Bioaccelerationism Is a No-Brainer

This is one area where progress is an unalloyed good

I don’t write that much about AI because I feel divided on the subject. Whether I think the skeptics of the idea of existential risk or those who discount the possibility are correct depends on the mood I’m in at any particular moment. I’ve read and talked to some of the smartest people on both sides and in the end I just shrug my shoulders. Must I have a strong opinion on everything? I’ve earned the right to punt every once in a while.

Technologies often have both potential costs and benefits that are worth thinking about. But reproductive biotech is one area in which I do not feel conflicted at all and think that we should be seeking maximum progress, as fast and with as few guardrails as possible.

On December 16, the company Gameto announced that the first baby had been born using a method that they call Fertilo. IVF can be a grueling process, as women receive multiple injections and deal with all kinds of difficult hormonal changes.

With Fertilo, instead of 10-14 days of shots, the process lasts for only three days. The company has developed what they call “ovulation support cells” (OSC), which allow eggs to mature outside a woman’s body. The process has been cleared for use in Australia, Japan, and a few other countries, and is about to undergo its Phase 3 trial in the US. IVF just got a lot easier, and this should lead to more births among couples who want children.

Biotech is different from other technologies in a few ways, all pointing in the direction of us being as enthusiastic as possible about the field moving forward. First of all, there is a great deal of time between the development of a technique or method and its widespread adoption. This gives us plenty of opportunity to see whether anything has gone wrong.

Imagine someone invents an AI that is simply better than anything else on the market but has some deep flaw that will harm humanity and make it impossible to return to the status quo ante once we’ve learned about the issue. New software can go from zero to nearly universal adoption in months or a year. Society in that case does not have the opportunity to adjust or go back once something has gone wrong.

Biotechnology is not like this. For reasons of affordability and preference, the vast majority of births will continue to be natural for the foreseeable future. The first IVF baby was born in 1978. Here we are, three generations later, and the technology is only responsible for 2% of births. We have had enough time to learn whether IVF babies develop horns or have some other major defect. Yet things have worked out well, and we now have good reason to think that there isn’t anything to fear in the possibility of a higher percentage of children being born through the method.

The same applies to any other kind of biotechnology we might develop. Imagine that tomorrow someone discovers an intervention to give each embryo 10 extra IQ points. Like all technology, it starts out expensive, and some people are just freaked out by it or have a religious objection. The first generation to be born through this technique will be well into adulthood well before it becomes affordable and socially acceptable enough to be adopted by the majority of people.

Relatedly, the second reason biotech is a good candidate for maximum accelerationism is that the costs are internalized. The AI doomer scenario is that somewhere a lab invents a machine with an IQ of 1,500, at which point we are at its complete mercy. It engages in deception and bides its time until it is able to enslave or eliminate humanity in order to achieve whatever misaligned goals it has.

In biotech, if something screws up, the costs are borne by individuals and families. Sure, that is terrible for them, but the downsides are limited. If you think that the risks justify state intervention, then you’d have to also support laws to prevent diseased embryos from being born. Since we don’t use government coercion to encourage the aborting of downs syndrome fetuses, where we know the costs to societies and families of letting a pregnancy end in birth are large, then we certainly can’t justify stopping people from experimenting with new techniques based on the danger that in the pursuit of better health things might turn out poorly. One might worry about companies overpromising or not delivering what they advertise, but these are concerns that can exist in any industry, so there is no reason not to simply rely on general prohibitions against fraud.

Finally, bioaccelerationism is a place where the interests of parents and those of society are almost completely aligned. Technologies are sometimes good for one company or industry but bad for society as a whole. This is arguably what happened with social media, as corporations figured out how to use algorithms to get people addicted to their products and neglect the rest of their lives.

Fortunately, in the world of biotech, parents are likely to want what is good for society as a whole. Humans value intelligence, health, and beauty. Smarter people are more productive economically, commit fewer crimes, and use fewer social services. The same is true for the healthy versus the sick. We’ve evolved to admire physical beauty in ourselves and others, and I don’t think that this is a zero-sum kind of dynamic where making everyone more attractive doesn’t make society any better off. Markers of fertility, the basis of sexual attraction for men and to a lesser extent women, are not completely relative. If all women under 50 died, men would not become significantly more attracted to senior citizens. Just as with health and intelligence, increasing beauty is a positive-sum prospect.

Jihadist leaders are able to motivate their men to die by telling them they will get 72 virgins. This is an appealing prospect, not made any less so by the belief that their fellow martyrs will receive the same reward.

Sometimes you will hear people say that perhaps there is some unintended consequence we need to worry about, in which humanity over indexes on one or a collection of traits and this leads to negative societal outcomes. This concern would be easier to take seriously if people also worried about unintended consequences of letting the future of humanity unfold “naturally.” As things stand, we’re getting dumber, to varying degrees, across the world. It is strange to worry about the long term impacts of IQ increasing but not decreasing. Just because one process is natural and the other is not has no significance here.

A related concern is that we might end up with too much cognitive or psychological homogeneity. On this point we can simply observe that humans are diverse in their preferences. Some people want their kids to be professors, others would prefer they be successful businessmen, and others athletes or entertainers. In any kind of genetic engineering or embryo selection, tradeoffs will exist, and as long as different individuals, cultures, and subcultures vary in their preferences, we will continue to get wide variation.

Of course, some things over time would be weeded out of the population, but such traits are those that everyone agrees are bad, like criminality and mental retardation. If you worry about “unintended effects” of removing them from society, then you should be skeptical of any effort to fight crime or disease. If scientists cured cancer, someone could stand up and say we have not thought enough about the unintended consequences of doing so. They would be correctly ignored, and the fact that such arguments are taken seriously when it comes to biotechnology reveals that people are simply looking for reasons to defend their attachment to the naturalistic fallacy.

This is of course the root of opposition to biotech, along with certain religious principles. There is also a general kind of leftist thought that stands against all good things because it might make some people better off than others.

For the rest of us, there are no reasons to be skeptical of biotechnology. Each new development to extend the fertility window longer, make reproduction easier, or give parents more choices over the abilities and traits that their children end up having should be treated as an unalloyed good. Our laws and culture should be oriented towards facilitating and celebrating progress in this field.