Don’t Exterminate Us: why do I carry the weight of the world?

Because everyone in science and social change should think of the risks and the cost.

Though I believe suicide is okay and assisted suicide should be legal that doesn’t take away the loss and deaths caused. Though I strongly believe that disabled people will exist in utopia or heaven on Earth I fear protecting this future could have a terrible cost to disabled people now.

I think of Nobel and his invention of dynamite that he hoped would revolutionise mining and his guilt when it was used by the military to kill people more effectively.

I wonder if some of the people on the project to build the first atom bomb were conscientious objectors but were drafted irrespective of their moral objections.

Scientists prioritise discovery and truth seeking above consideration of their uses. They usually leave that to engineers. Neither profession has a moral code. It is left up to individuals and I’m afraid they fail to comprehend the consequences of their advances.

A theoretical physicist should consider that their work could contribute to a new generation of power generation but also that more advanced particle physics could also be turned into uncontrolled reactions which would dwarf current nuclear bomb technology.

As a social scientist, mental health rebel or whatever you, the reader, label me as I have to weigh my actions against the potential consequences. Too often I fail to do this enough.

For example, the other prongs of Angel of the Abyss could have negative impacts I’ve not yet explored. Equality First is riddled with problems and a lack of rigorous criticism.

But the genetics problem at the core of Don’t Exterminate Us is something I’m afraid of. I see big problems and evils whatever position I take. My intellect and experience have thus far failed to find a solution I’m comfortable either. Any decision I can make thus far makes me an evil man. My heart errs one way but protecting my soul make me err the opposite way.

Ugh.

Don’t Exterminate Us: short update

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to find the answer from first principles. I got stuck.

Yesterday I went to my local Unitarian church to light a candle in the hope that god, a god I hate, would help me solve the GM designer babies problem.

This morning I woke up and within an hour I found a different approach: thinking of the possible scenarios. I scribbled down ten variations spanning the spectrum from a total ban to total freedom UN using genetic screening on embryos.

This is a small step forward which I should have thought of earlier. I first wrote an email to a disability broker to arrange a meeting to document the outcomes I needed dealing with.

It wasn’t a sequential thought to apply this thinking about outcomes to the Don’t Exterminate Us project. Some background mental process – or something else – connected the dots quickly after I sent the email.

Anyway, it’s a little bit of hope I can think about this problem better.

Don’t Exterminate Us: way of thinking

When dealing with the opportunities and potentially catastrophic outcomes of technological advancement I feel there is a specific mentality needed.

It begins with appreciating our stupidity and the knowledge we don’t know we don’t know. It is a test of today’s decision makers and they’re least likely to be vilified by history if this is the mentality we all maintain when dealing with revolutionary technological advances and their use on humanity.

In particular, it’s around decisions about preventing disability using GM which could result in the eradication of essential human types. Though they may suffer if they’re born today it is not a reason to exterminate them from existence forever.

The example of Negritude – the medical illness of having black skin – is a historical example I often use to illustrate the risk but I could use the extinction and near extinction of species of animal to demonstrate how mistakes of the past affect the future in bad ways.

It seems intrinsic to value biodiversity but this same ideology is not applied to the diversity of the human race. There is no equivalent of the WWF protecting humanity’s diversity.

Two opposing paradigms

Doctors specialise in normalisation and this has valuable uses however it must be tempered by preservation of human diversity – a higher value in my opinion – as is guaranteed by the principles of equality or the integrity of disability.

This battle between two opposing systems will define the decision on what GM techniques can be used, and also the goal of preventing harm and death.

It will define this generation as typically short-sighted and responsible for crimes against humanity (specifically the eradication of essential human diversity) or unusually foresighted for our epoch and capable of preserving a better future in a hundred and even a thousand years later.

I believe acknowledging our inadequacy will help make the right decision. Only time will tell if I’m right.