
Survey Suggests a Public Wariness of Enhanced Humans - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/upshot/building-a-better-human-with-science-the-public-says-no-thanks.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
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fl0wenol
For me, an interesting take-away from this survey is that people assumed that
_scientists_ would jump the gun, that "...scientists would rush to offer each
of the technologies before they had adequately tested or even understood
them."

In their minds, it is the doctors/scientists that are most excited about the
possibilities / opportunities afforded by offering something as soon as
possible to the public, as if we could all be further guinea pigs for them, or
as if it would make them rich personally, or that they are motivated primarily
by the satisfaction of knowing the fruits of their labor were put to use.

Those are certainly some of many valid motivations for people working in
intellectual fields. But it is interesting the public does not understand that
doctors/scientists are more likely to be reluctant to turn findings into
products, instead preferring to follow the new research opportunities and/or
building a community or consensus.

It is a different kind of professional that turns scientific innovation into
potential products (engineers, entrepreneurs, marketers, bad journalists), and
along that spectrum is the increased rushed, cavalier attitude.

This distinction is lost on those surveyed.

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reptation
I remember working in a university physics lab and let me assure you when the
patentable discoveries are made they are surely patented.

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bllguo
That's not really related to his point. Unless you are implying patenting a
"patentable" discovery reflects how "scientists would rush to offer each of
the technologies before they had adequately tested or even understood them."

Which it really doesn't.

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derekp7
The thing that is weird about the survey answers, is that we've been using
technology to enhance humans for quite a while. This includes vaccinations,
eyeglasses, cochlear implants, pacemakers, crutches, nutrition, the list goes
on. None of these things are too far removed from the suggestions in the
survey such as boosting the immune system through gene editing, or neural
implants (how is that much different than a cochlear implant?).

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jacquesm
Those are mostly things to offset damage rather than to enhance beyond the
norm.

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Retric
Post 50 reading glasses push people past the norm for their age. Coffee is a
very common enhancement beyond the norm for any age.

PS: Even more broadly tools are enhancement beyond the norm. IE: It's much
easier to win a fight while holding a stick vs. bare handed.

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MattGrommes
> the public finds it slightly more acceptable to change a baby’s genes than
> to enhance human abilities.

This is weird. Making a permanent non-consensual change versus something like
an implant. I have to chalk that up to not really thinking about the question
that hard. Is there some angle I'm missing here why the first would be better?

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JauntTrooper
The first prevents or cures a disease. We vaccinate children without their
consent, causing permanent changes to their immune system, because we know it
reduces their chances of suffering illness and death. Curing Huntington's or
sickle cell anemia, or removing high-risk cancer genes, seem like logical next
steps.

Implants that change the way we think and interpret the world are a much
bigger leap. They challenge our sense of self and identity. Am I still "me" if
my cognitive abilities are modified? I totally get why that's a much more
uncomfortable topic.

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Zigurd
I wonder how many people who harbor hidden racial prejudice are worried that
enhanced humans means the end of any real or perceived or mismeasured racial
advantages.

There are other advantages, too: If the safety of Roundup is called into
question, just make humans Roundup-Ready(tm).

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dkarapetyan
Survey suggests fear of anything new. Don't really need a survey for that.
It's human nature. For most of human history new things were more likely to
kill you than old things. I'd even go as far as saying it's an instinctive
reaction.

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dexwiz
Foods are now advertised as GMO free. A large portion of people don't even
want to eat anything they associate with genetic tampering. Why would they
want to use that technology on their kids? We need a popular food or pet with
genetic modifications before the general public accepts genetic tech on
themselves. So many successful animal trials, as morally sour as that sounds.

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sp332
The GMO aversion is more complex. Many GMOs are deployed to increase the
amount of pesticide that can be used. And Monsanto uses their GMO IP to
control a significant fraction of the market. So people who don't like large
amounts of pesticides and people who don't like IP being used to control food
markets have been campaigning to demonize GMOs in the public mind. Without the
negative campaigning, I think people would be a lot more welcoming of it.

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xlayn
Science has been enhancing humans for a very long time. Cellphones extend my
ability to research before taking a decision. Current drugs has addressed a
lot of human ailments; from pain to AIDS. Vaccines have took away a lot of
deadly diseases. Last but not least we have a 35+ years life expectancy.

Edit:

As bogus as it is, also IQ has been increased.

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bordercases
So IQ is not bogus when it proves your point, but is bogus when it doesn't.
Got it.

(Bite the IQ bullet or don't; going half way and then flip-flopping back and
forth is intellectually dishonest.)

Additionally: "enhancement" seems like a bit of a bucket word. There are only
a surface similarities between cellphones and AIDS cures, in that they help
people. I mean, vaguely speaking, you're pushing the bounds of what humans are
able to do; recall information more effectively, live longer, _maybe_ fight
disease. But then you end up broadening the category to "all technologies
serve as enhancements" and vice versa, which stops describing the specific
information that causes some people to be uncomfortable when they hear
"enhancement".

I would want to know what connotations about the word enhancement produce a
split between the religious vs non-religious, and the spiritual vs the non-
spiritual (the two are independent but correlated dimensions, believe me.) In
this article the argument has been framed around "meddling with nature" which
itself is kind of limiting the discourse. There's probably more to it.

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sp332
IQ isn't as good a measure of "general intelligence" as it claims to be, but
it still measures some aspect of cognitive ability.

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whack
Let's be honest - people were even more freaked out by the idea of "test tube
babies" a few decades ago. Then, when the world didn't end, and they started
meeting people who were actually conceived in-vitro and seemed perfectly
normal, they changed their minds.

This is exactly the same way "Enhanced Humans" are going to play out as well.
The public is going to be freaked out, but some people will do it anyway.
Either locally, or in some foreign country. With time, people will realized
that these "Enhanced Humans" are their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and
perfectly good people, and their barriers will start dropping. And when the
time comes when they have the opportunity to enhance their baby's
health/intelligence/fitness, they'll think it's plain irresponsible of them
not to do so.

Unless you're worried about regulatory bans, "public fears" are pretty much
meaningless. If you can build it, show that it's safe, and demonstrate
compelling benefits, the public will change their minds soon enough.

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AndrewKemendo
I'm not so optimistic about a positive or even neutral response. I say this as
a rabid transhumanist who desperately wants to see BCI and WBE come to
reality.

My fear is that, an "enhanced" human will significantly outperform it's peers
and thus will gain advantage in all aspects of life, that is the point after
all. Those advantages will be seen as unearned and thus the "losers" will
become jaded and blame the technology - or rather the person's access to it.
Someone who was conceived in vitro doesn't pose a threat to it's peers from
the perspective of abilities by virtue of being in vitro.

Just like you see jealously now for disparities in abilities, I worry it will
be magnified once people start upgrading.

That's without even getting into the "who can afford to upgrade" part of it.

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whack
I agree. You're going to see a lot of jealousy/envy when this technology is
first rolled out. But what are people really going to do? Even if you ban the
technology locally, people will just go overseas and get it done. And if
you're going to make that an illegal offense and screen for all babies at
airport terminals, what about immigration? Is the country really going to ban
all immigrants from countries where the procedure is legal?

Once the genie is out of the bottle, people will realize they can only fight
it for so long. At some point, people will realize that if you can't beat 'em,
they might as well join 'em.

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AndrewKemendo
_But what are people really going to do?_

Target the people enhancing for discrimination. I mean just look at the state
of transgender relations now with targeted bans and targeted murders etc...
That's not even someone gaining an advantage - it's just latent fear about
differences.

Imagine instead if a trans-HUMAN is threatening your livelihood.

I don't think it's going to be pretty honestly - but in the end I think the
upgraders will win.

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whack
If transhumans are easily identifiable, then I agree. But imagine a GATTACA-
like future, where genetically-enhanced humans look just like regular humans -
they just happen to be at the 90th percentile in intelligence/fitness. There
is very little that people can do in such a scenario.

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xori
My issue with gene editing is the problems you could be creating at the end of
the lifetime of the person. What happens when you've ensured no heart disease,
but have guaranteed them alzheimers. Who is to blame? The now dead scientist
who discovered the gene modification? The now dead parents who wanted it done
to their child?

Testing a large enough population would take generations.

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xlayn
Not taking an option because it's not perfect is called fallacy of perfection.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy)

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bordercases
Would you on principle release unmaintainable code? If you do so because
you're rushed, would you want the same situation to be applied to say, genetic
engineering?

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xlayn
"Would you on principle release unmaintainable code? If you do so because
you're rushed"

The term for this is "technical debt", you deliver when it works but have a
debt for fix until it's good enough.

"would you want the same situation to be applied to say, genetic engineering?"

World works on this premise, every drug for every ailment has a secondary
effect.

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bordercases
But these are inefficiencies that you don't explicitly want; instead you
manage them. In some systems these inefficiencies cost lives and instead of
managing them you decide to prove them out of existence, or avoid ruinous
failure altogether.

Truth be told now that you bring in the drug metaphor I'm torn, because I've
been recently convinced that there are opportunity costs and institutional
inefficiencies that come from being too risk averse on the drug market. So I
would believe that tolerating some error, i.e. some casualty or someone's
death, could on average be OK if more people were saved. This is a part of
what we mean when we say we're OK with secondary effects in drugs. Usually the
prescription ensures that the worst won't happen.

There might be differences to tease out between this example and genetic
engineering, however. If a drug fails, you kill off a couple of people and
make recalls. But these deaths happen more-or-less independently. The same
goes with some software systems that tolerate error: so what if your shitty
exercise app goes dark? Or, so what if a single consumer doesn't get served?
You lose some money but life goes on. No one dies or no one gets cancer.

The reason why dealing with genetics is more scary, and this applies to
manufacturing retroviruses, is that the error can spread or be transferred
more effectively than in the case of drugs, whose sale is tightly controlled
and whose information doesn't propagate. A virus spreads or a seed scatters or
a person breeds and you end up exploring new unexpected territory. This isn't
bad per se. But it's harder to control. If I were to deal with that kind of
thing I would attempt to see what was invariant with scale and see if I could
test on that case, so that if a spread did occur, the "patterning of the
network" would be sound (like designing a component of a fractal).

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Animats
Remember the reaction to Google Glass? That was just a heads-up display for a
smartphone.

On the other hand, Apple managed to make wearing iDweebs (their headphones)
cool through advertising and branding.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Are we really so tribalistic now that we need to make up childish nicknames
for the _wrong brand of earbuds?_

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shanacarp
The public is against protecting babies from diseases?

grrrrrr

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loup-vaillant
Interesting how de-converting people will make them more amenable to
transhumanist ideas. Not surprising though, considering the common ground:
both fundamentalist Christans and transhumanists want to live forever, happy,
etc…

We just think prayers ain't gonna cut it.

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rasz_pl
Submarine for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided?

