I’m Nathan LeClaire, open source enthusiast and DevOps philosopher, and this past week, I came across a post that has me transfixed: How To Make Superbabies, which is a deep dive on the mechanics and science by which we could craft new humans.

Its conclusion I find both cliché in terms of being LessWrong-ey (The brave, aligned thing is to have a super baby, because they can solve alignment!) and a bit uncanny:

If it turns out we can’t safely create digital gods and command them to carry out our will… No one has a backup plan. Superbabies is a backup plan.

But are super babies really defensible ethically, socially, and aesthetically? I think so, with some caveats. This article is my attempt to explore why I think so.

The motivation to want to have superbaby characteristics such as cancer-proofing or increased IQ (given that one is inclined to have a baby in the first place) seems obvious to me - because it will ensure your future childrens’ prosperity, no different from sending them to great schools, getting them excellent nutrition, or teaching them life skills.

But there is a big debate whether having a superbaby is agreeable for first order effects (Is the action of creating a superbaby inherently right or wrong?), second order effects (Do the effects on the individual and society tip the balance towards unethical?) and aesthetic (Does having a superbaby align with living a good life?).

A Tale of Three Babies

To assist in our explorations and reasoning, let’s create an anchor point of three hypothetical thought babies, born in the year 2025 and fast forwarded to their adult life in 2050. They are:

1. Liam, your run of the mill, non-super standard model baby created the old fashioned way.
2. Calum, a baby birthed after sifting through 5000 embryos, selected for desirable traits such as IQ and height, but also increased empathy and personification of the higher masculine nature.
3. Manny, who was gene edited to perceive a wider spectrum of color than any non-edited human.

With these individuals, we will try to see some abstract ideas and concepts through a more concrete and narrative lens.

Ethics: Is the Action of Creating a Superbaby Unethical?

There are some who would object to the introduction of Calum on various grounds. One such ground would be that discarding the unused embryos is wrong. But we already have accepted a range of technologies and interventions that are clustered in this area like IVF screening and genetic counseling. Embryo selection isn’t categorically different, and it seems that qualms are by and large more oriented towards the effects on society, or a slippery slope towards abusive historical eugenics practices.

I would therefore argue that, even if applied towards controversial traits, embryo selection is mostly fine in a self-contained way. There are relatively few hairy questions about identity, as the DNA still remains wholly in the provenance of the parents. If limited to disease prevention, I’d say it’s practically a no brainer. But I’m not ideologically opposed to selecting for traits like IQ or height either. I leave this to the discretion of the parents to amplify their desired traits.

Gene editing, on the other hand, is more complicated. The act itself, physically speaking, doesn’t introduce any immediate concerns, as it’s just a bit of rearranging encoding. But, it does immediately raise some questions about identity and self sovereignty. Directly editing the genes of a future human, it could be argued, deprives them of the agency that is their sovereign right — to enjoy the expression of their phenotype and shape their own destiny. Questions about nature vs. nurture, and how heavily parents should be authorized to dictate their child’s life, get even more complicated when the nurture can reach directly into the nature and edit it.

Still, we often override individual sovereignty in favor of the greater good, and we do bring new drugs and technologies to market despite the risks. So in terms of the inherent worth of the act, a “light touch” in genetic editing is acceptable, when aimed at preventing disease or improving existing human traits. But pushing beyond what currently formed humans can do (like giving Manny the ability to see color outside the visible spectrum) crosses a bigger ethical line.

Counter-balancing genetic editing with guard rails likely also makes it more palatable. Effort should be focused on ensuring diversity remains in our populations’ genomes. We should, at a minimum, come up with a coefficient representing information loss from the parent genomes and set a genetic “speed limit”.

A lot of adjacent questions crop up the second you edit a genome — if the child’s edited genes are not “ours”, the parents’, then … whose are they? We’ve already seen legal debates over genetic IP in agriculture — do we run the risk of that extending to humans? Are you only authorized to edit genes to the values already contained within your family tree, or is any human sequence fair game? I don’t think these questions have any easy answers.

Are Superbabies Wrong For Society?

Even if the mechanics are fine, this is inherently problematic for other reasons, right? The objections are usually along the lines of, (1) This is eugenics with extra steps, and eugenics is bad, (2) This will increase inequality in society to an unacceptable degree, and (3) We are “playing God” and assuming a vain role we should not.

The “this is eugenics” argument is understandable, but eugenics was pseudo-science in origin, and here we are talking about applying actual real science to try and make human life better. Eugenics implies weak agency of the individual, whereas this could be individually empowering — no one is suggesting forced sterilization or a centralized dictation of what a super baby should look like. Rather than a top-down driven process of artificial selection, this is granting agency to people to decide what they want to do with their offspring, within the boundaries of what is ethical and beneficial to society.

However, while the possibility of an ethical rollout is present, the practical aspects are more difficult to finesse - it’s hard not to sympathize with the objectors who wring hands about super babies causing a widened gap between the rich and poor in our society. But that also is a bad reason to reject it out of hand, given that inequalities are already around everywhere, and we “accept” them. Super babies will put yet more urgent pressure on revising our already-overdue social contract. But given the social consciousness the present generations have compared to their parents, there’s a possibility we could bootstrap an improved social contract with embryonic selection and gene editing themselves - we need something to break the loop, and it’s clear human nature as-is isn’t working. Could having more peace babies, driven by the same impulse that leads to fair trade and ethical sourcing in coffee, help with this?

Maybe Calum, our earlier mentioned gentlemanly embryo, grows up to favor empathy over aggression. This isn’t because he is weak and submissive, but rather because he’s wired to be considerate and cooperative. A society with the presence of such babies would be a better one, with a stronger social safety net, than a society full of Liams.

Yet there’s another side to selecting such traits — say we do see Calums created en masse. Will that population also be too docile? Would the American Revolution still have happened if the population was less aggressive by nature? Would a dystopia of compliant sheep for despots thrive? I’m not sure it’s an obvious win and wise path, but I think the branch of thought is worth consideration.

And the net benefit to society at large in terms of disease reduction could be immense. If we delete cancer, isn’t that kind of miraculous? Perhaps we will be playing God in miniature, but it will be in kind of an awesome, manifest-the-kingdom-of-heaven way?

Aesthetics: Is Having a Superbaby Beautiful or Ugly?

When sharing my thoughts on super babies with a friend of mine once, he had a good point - paraphrasing him - “But isn’t [the stochasticity] the beauty of life? Aren’t our scars, and our ugliness, and our healing, what makes us human, and what highlights the highs of life by contrast?”

Which, to me, stands as an independent point of “is this inherently bad” or “is this wise” - it’s more aesthetic and personal, more of a question of if you are dooming your future progeny to never experience life as a lived art form. Which is a valid concern! Would we have Carravaggio’s “Medusa” if he did not brawl and murder and face exile? Will widespread gene editing doom us to be a civilization of Corporate Memphis?

I find this argument more sympathetic given its mystique and romanticism than trying to make an outright levy on ethics - it somehow manages to capture the “X Factor” that we all can see in human nature, and it’s more ontological than ethical - Is it still human if we produce a super baby? A surprisingly small quantity of DNA information is all that separates us from animals we deliberately cultivate and eat. It won’t take much revision to the genetic code before we have worse answers than ever to “Who are we?” and a new question of “Are we still Homo sapiens?”.

How many genetic modifications can we make before we aren’t human anymore? If you keep replacing parts in the baby’s code like a genetic Ship of Theseus, does the baby lose its identity and bloodline? There feels an inevitable point of modification at which your kid is no longer yours, and yet another where they are no longer human. We need to take care not to cross it.

Take Manny as an example. He looks human. He sounds human. He acts like a human in all ways, including having sentience, and using language, etc. However, he has pushed the boundaries of human experience - he has taken in qualia that have never been perceived by any human before. Are we, then, dooming him to a life of alienated torment, or are we blessing him, and ourselves, with a deepened understanding of the world that enriches our respect for, and understanding of, human nature? Is he still human?

I am unsure, but I am inclined to believe life would still be majestic and human for Manny. He would boldly perceive where no man has perceived before, and the net effect of his newly granted qualia seems positive, for both himself and for society. We have real life tetrachromats already, and the fields of design, photography, and art are better off for it. His life will assuredly still contain pain, glory, and scars, just of a different type. Even for super babies, life will still suck, it will just suck less in some ways. Or perhaps, they will even be bullied precisely because they are super babies.

Manny’s example overly romanticizes the actual likely usage of widespread gene editing as a thought experiment. Realistically, we’re more at risk to be flooded with Kardashian clones than new qualia. This will be not be problematic in the very long haul, because ensuring genetic diversity is the entire point of sexual selection, but in the short term, it could be miserable. So, for both aesthetic reasons as well as ethical ones, I reiterate that finding ways to encourage diversity in the genetically modified population is critical.

Hopefully, as a super baby, won’t have cancer or dementia, but you will still have scars, and ugliness, and uniqueness from your peers. That’s an unavoidable part of human life, and removing some vectors of pain, or even widening the door to hack traits like IQ or physical appearance, won’t do anything to take it away.

Takeaways

Grappling with the ethical complexities of the genomic revolution is mind bending but important. The technology is already here, and it seems inevitable that someone, somewhere will start using it. The competitive pressure between nation states if one of them begins allowing this technology en masse could create a “Future Shock” type of situation that we should be prepared for, rather than caught off guard by. My thesis is that embryonic selection is by and large OK, even for large quantities of embryos, and that gene editing is also OK when applied with a light touch. The possibility remains to be seen from observation that slightly more heavy handed applications could be within the realm of tolerance too.

Until next time, stay sassy Internet.

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