Steve Hsu: commitment

Transcript context

…Awesome. Let's talk a little about what consumers actually want. Gwern has this really detailed post about embryo selection. He writes in it, “My belief is that the total uptake will be fairly modest as a fraction of the population,” and he's talking about embryo selection there. “A large fraction of the population expresses hostility towards any new fertility-related technology whatsoever, and people open to the possibility will be deterred by the necessity of advanced family planning and the high financial cost of IVF, and the fact that the IVF process is lengthy and painful.” So, he seems very pessimistic about the possibility that this is something that millions of people are using—what is your reaction to his take here? There are two perspectives that you could adopt in looking at this. One is a venture capitalist perspective, where you ask: “How big is this market? What's it worth dominating this market? What valuation should I accept from these pirates at GP?” The other perspective is being worried that humans are all going to engineer themselves to be blond, 6’4, and we're going to be suddenly susceptible to all kinds of diseases—and one single, cold virus will kill all of us. So, there's two different perspectives on what level of penetration will this technology have. From the venture guys' perspective, I will just say this: one out of 10 babies in Denmark is born this way. Would you capture a market that interfaces with one out of 10 families, and that's going to grow, of course. One out of 10 families in all developed countries, maybe including China. Do you have the genome of mom and dad and the kid? Maybe you can sell them some health services later on? Maybe your relationship with these people is sticky? That's for the venture guys. From the, “Oh, I'm really worried about human evolution!” Or, “When are we going to get another von Neumann?” That's a different question.It may be that it'll never be more than 10 or 20% of the population that's using IVF. Through IVF, embryo selection, and maybe potentially editing someday. In that sense, why worry, there's always going to be this natural reservoir of the wild type that has much more genetic diversity? Maybe this is the Goldilocks world. But imagine the Goldilocks world where there's plenty of wild-type people, and then there's plenty of people using these advanced technologies, and everybody's happy—including our investors. Something tells me that that will not be satisfying for the people who are concerned about the evolutionary diversity or whatever. I have the sense that this whole argument is just a front for a moral reservation about this technology.…

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