. In this interview we discuss genetic engineering, the future of AI, and mitigating catastrophic risks.
This interview has been edited for organization, clarity, and concision. The full audio will be published shortly.
— Editor
What are you most worried about when it comes to genetic engineering? And what worries do you think are the most overblown?
SH:
I think among specialists, the most overblown concern is pleiotropy. The modal geneticist probably tends to overestimate the amount of pleiotropy in the genome. Often they don't really have good intuitions for high dimensional spaces, or they were told in a textbook that pleiotropy is significant. But all of our empirical tests show that pleiotropy is not that strong, so you can have big gains which are pretty safe, or you can boost one trait without necessarily screwing up something else. The underlying deep structure of our genetic architecture is different from what most people intuit from their biology education, mainly because genetic traits occupy a much higher dimensional space than most people are used to thinking about.I think a very real concern is that we could go through an era of very strong inequality like we've never seen before. When you have selected or engineered humans that are very different from the wild type, and 90% of the world population is still wild type, you’re going to have a breakaway elite. There was a period of time where aristocrats in England were quite a bit taller than normal people just because they had better nutrition growing up, while the lower classes were nutritionally deprived. Imagine a guy in his evening jacket with a cane who’s literally a head taller than his carriage driver. That guy could have attended Oxford and been educated on Euclid, or Gauss, while his shoe shiner was illiterate. People often forget that this happened, but that was the norm in most countries just 100 or 200 years ago. One can imagine a future where the edited/selected people are tall, beautiful, athletic, and live to be 200 years old—at dinner they’re discussing convex optimization of objective functions in complexified tensor spaces, while the server has no hope of ever understanding their discussion no matter how hard they study. In our recent past inequality has been mitigated by nutrition and mass education, but it would become far more entrenched if the difference was purely from genetic enhancements. We want to avoid a world where such inequalities exist, especially when the cause is genetic modification or genetic selection.
What does a good long-term future look like, in terms of a healthy way that humanity could be reconciled with genetic technology?
SH:
In the long run, we could improve humanity. People in the future could on average be smarter, much longer lived, nicer, more cooperative, lower rates of mental illness. I think this will be within our grasp technologically in the near future. I don’t know if society will organize itself to achieve these things. Having worked in this field for 10 or 12 years, I think it’s been established in published papers that we can predict complex traits through DNA. We built a company which can genotype embryos and select embryos based on this information, so I have no doubt what I just described is a possible future outcome that humanity could achieve. Whether it will get there, I don’t know.
You’ve described something akin to “let a thousand flowers bloom” when it comes to the traits that people might select for. You’ve mentioned that an academic might choose the smartest kid, a beautiful person the most beautiful, and a strong person the strongest. But doesn't this seem to run up against the fact that if all these traits are independent wouldn’t everyone just choose to move the IQ slider up to the maximum? And then selecting aesthetic qualities, like eye color or height, would become a Keynesian beauty contest of choosing what's most popular? So maybe a thousand flowers won’t bloom.
SH:The examples I've given in the past are all based on real conversations I've had with trophy wives of billionaires and, you know, hedge fund masters of the universe. If you're the top hedge fund guy in the world, you often know you're not the smartest guy in the world. You employ people that are smarter than you, or you might talk with scientists who are smarter than you. And yet somehow you're super successful and you have the private jet and you fly in the scientists to talk with you. So what they consider important and valuable might be a little different than what Joe academic PhD thinks. And the same thing with their trophy wife. Who's having the greatest lives? Is it the brainy guys in the library? I'm not sure. Did Kobe or Michael Jordan have a great life? Are they having better lives than like Noam Chomsky? So there really is a diversity of preferences.
If there are no downsides to moving the slider up, won’t everyone maximize all plausibly beneficial traits? If pleiotropy really is low, this seems to be a possibility.SH:
So there could be downsides, like imagine you become so smart, that you can appreciate the beauty of category theory, and quantum gravity. And you want to spend the rest of your life trying to think about those things and develop those things, which are the most beautiful creations of the human mind, at the expense of having lots of kids and a trillion dollar company. Academics might think it’s one of the best things to be smart, but I’m not sure that it is.But let me just explain why these are going to be constrained choices for quite a while if you’re doing embryo selection. Let’s suppose you’re a billionaire with 300 frozen eggs from a donor, and you have surrogate mothers who will carry them to term. So you've outsourced the whole thing. But you still only have 300 eggs, and you want to pick the best one. And the one that's the smartest is also not necessarily the one that has the best facial morphology or the best team leader personality or, you know, the broadest shoulders. So these things, if you have a finite number of embryos to choose from, you're going to be trading things off. Even if you have perfect predictors, you're going to be trading things off. And then you could say, oh, in the next phase, we won't do that. We'll have CRISPR and we’ll edit in whatever direction we want. But there's probably going to always be a limit to the number of edits you're willing to make because there's some off target rate. So you still probably will have a budget of edits that you can make. And you'll be a little leery of going way beyond that budget of edits. And then you have to allocate those edits toward some quasi-independent different traits. So I don't want to predict what happens.
I think your point about constraints is well put, and a big piece of the puzzle. I know Gwern has also said that CRISPR style gene editing is probably not as revolutionary as was first anticipated.
SH: The reason for that is because we don't know exactly which edits to make yet. There are two problems holding CRISPR back. One is the off target thing. Like how many edits can you really safely do without accidentally doing some edits you didn't want to do? That's a technological problem that the molecular biology jockeys are trying to fix right now. The second one, which is a data problem, which is more in my field is, which edits would you actually want to make?....
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