babies made from 3 people

[Starglider]

the only real good which interests the upper class is dominance

You still have this ludicrously elaborate, concrete and personified notion of 'class struggle' which is causing you to conjure such notions. Rich people, in general, act in their own interests - just like all other humans. Their personal interests meaning taking more money and power from wherever it can be found. Contemporary rich people do not, as a rule, give a damn about the continued success of rich people other than their immediate family and personal friends. All identifiable barriers to economic mobility are emergent consequences of individual self-interest; there is tacit suppression and oppression of certain social groups because those groups tend to act directly against the interests of wealthy people, but there is no objection to those people individually migrating out of the group. Indeed that is very much the ideal of many richer people, who just can't understand 'why so many people insist on being poor'. In this case the profit motive of providing such technology to the mass market vastly outweighs any vauge notion of class eligibility, and in any case no first world nations are remotely close to allowing such massive discrimination in the use of a technology.

(Orwell said - the goal of power is power, the goal of torture - torture); if current demonstrations of dominance are not enough, technology (even a widely available one) can be used to create essentially a caste society

Power is only weilded on that scale by nation states; either under the control of an ethnic minority or an ideological one. Governments and corporations are both giant amoral intelligences, but the former focus on power with money as merely a means to that end, so transhuman technology (like pretty much anything disruptive) is automatically seen as a threat against autocracy and an opportunity to reinforce it. Corporations focus on money with power as a means to that end; successful transhumanist technology creates a tremendous demand with consequent profit in satisfying it. Pluis of course while giant corporations can alter and ignore the law to a limited extent, governments can do what they like.

That is irrelevant if the upper class wants a good which they will not be able to have in a society of mass-created superior humans - dominance.

Clearly the threat is when the 'upper class' consist primarily of government powerbrokers and vice versa - a hard distinction of social privilidge instead of just a fuzzy income/wealth bracket. Fortunately the defeat of the USSR destroyed the most hideous expression of this model, but sadly thanks to relentless expansion of government (and government/central bank subsidy as the prime source of corporate income) it is creeping back.

[K. A. Pital]

Blah blah blah. Hierarchy is self-reinforcing regardless of the way it is formed. Therefore your arguments are nothing but apologism, similar to a Christian one. Sorry.

[Simon_Jester]

Stas, I think you are misunderstanding the internal dynamics of your enemy. That is not a good idea, even if you are utterly determined to keep it as an enemy, which I am not disputing.

There really is no effective and universal conspiracy of the rich, in the sense of businessmen getting together and meeting to decide that XYZ will be done to prevent social changes ABC. There is no conscious organization, beyond the crudest and most spontaneous ones; there is no secret chamber you can invade and find the rich masters of the world. There is no Pope of Capitalism issuing dogma, no central committee deciding "this technology we will release, this one we will not release."

This should not surprise you. Capitalists may do things that hurt plenty of people, but they need little more coordination to do this than would a bunch of tigers. Tigers do not need to conspire for there to be a constant stream of predation by tigers. Tigers do not need to work together to stop the rise of other apex predators. Tigers don't even need to care if there are other apex predators, so long as their own hunting range remains available.

This is one of the reasons capitalism (especially capitalism in democratic states) has remained so persistent, despite several alternative social models having cropped up to oppose it. Monarchies, centrally planed bureaucratic economies, fascist tyrannies where capital is ultimately subordinate to the national Will... All these things have a 'head' which can be struck off in a revolutionary social change.

Capitalism does not, there is no central planning, there are only the plans of masses of individuals who occasionally decide to cooperate in limited ways.

The practical upshot of this, in the case of genetic enhancements, is that, capitalists will happily sell the general public the rope that might one day be used to hang them, figuring that they'll find a way to avoid being hung later. And who knows, perhaps they are right and will not be hung- but they won't be institutionally capable of keeping a lock on the technology, of that I am certain.

There's massive manipulation of children to make them grow up as desired in the book, but it's almost all done by 'nurture,' not nature.

That was what made it a good reference, even though it would not work as written it illustrates that genetics alone are insufficient to determine career.

Ah. I didn't quite realize that this was your intention.

Which is more of the concern. Basically, if you can plunk down a million dollars to get a baby with that list of enhancements,

Oh get over it. New technology is almost always expensive to start with, but if it's popular the cost will quickly come down to mass-market affordability. The basic procedures involved are not inherently expensive, the genetics part is almost completely automatable.

The market will do this.

There are unexpected consequences, not predicted by supply and demand models, if the market doesn't make this technology mass-market-affordable within about 30 years, though: the rise of the (very expensive) first specimens of homo superior disrupting everyone else's ability to bring their own children in on the emergence of this new artificial species.

Hopefully the decline in cost will happen faster, and there won't be a problem, but it's just cause for a bit of trepidation.

[SMJB]

Here's the thing about fears of the rising of a caste system--insofar as designer babies would facilitate such a thing, we already have it. Rich people have nannies and special schools and tutors and all sorts of things specifically designed to give their kids an edge. I've hypothesized elsewhere that the main reason so many poor Blacks can't rise above their station in life isn't anything to do with Blackness but with poor people being unable to rise above their station in life, and it's just more apparent with black people because they're a class which happens to also be an ethnic group. Basically, even pretending that people will act in their class interest--and the number of rural districts that vote Republican would seem to argue otherwise--the elites have no need to squash genetic modification for all, because they already have all those other advantages to sit on, and a head start to boot. Besides which, by the time genemod 1.0 is cheap enough to be available for the masses the elites will probably working on genemod 5.3.

Basically, there will be no sweeping societal changes based on the elites being genetically superior. Quite frankly, we already assume they're superior, anyway.

As to "eliminating Blackness", obviously people will only have say over whether their own kids get modified, baring some sort of Fascist Revolution which has nothing to do with this thread, and if they have that much of a problem with Black people, they probably won't fuck one in the first place.

[Mr. G]

Or else we'll have a bunch of rich people who are pretty ornaments but not extraordinary intellects, or who are jocks but, again, with no other talents. "Superior" is defined in so many ways, we may not wind up with ubermensch who are superior in all ways. Also, there are tradeoffs in biological systems. Engineer your kids to be really tall and they might wind up with all sorts of back and joint problems down the line, as an example.

On the other hand, engineer your kids to have a mean IQ of 140, a metabolism that keeps them physically fit even if they can't or don't take time to exercise, and need no more than four hours of sleep a night, and they will probably have a workplace advantage over the normals. And all those things are probably at least vaguely possible for genetic engineering, since there are people who already do have those traits. We know it's possible.[/quote]

There are people that need to sleep less than 4 hours per night?

Basically, if you can plunk down a million dollars to get a baby with that list of enhancements, then you will see a LOT of millionaires having children like that. Who then proceed to inherit their parents' money and become the next generation of elite, with both financial and genetic advantages of their own.

Rich people already do the essentially same thing when they purchase Ivy league university education for their kids they also have connections and wealth that allow for their kids to have advantages over other kids later on (either directly or even in terms of interest returns on inherited wealth). Essentially, in equilibrium, assuming people are indifferent between the various forms of return (either education, genetic enhancement or simply inherited long term capital investments) the tendency is for the returns on genetic enhancement of your kids to equal the returns of everything else so that spending 1 million dollars on genetic enhancement will, for instance, increase your kids expected income by the equivalent of a eternal flow of 35,000 dollars per year, given interest rates of 3.5%.

You may also see a class of "genetic indentured servants" whose parents took out monster loans against the child's future earnings to engineer them that way. It's frightening, but it's not all that much different from what we now do with college loans.

Exactly. We essentially already have the same system only a less complex version of it.

[Mr. G]

Edit: Sorry for the double post I am not used to the interface in this particular forum.

On the other hand, engineer your kids to have a mean IQ of 140, a metabolism that keeps them physically fit even if they can't or don't take time to exercise, and need no more than four hours of sleep a night, and they will probably have a workplace advantage over the normals. And all those things are probably at least vaguely possible for genetic engineering, since there are people who already do have those traits. We know it's possible.

There are people that don't need to sleep more than 4 hours per night?

Basically, if you can plunk down a million dollars to get a baby with that list of enhancements, then you will see a LOT of millionaires having children like that. Who then proceed to inherit their parents' money and become the next generation of elite, with both financial and genetic advantages of their own.

Rich people already do the essentially same thing when they purchase Ivy league university education for their kids. Also, they have connections and wealth that allow for their kids to have advantages over other kids later on (either directly or even in terms of interest returns on inherited wealth). Essentially, in equilibrium, assuming people are indifferent between the various forms of return (either education, genetic enhancement or simply inherited long term capital investments) the tendency is for the returns on genetic enhancement of your kids to equal the returns of everything else so that spending 1 million dollars on genetic enhancement will, for instance, increase your kids expected income by the equivalent of a eternal flow of 35,000 dollars per year, given interest rates of 3.5%. So, overall, maybe the existence of genetic enhancement may not actually change anything in terms of wealth distribution and social mobility.

There is also the possibility that having genetically modified kids with high IQs may actually make jobs requiring high levels of intellectual skills to be relatively less valuable (a reduction in the IQ premium on income), reducing the vast levels of income inequality between the smart people and the dumb ones that we have right now.

You may also see a class of "genetic indentured servants" whose parents took out monster loans against the child's future earnings to engineer them that way. It's frightening, but it's not all that much different from what we now do with college loans.

Exactly. We essentially already have the same system only a less complex version of it.

[Broomstick]

There are people that need to sleep less than 4 hours per night?

Yes. I actually know one. Not common, and I'll note it's no guarantee they'll be workplace supermen.

You may also see a class of "genetic indentured servants" whose parents took out monster loans against the child's future earnings to engineer them that way. It's frightening, but it's not all that much different from what we now do with college loans.

Exactly. We essentially already have the same system only a less complex version of it.

Under our current system the parents can certainly take out a loan... but not against the child's future earnings. Only the child could do that (possibly to finance education). It would take a nation that allows parents to indenture their children or causes the children to inherit their parents' debts. While such do exist, they're a minority at present, particularly in the west.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Stas, I think you are misunderstanding the internal dynamics of your enemy. That is not a good idea, even if you are utterly determined to keep it as an enemy, which I am not disputing.

Struggle between classes does not require a deliberate conspiracy and conscious collusion to be demonstrated. They can come about purely from emergent behavior and subconscious cues. For example, there is no open conspiracy of white Americans or men to keep the current racial or gender hierarchy in place (and with the population distribution, a conspiracy would be impossible), but the actions they do reinforce the hierarchy even if entirely unintentionally. A lot of times simply the existence of the hierarchy is enough to maintain it, as seen by people who think black Americans are lesser because of the system keeping them down, or people not hiring, promoting, or granting leeway to female employees because they're seen as not as valuable to do so.

With a power structure like the elite of society, it seems as if there'd be an additional factor in the form of selection pressure. Any system that influences those in power to maintain the power structure better will be more likely to remain in power, pretty much by default. Again, this doesn't have to be a conscious decision, but learnt and emergent behavior.

[Mr. G]

I actually think that genetically engineered cognitive enhancement will tend to reduce the overall degree of social inequality. How?

Social inequality has been increasing in the developed world over the past several decades due to the fact that the economy has shifted from a material economy based on industry to an information economy based on IT related industries and services. In this information economy the inequality in cognitive skills produces larger inequalities in incomes than in an economy more based on manual labor or labor operating simple machines (like the old industrial economy) as cognitive skills became particularly valued in a more automated society where simple repetitive tasks are increasingly performed by automated machines and not people. As result, due to the demand factors, cognitive skills tend to become more valued and the inequality in earnings due to the natural inequality in cognitive skills tends to increase.

With the possibility of genetically enhancing cognitive skills (at not absurdly high costs) the supply of workers with high levels of cognitive skills will tend to increase, lowering their relative value due to supply factors. These supply factors will negate (at least partially) the trends of increasing the earning premium on cognitive skills.

[Broomstick]

Yeah, well, we actually do have lots of "cognitively trained" as opposed to manual laborers, yet millions of them are unemployed. Making everyone a genius isn't going to guarantee employment if there aren't enough jobs to go around.

[Simon_Jester]

Look at it another way, too:

Do we honestly believe that existing workers are hitting the limits of their brains' ability to process information? I kind of doubt it; there are too many people out there complaining about how mentally understimulating their jobs are. Adding more intelligence won't make you enough better at such a job that it'll level the playing field between you, and a similarly upgraded guy with more connections.