Ask A Genius 638: Potential Human Life
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/04
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: And the main issue that comes up is, well, this is a potential human life. So even when it’s just 8 cells, 16 cells, or 64 cells, there’s this belief that those cells have a right to life. Yet, a quarter or a third of all these early-stage embryos are miscarried naturally. We haven’t even resolved the issue of abortion, arguably one of the simpler, supposedly challenging ethical questions of modern biology. In reality, it’s not that challenging at all. But it’s a burning issue in America and other parts of the world, and we’re far from settling it. Now we’re about to step into an era filled with other tricky ethical questions surrounding consciousness and what qualifies a being as deserving of being considered as such, deserving not just of existence but of a non-painful existence.
We’re likely going to do a poor job in a lot of places, maybe particularly in the U.S., at resolving these issues and at building a legal framework that extends the golden rule to other forms of sentience. This includes animals, especially as we start messing with their genomes to increase their intelligence or lifespan. Imagine dogs and cats living for 30 years, with their intelligence doubled, giving them the intellectual sophistication of a three-year-old. We’re going to screw all this up because politicians are shitty. A lot of forces, at least in America, repel good people from politics and attract scumbags. The end.
[Recording End]
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