From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 12:44:33 MST
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 02:11:55PM -0500, Alexander Sheppard wrote:
>
> >From: Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se>
>
> >I have been thinking about this due to my writing of a study on the class
> >effects of genetic enhancements.
>
> That's an interesting topic. It seems to me that, if it is not kept in
> check somehow, and assuming we don't have some sort of general
> technological leap which outmodes human civilization itself in some way,
> this will eventually lead to monstrous occurances in the social structure.
Interesting. Could you expand on why you think so? So far I have come
to another conclusion. However, in order to reduce the risk of political
preconceptions clouding the analysis I'm doing this together with a
friend who happens to be a social democrat political scientist / law
student with a refreshingly different perspective from me.
Basically, my argument against that genetic enhancements would amplify
existing class stratification is that while many traits with genetic
components (like intelligence and personality) that would be good
targets for enhancment have positive correlation with socioeconomic
status, the relative increase in parent-child economic correlation would
be far smaller than the sizeable inheritance of values and social
network opportunities. There is also a nonlinear marginal factor: fixing
low intelligence or impaired social abilities by a certain amount
produces greater improvements than adding this factor to somebody with
good traits - a person with IQ 80 benefits much more with +10 IQ than a
IQ 120 person, economically speaking. There are risks, but they seem to
be tied more to limited access (through artificially high prices due to
regulations, bans, patents or medical associations) or cultural issues
(even without useful genetics one can discriminate).
> Of course, it all depends on certain things that I (or anybody, I think)
> don't know right now, but...
We are trying out scenario planning for this project, looking at what
happens when different assumptions are varied. Helps see the realm of
the possible.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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