Gregory Stock: To upgrade is human
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- čas přidán 13. 04. 2009
- www.ted.com In this prophetic 2003 talk -- just days before Dolly the sheep was stuffed -- biotech ethicist Gregory Stock looked forward to new, more meaningful (and controversial) technologies, like customizable babies, whose adoption might drive human evolution.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10 - Věda a technologie
D:
So Blade Runner meets Firefly meets Doom.
Great. We're pretty screwed guys
He's absolutely right that attempting to legislate against these things is doomed to failure and bound to create unintended consequences.
The rich always have more power to circumvent such laws. Such laws have the effect of discriminating against the poor.
Making a person smarter, faster, stronger, healthier, etc. etc. can NEVER be a bad thing, no matter how you twist it.
What are some examples of contemporary conversation? How has it changed? I'm interested in the topic.
I couldn't agree more.
Well said.
Don't fear Change, catch and ride
the Wave as best You can!
Love to All!
8:20 "make you feel really contented...doesn't have any overt side effects". Who needs side effects when the primary effects make people into happy contented cattle. His description is an almost exact description from Aldous Leonard Huxley's Brave New World. People are by state direction categorized into alpha, beta, delta, gamma and epsilon engineered castes. Soma is that special concoction which makes life so much better even if it isn't creative. Creativity and struggle are synonymous.
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth"
MATTHEW 5:5
Likewise. Stay safe and respect life.
"Stress hormones have well known physiological effects on the body, plus if you feel positive you tend to look after yourself." - I should add to this that positive thinking is in fact medically proven to be overrated. There was a recent clinical study which found positive thinking had no impact at all on the growth of cancer tumours. There are valid psychological reasons to try to stay cheerful, but evidently "mind over matter" isn't as significant as many people claim it is.
good, thanks. Well yes, I expect you're right about that, I doubt it's the mainstream view
Here, here, Gaddinglmp! My thoughts exactly.
From every situation both good and bad consequences arise, most unforeseen.
I hope so!
I would consider it a terrible and tragic loss if one day in the future there are no more humans, but merely synthetic, altered people. It's one thing to take drugs that wear off and another to permanently change the genome of a person.
Our pain and weaknesses are a part of what makes us so beautiful. They are, like it or not, what make us human. We have to proceed very, very carefully.
right on!
Couldn't agree more. If anything thats the bane of most of our big problems these days.
I'm up for it. I've always been both a genius and a freak. If my kids can have the benefit of the one without the problems of the other I'm willing to take that chance.
"If we CAN do this we ABSOLUTELY WILL DO THIS, whatever the consequences are"
Wow that is a pretty bold statement.
3:08 and now it's 2009 and we still haven't come that far.
Depends on who gets to do the science and for what reason.
Unfortunately it's very hard to accept, or even consider, that lots of dirtier-than-rotting-corpses business decisions are being done by pharma&agri firms. Sometimes it's more responsible to let things rot away, than to let someone get their hands bloodied, in many ways.
It's called the ego. Most people think that their thoughts are their identity - that their thinking mind is who they are, when actually we are the consciousness behind the thinking mind, "watching" our lives.
Our thoughts, like circulation or unconscious breathing, -happen to us-. They are not who we are.
Meditation clears the chatter of the ego mind, and with a clear mind, one can manifest anything and everything. One can perform all manner of miracles if learned properly.
Wow, very engaging speaker.
I don't think people in the future will accept death while having the chance to intervene. The fear of death haunts humanity since the beginning of time, this will never disappear. Aside from disease, etc, death and ageing is one of the major discomforts we face today. Although I'm very critical of the implications this technologies will have on our lives, I need yet to find a reasonable argument as to why the opportunity of controlling the ageing process should be dismissed.
"Something inside us, around us even, is fueling the thoughts" The only things that fuel thoughts are brains. Nother outside of this universe is needed to explain that.
Keep on Truckin'!
Life and Evolution
will go on, and on.....
There is no stopping
of Either.
Yet things will stay the same,
at some levels at least, even when
Everyone is Blond, Blue-Eyed
and Beautiful.
People will eventually all realize that it only matters that you live your life fully and with no regret. Then whatever comes after death can be welcomed by whatever form of energy one becomes. Yet, biotechnology already has a path to find A.I. within the next COUPLE of years and the result of that will only be the capability to explore and decode all the misteries we now know.
I think i remember that one in "V"
It is not provable that energy comes directly back into this moment (zeit) or dimension. It might visit some parallel universes and we still do not know for fact how these universes mix and interact. However I think its very reasonable to think that there would be no life without death. So seeking to avoid death is the same as seeking to avoid life. And this is why A.I. does not really worry me. Anyway thats a whole diff topic and ill be glad to upload a little discussion on that soon.
That is how you learn, messing around in controlled environments is how you understand the mechanics of any science. we bearly understand how our own genetic code works, we have to learn and understand, not just how to 'improve' ourselves, but who we are. There is enormous risk in this, but it is probably worth it. We might as well find out sooner so that we can be prepared for what is inevitable.
"Why does it feel so good to help people that will never pay you back, or likely see you again?"
There are various evolutionary explanations for altruism. Look them up.
"Why does positive thinking promote health and prevent disease?" - Stress hormones have well known physiological effects on the body, plus if you feel positive you tend to look after yourself.
Running out of space, so TBC...
If you are interested in the subject search for "telomeres and telomerase" on google. There has been a lot of good research on the subject in recent years. We are closer then you might think.
@47f0 It's constitutional for the post office to exist, just not for them to have a monopoly on mail delivery. The post office has a history of restricting speech (by restricting what types of literature was allowed to be sent), and by imposing fines on private companies who offer a better service at a better price. I'm fine with the post office if it can stand on it's own feet and not restrict private competition. It the private sector can do it better, why not let them.
I have no problem with learning in controlled environments, and if some people think they need to be genetically redesigned - it's their decision. But as soon as genetically modified humans reproduce, the "experiment" leaves "the laboratory". Given the enormous risk in this, it is important that we introduce some kind of fail safe mechanism (no reproduction after gene alteration). Genetic modifications? Fine, but not at the cost of future generations. No human should have this much power.
Has anybody watched the movie Equilibrium? That's what goes through my mind when I hear of people drugging themselves. I don't mind modifying to get rid of harmful diseases like extreme Schizophrenia.
But look at the people that gave us art and shaped our societies; they re the ones with diseases that run for miles.
I think people should be more appreciative of who they are, that way we'll all be accepting of each others flaws.
I think this has to wait. Poverty and global warming are closer.
sounds good
Discarding failures is always an option, ya take a minute to absorb that.
@frade001 BUT, that image also shows us that we should trusts geneticists as they have accomplished amazing things with limited tools in the field. We should be excited for the future it will be like nothing we've ever seen before.
that was meant to be "quite a lot" - the current Bishop of Durham (UK) for example
Any random gibbering lunatic could also be described as an original. That's not necessarily a good thing!
Yes, "believing only in things which are probably true, as determined by examination of the evidence" is somewhat limiting, but it still leaves the entire universe for us to admire.
Sometimes it is enough to admire the garden because it is beautiful, without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it.
I would also like to say that even if we get to alter our genes, that doesnt mean that we're bypassing selection, because even then, people will select mating partners based on specific qualities.
"I feel sorry for those that only believe in what they can see and touch, and measure..."
Don't worry too much about us. Many people are quite happy to live inside that little box we call "reality". Fantasy and delusion are fun I'm sure, but they're not my cup of tea.
There is a lot of problems that need to be solved when this technology becomes available. IMO the biggest problems have to do with insurances and the fact that the best, newest technology is always going to be too expensive for most of the human population. Things like expensive neurological enhancements would have the power to create a lot of inequality in education. Gene doping is also going to be a problem, albeit a very small one on the world wide scale.
Hubris posing as progress! Sounds familiar.
Hi. Yes, thanks. No, you said "people don't want to live forever" and I'm a person. Anyway, on a recent poll on richard dawkins' site about how long people would like to live ideally, more than half (64 posters) said they would want to live until the end of the universe given the opportunity. re. your points it may sound callous, but you would make new friends and I'd still rather stay alive even if all my current ones die, however in the event of me being able to live forever
Can anyone tell me how you tell the personality of an embryo if a personality is something developed through experiences in life?
It's kinda funny watching this, because this discussion is so 10 years ago - when the discussion was all very theoretical and ideologically driven.
Pros:
1:Physically perfect, strong heart, free from genetic disorders
2:Mentally perfect, no more schizo, Alzheimer, etc.
3:Improved lifespans / slowing of the aging process.
Cons:
1:Loss of reproductive ability
2:Potential for problems to come generations forward when it is too late to reverse.
This is why we EXPERIMENT. Small numbers of animals / people at first, then if no problems present themselves, it will be offered to the public.
It'll go to the same place your documents go to when your hard disk is melted down to slag...
Very good talk. Dead on.
As long as this technology is controlled by the public and not privatized. I'd be most comfortable. Other than that I think this is really cool!
keep thinking that brah.
You have to understand evolution coupled with natural selection. When you do the answer is clear.
When we bypass evolution we also bypass selection, and describe for our specie another "dependence".
As that relates to religion, this comment environment is too compressed to debate with quality.
I can very capably debate it, it's just difficult to do so under space restrictions.
Even if the absolute worst happened and we did lose our ability to naturally reproduce, by then I'm assuming artificial intelligence will have advanced enough that it will continue on, or humans could become digitized hybrids without the need to naturally reproduce. Revolutionary stuff I know, but the way we think about what constitutes human life will undoubtedly change in this new epoch.
I agree totally with everything you've said. I personally would love to live forever.
You said it yourself though,a recent poll on "Richard Dawkins"site. So if you ask scientifically minded atheists whether they would like to live forever, %60 say yes. Try asking that same question on Fox news website, or any other more mainstream forum.
"but it will probably happen. supply and demand" Thats exactly why i think it's going to happen. The free market will demand it.
I hold the opposite conclusion, in that eternal life symbolically represents continued success in selection. That religion provides restraint, inspires creativity, and compels further evolutionary development and not a dependence on technological and scientific development in order to sustain evolution.
The problem most have today is the ideology has become archaic, and needs a new way to be disseminated, while the base truth is just as good as ever.
@Finiras When we manipulate nature we step outside of the process of nature. To say that is natural is contradictory.
@both anwyll - finiras
The wisdom in natural selection is that it rewards success (good) and excludes evil (failure), by survival or extinction.
In short a very pure definition of the positive and negative.
Religion as a concept preaches wisdom towards a positive end, and therefore success in selection.
But again no room for detaail here in a comment format.
the moral argument still stands...i have heard dawkins talking about this book and i think even dawkins said tht he never endorses of wht he is saying as something being morally good.anyways i never liked dawkins literature,ill try reading the matt ridley one when i have time. looking through them, arent these books based on hypothesis? im more impressed by ramachandran's work which forms the basis of my philosophy.
They already got them!
that's a great advertisement to children !
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Injustice righted.
thanks, I should study the science of it more, but I am aware that we are tantalisngly close to finding ways of greatly extending human life. I am a supprter of the Methuselah Foundation, for example
it was done in 2003 though
how old is this?
I assume you are referring to my comment where I said "most people don't want to live forever".
Anybody I've ever talked to about this face to face always has the same reasons why they wouldn't want to extend their lifespans:
Everyone they love will die before them
Over population
Living forever would take the fun out of life
etc.
If religious people are given the choice between eternal life in heaven, on earth, or both, they would choose heaven only. (just a guess)
@kaje01:
1. I am not a christian
2. Since we are just beginning to understand the basics about the human genome and still have no clue about the countless interactions between group of gene pairs, we should not mess around with the genetic code of the generations to come. This step can not just be undone. Only a fool can honestly expect the power to manipulate evolution has no downside. Science has brought us countless advantages but also great dangers.
This speech partly reminded about some parts of the dystopia world of A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It feels refreshing compared to all the Orwellian aspects developing in our societies.
There seems to be an overwhelming stench of soma everywhere.
To get what that means (know Huxleys story and):
Watch KYMATICA at videogoogle, or dl free (&legal) from thepiratebay.
Cheer up people, just free yourselves. Love and respect to all.
Totally agree, generationist.
When I heard that (8:20), I thought: we already have it. It's called heroine.
If we consider artificial constructs as being capable of life, there's no reason to think that it's not the next step in evolution.
to upgrade is not human to upgrade is natural
it's all about consequences.
Genetic engineering does bypass selection, and no we are not there yet, but we are on the threshold.
Wisdom (for me) implies the known end of all things (consequences), and when we engineer outside a natural process, we assume an infinite wisdom we do not possess. In that sense I enter religion as pertinent and a reality.
And that is just one aspect of the concept, it covers everything we know and much more we do not.
@Leifthrasir it's funny you say that. I was thinking the opposite, as long as it's controlled by the private sector I'm comfortable with it. In the governments hands, I don't know; the government doesn't do very many things well. They can't turn a profit with the post office, they've made medicine more expensive and by extension less available. If in private hands it's in the hands of free people, if in the government's hands it's controlled by a ruling class.
@frade001 And why exactly are you telling us this ?
Having a high IQ is good for reasons other then that it makes you better then everyone. The less rare a high IQ is, the better.
If everyone's IQ was 150, the world would be a better place. I do agree with you though that this sort of thing would encourage a Gattaca type situation where people who have natural genes are discriminated against. I don't however think that the possibility for inequality is reason enough not to pursue this.
I agree also that people don't want to live forever.
I agree but it was 6 years ago. All old news.
but what if we are no longer human, like the drawings of the ancients
There is no trully good reason to stop aging or changing lifes way of regenerating life. In my opinion at least. I think its simpler than this.
The internet isn't yours to control.
You are right to ask these questions, but think about the diversity of ability we already have.
There are Downs Syndrome adults, living in the same world with Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. We already have huge differences in our abilities.
Now, we also have injustice done to the weak, but I think it is possible, if we fight for it, to preserve the equality of our rights before the law.
We will never have equality of outcomes. But equality of rights before the law is achievable.
The future is coo.
large space stations and colonise other planets etc. It is only speculation to say there would be no fun in life of you lived forever - is there any reason why the things you find fun now would ever stop being fun if you were still healthy? and if you have the whole world, and in the future probably other worlds, to explore and enjoy, and new things being invented and created all the time surely you are onlly limited by your curiosity/imagination and there is no reason why we
should
Cant he Understand Nobody can Tell what effects this will have on the rest of humanity and nature at large?
Until we develop from the inside there will be no development at all. More power in the hands of fools is a bad thing. Academic excellence is not a substitute for understanding how to live. Half educated, and not the good half. "You have great power!" "What should I do?" Should we be happy to become more powerful when we are already using our power so badly?
Like the Kings of Carthage or Timur Lenk or Stalin? I think that your view is spurious and myopic. We humans have amazing untapped potential as living entities that is intentionally kept repressed by our masters. To try and leap-frog ahead artificially without actually discovering what are good for as beings is presciently fortold by Shakespeare and Shelley. This is one chance to make a buck that we would be wise to circumvent.
gday mate
"Why do people call each other, across the country suddenly, to find out that something very impacting just happened?" - Easy... COINCIDENCE! Hundreds of millions of phone calls are made every day, some of these people calling each other will have had simultaneous big events occur, and when they do, they'll remember it!
Seriously, these aren't even slightly hard to explain rationally. This is very suggestive of you wanting to believe so much that you'll grasp at the thinnest of straws.
Like you said, in most western nations we don't have a problem with too high birth rates, in fact they're too low, which is the reason that we depend on immigration so much. One can't compare India and China with countries of Europe, different approaches are needed for different countries. And yes, "less sex drive" sounds pretty horrible, I think we know how to use contraceptives in the west ;)
This guy reminds me of the guy from Brave New World the film! all for chaning the way we are born and how long we live!
I hope he means genetic penis enlargement, and longer lifespan, rather than cloning and 60 as the max age.
Why think in terms of technology or no technology? We've got the technology to do it now, the problem is our perception of the world is ass backwards. We think of things as isolated events when the reality is EVERYTHING is part of one living system, and this has many different scales and examples but who could deny the balance of the universe? Nothing created or destroyed equal and opposite reactions? Its all one thing, yet we do behave asthough there's us and them. I didnt start it, just see it
So who want to be the first Guniea Pig?
Your future child is either going to be either a genius or a freak.
Any takers!?
In 200-300 years there will be nothing left of the "humans" we will be compleatly diffrent. we would of changed ourselfs soo much they may be no turning back.
that iss soooo sick
So I suppose we shouldn't switch our biology around so much as add on to it. Improve it. Instead of permanently making our metabolism slower we might build in some sort of metaphorical switch that allows us to have a high metabolism when we need it and a low one when we just sit around. And I guess better contraceptives would negate the low sex drive huh? I mean several Western nations have a birth/death ratio below one.
Super strength and doing Calc. in in my head would be awesome too.
That would be great, but there will always be inequality of ability.
In fact, this is a GOOD thing! It is a form of diversity! The opposite of diversity is uniformity. That leads to stagnation.
I'm not saying that it is good that there are low-IQ people in the world, or that we should not try to improve their IQ's. We should.
But there is more bang for the buck from raising the high-end than raising the average, since high-end intelligent people create things that benefit us all.
Why think in terms of technology or no technology? We've got the technology to do it now, the problem is our perception of the world is ass backwards. We think of things as isolated events when the reality is EVERYTHING is part of one living system, this has many different scales n expressions but who could deny the balance of the universe? Nothing created or destroyed equal and opposite reactions? Its all one thing, yet we do behave asthough there's us and them. I didnt start it I just see it
true, but it seems that doesn't apply to you though.
Looking at God traditionally is foolish, but looking at our unatural influence on our evolutionary path as it relates to religion is not.
So if you understand the concept of a creator in this light, then you can realize there may just be something to it.
It's all about wisdom and accumulated knowledge and the use of both.
GM food no? GM folks yes??
"what if you could take a concoction of pharmaceuticals that made you feel really contented?"
It's called cannabis.
how or why?
Actually it's both how and why, effectively...
Our morality itself is based on success is it not? We could have evolved in immoral ways but would we be here to talk about it?
Same risk applies to our future as a specie, not to mention our impact on the universe if we ever get off this rock.
Believe me I've devoted many hours of thought to this very subject.
in 50-100 years time we will be playing with new ideas in 200-300 years the gene pool will be compleatly, diffrent.