Steve Hsu: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's super interesting. What do you think will be the plateau for a trait of how long you’ll live? With the current data and techniques, do you think it could be significantly greater than that? We did a simple calculation—which amazingly gives the correct result. This polygenic predictor that we built (which isn't perfect yet but will improve as we gather more data) is used in selecting embryos today. If you asked, out of a billion people, “What's the best person typically, what would their score be on this index and then how long would they be predicted to live?”’ It's about 120 years. So it's spot on. One in a billion types of person lives to be 120 years old. How much better can you do? Probably a lot better. I don't want to speculate, but other nonlinear effects, things that we're not taking into account will start to play a role at some point. So, it's a little bit hard to estimate what the true limiting factors will be. But one super robust statement, and I'll stand by it, debate any Nobel Laureate in biology who wants to discuss it even, is that there are many variants available to be selected or edited. There's no question about that. That's been established in animal breeding in plant breeding for a long time now. If you want a chicken that grows to be *this* big, instead of *this* big, you can do it. You can do it if you want a cow that produces 10 times or 100 times more milk than a regular cow. The egg you ate for breakfast this morning, those bio-engineered chickens that lay almost an egg a day… A chicken in the wild lays an egg a month. How the hell did we do that? By genetic engineering. That's how we did it. Yeah. That was through brute artificial selection. No fancy machine learning there.…

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