Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…It seems like another technology that you might be very interested in that could have big effects on the trajectory of human civilization, and potentially avoid extinction — although it also could be very negative — would be the capacity to redesign human motivation and our personalities through genetic engineering. We could potentially select our children such that they are, say, very pacifist, such that they don’t want to kill one another. If you could get large take-up of this technology, that could potentially lower existential risk and get it very close to zero and give us more brighter prospects of surviving for a long time. On the other hand, the ability to redesign human personalities such that we’re so passive and will just accept dominance would potentially, again, facilitate totalitarianism and a very stable bad or neutral state. What do you think of that? I don’t think we know yet how genetic engineering will affect existential risk or even long-term growth. We don’t, at the moment, as you know, have the capabilities really to do that. As we develop them — if we do — we might have a better idea, but I think most people should be deeply agnostic and also somewhat worried about genetic engineering. If you think we’re on an okay civilizational trajectory right now relative to the human past, and then we’re going to have this other major event, possibly more important than nuclear weapons, and our current trajectory is okay relative to the more distant past, probably we should be more worried than cheering. That would be my take. But given that we don’t have it in front of us, it’s hard to say. It might all work out wonderfully. I guess you would think that, as that technology gets closer, it would be important to have people thinking about, “How do you regulate that? How do we make it applied well rather than badly?” That kind of thing.…

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