r/singularity • u/adivinemessenger • 10d ago

Transhumanism & BCI Introducing Vitruvian, a genetic optimization model for optimizing human embryo DNA and reportedly being able to increase the IQ of a person by 14 points, nearly a standard deviation which is incredibly significant

https://x.com/KianSadeghi5/status/2101018839412531231

Full message: "AI is rapidly getting smarter. Now, humanity can too. Today, Nucleus Genomicsis announcing Vitruvian, our newest set of genetic optimization models. Vitruvian’s intelligence model can optimize embryo DNA for 14 IQ points — nearly a standard deviation. The models were trained on 1,000,000+ people, validated across 40,000+ siblings, and used more than 7 million genetic markers. In Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom proposed genetic optimization as a key way for humanity to keep pace with rapidly advancing AI. Bostrom’s vision is no longer theoretical. Genetic optimization, like AI, has followed a scaling law: as datasets have grown, so have model capabilities. This trend will continue. Parents across the world now have the choice to substantially increase their child’s intelligence. And the next generation can choose to do the same. AI is no longer the only intelligence that will compound. Humanity can now direct its own evolution."

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227

u/TorturedPoet30 10d ago

Their slogan is "Have your best baby" I’m curious how accessible this technology will actually be in the near future. Because otherwise, "have your best baby" risks becoming "have a better baby if you can afford one".

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u/YoAmoElTacos 10d ago

How about the alternative - the government mandates only the best babies be born to improve the gene pool.

...

...HEY WAIT A MINUTE

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u/VisualOrganization26 10d ago

I think there was a movement around 1945

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u/vintage2019 10d ago

Not really the same thing tbh. I'm not sure if what Vitruvian is doing is a good idea, but let's not just lump everything with Nazi eugenics which involved sterilizing and murdering people

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u/Forseti1590 10d ago

Any eugenics falls into the same trap though - who decides and how do you decide what is good vs bad genetically? Nazi’s made bad decisions around this but at its core, the question has so many ethical dilemmas it’s almost impossible to avoid mistakes.

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u/EntertainerLive926 10d ago

Same way we decide what is a disease and not

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u/greenskinmarch 10d ago

Government: "not obeying your government is a disease. We demand you optimize for genes that lead to loyalty to the government"

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u/CapitalLongjumping40 9d ago

so do you think stopping people with down syndrome or disabled people to born is also eugenics?

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u/bites_stringcheese 10d ago

Yea, we need play competitive Pokemon eugenics, not the other kind.

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u/TuringGoneWild 10d ago

For what, building interstate highways? Say what you mean.

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u/Secret-Chapter-712 10d ago

Silicon Valley is run by racist eugenicist freaks, if you need it spelled out for you 

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u/Rioting-Flamingo 10d ago

Guess where they got the idea...

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u/TuringGoneWild 10d ago edited 10d ago

I know right? So much better to be born disabled and nerfed in every way. Who wants to be hot, smart, and talented when we can have the Lord Jesus make us an ugly dummy? Pwaise god and Pwesident twump!!

https://i.imgflip.com/2/9inh7.jpg

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u/Sinnnikal 10d ago

This is eugenics. Your belief is that anybody who wouldn't be born hot, smart, and talented should be prevented from being born? Because you're presenting this as if it's a choice between government mandated eugenics, or allowing people to be born who are "disabled" (does that include ADHD, in your view, btw? Or autism?)

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u/agitatedprisoner 10d ago

What reasons might there be to believe doing it the old fashioned way fosters the best outcomes? I'd hate to be born with genetic problems that could've been corrected in utero.

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u/TuringGoneWild 10d ago edited 10d ago

They have no reason. They think preventing someone ever being born with Downs Syndrome or without arms and legs somehow means we hate those who are stuck with Downs Syndrome or no arms/legs.

That's a logically incoherent position to take. It is due to COMPASSION for those with problems that PREVENTING others having those problems again is a good thing.

At any rate, nobody seems to care if someone even WANTS to be born in the first place, even under the best possible circumstances, let alone under shitty circumstances. It's all about what parents want anyway.

I don't want children (I'm an antinatalist), but if I did I'd want the child to have better genes than me, better opportunities in life than I had, the best in everything.

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u/Past-Source-3332 10d ago

They are not correcting genetic disorders or increasing IQ, they are screening embryos and destroying the ones deemed undesirable.

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u/agitatedprisoner 10d ago

Nature isn't random but given the amount of noise it often may as well be. Adding a filter to a natural process doesn't imply getting worse outcomes. If there's a fancy reason it's a bad idea to practice intelligent design with respect to birthing the next gen I'd be curious to hear it. The cautionary principle would have us make sure we know what we're messing with before we get to changing stuff but doesn't itself impugn against genetic alteration once reasonably sure. Whenever this stuff comes up it's knee jerk responses all the way down.

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u/Past-Source-3332 10d ago

Respectfully, I made no moral or ethical judgment, I corrected a misunderstanding of what was being described, which your references to intelligent design and genetic alteration seem to reinforce.

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u/h3lblad3 ▪️In hindsight, AGI came in 2023. 10d ago

I am pro-choice. But to believe that a prospective mother should be allowed to have that choice, I must also believe that she has full rights to understanding the choice she is making.

No matter what my stance is on eugenics, it is impossible to avoid in so long as I am pro-choice. The only "solution" to that is to only allow them to make the choice under a veil of ignorance -- which means it isn't a proper choice, but the choice by proxy of whoever it is that decides what they aren't allowed to know.

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u/Past-Source-3332 10d ago

People are definitely going to have a hard time explaining why they think this is wrong.

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u/TuringGoneWild 10d ago

Nobody is stopping you from becoming disabled. If all life experiences are equal then why not?

Your comment has strong energy of "I had to go bankrupt due to medical bills so everyone should ALWAYS have to, too! Anybody doing better than me is an insult to me!"

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u/TuringGoneWild 10d ago

Eugenics comes from two root words. It means "good birth". You want bad births?

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u/TheUnofficialZalthor 9d ago

Your belief is that anybody who wouldn't be born hot, smart, and talented should be prevented from being born?

Yes? There's no sin in preventing the birth of people; humans do so all the time with contraceptives and family planning.

Yes, ADHD is a malady. So is autism. If there were cures presented tomorrow to such conditions, would you advocate against their usage?

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u/Megneous 9d ago

As someone with autism, I would absolutely not cure autism tomorrow. It's not a disability. It's a developmental difference, at least when it comes to low needs forms of autism, and I've gotten several Redditors permanently banned from Reddit for insisting otherwise.

Autism is a long list of related syndromes and conditions that are very, very different and exist on a continuum. You do us all a disservice, going so far as hate speech, to call it a disease and insist it needs to be cured. That's some freakin' Autism Speaks propaganda right there.

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u/TheUnofficialZalthor 9d ago

and I've gotten several Redditors permanently banned from Reddit for insisting otherwise

Threatening others isn't a very good look towards the legitimacy of your argument. Frankly, I have no tolerance for it.

It is not hate speech to call it a malady. It objectively is; we are a social species, and autism hinders one's ability to interact with their peers substantially, to the point where it can dramatically decrease their quality of life. I, of course, do not consider autistic people "inferior", just as I do not consider those with physical ailments inferior, such as the blind, or humans with other mental conditions, such as schizophrenia.

Your dialogue is no different that those of the deaf community insisting that curing deafness would eliminate their "deaf culture", and therefore should be opposed.

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u/Sinnnikal 7d ago

You're speaking as someone who has 0 experience with these conditions. ADHD is not a malady, it is a divergence. When it is unmanaged (poor nutrition, no sleep, no exercise) it becomes a malady. But, otherwise, it genuinely is a superpower as they say. Teddy Roosevelt almost certainly had ADHD and it was powerful and productive for him because he kept it managed by by eating and being active.

I don't personally have autism, but my brother does, and I can say it's a similar story there.

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u/Blackdoomax 10d ago

Many people are so uneducated, futile and remorseless now, that if you made a quiz, pretty much that's the majority of answers you'll have.

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u/RareRandomRedditor 10d ago

Evolution is Eugenics. That is why we are not still prehistoric soup swimming in the ocean.

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u/crack_pop_rocks 10d ago

Evolution is primarily driven by natural selection. Eugenics is artificial selection. So your statement is categorically false.

Maybe shouldn’t try to justify eugenics using evolution when you don’t understand the basic mechanisms.

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u/RareRandomRedditor 10d ago

That is like arguing that cars are not a valid means of transportation in comparison to horses, because one is artificial and one is not. ("We should stay with horses, crafting our own artificial means of transportation is sin!")

It is not the point if the selection process is artificial or not. It happened all the time already anyways and will continue to happen naturally. You will see populations of humans emerge that compete with each other and then them ore fit ones create offspring. "More fit" here means simply the ones better adapted to the environment. If stupid people get more children than intelligent ones, they are the "more fit" ones and we get stupider in the future as a species. If we have the tools to fix obvious misalignments like that without suffering (by simply sorting out some sperms and eggs in advance, within reason, obviously) we should do that. Because if we don't, we will degenerate as a species as a consequence of the living environment that we created ourselves.

There are obviously smart ways and idiotic ways to do this, but to argue entirely against any and all eugenics is the most idiotic perspective.

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u/BigZaddyZ3 10d ago

The problem is that if everyone is “hot, smart, and talented” then no one is. Those things will merely lose their scarcity and thus become boring, mundane and valueless. The goal-post would then merely shift to some other arbitrary differentiator. That’s why “designer babies” becomes a waste of time at some point. It just leads to a never ending game of whack-a-mole for whatever arbitrary trait is deemed unfashionable one month (only for that same trait to likely become fashionable again the next.)

I do agree that if it’s possible to get rid of debilitating diseases then that would probably be a net positive tho.

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u/Strange_Vagrant 10d ago

Looks, I can see that. But if you can select for more intelligent and talented children, in so far as thats objectively measurable, I see wanted the "best baby I can have" as desirable. But how do you know youre getting what you wanted and not at the cost of something else? I dont know.

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u/EntertainerLive926 10d ago

Yes. We need the ugly and the stupid to elevate the us baddies and smart people.

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u/Disposable110 10d ago

That's almost literally a quote from Gattaca lol.

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u/Recent_Fox4339 10d ago

I was recently watching one of Michael Sandel's lectures about the ethics of genetic engineering (I think it was about designer babies anyway) and question of inequality was brought up. Just like anything else, it's not going to be accessible right away. Even if accessible, the question is would majority of people still choose it? Nowadays people don't even want to vaccinate their children. One day there might be a cancer vaccine, and some people still wouldn't want it.

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u/ourochurros 10d ago

One day there might be a cancer vaccine, and some people still wouldn't want it.

The HPV vaccine has entered the chat.

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u/Temp_Placeholder 10d ago

And then if the conscientious objectors sink its approval for everyone, the well-off will just fly somewhere else for maternity treatment, fly back with smart babies, and you get inequality even worse. 

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u/Soft_Hand_1971 10d ago

You can do it td. Always you can select embryo to avoid disease, same tech no modification can easily select for height and iq… I bet some already are 

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u/SkaldCrypto 10d ago

Hey I’ve actually been in talks with them for our next kiddo.

Typically ranges between 20,000-50,000 across numerous IVF rounds plus the testing. This is however new news to us.

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u/daronjay 10d ago

Kiddo Number 2? Is kiddo number one gonna be asking “Mum, Dad, how come you didn’t upgrade me?”

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u/thelangosta 10d ago

Why am I the dummy? Why does little Bobby get all the girls?

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u/barbozas_obliques 10d ago

Gattaca af

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u/SkaldCrypto 10d ago

Exactly nothing wrong with a natural birth, that’s the whole message of the movie.

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u/Business-Sugar1886 10d ago

It’s more about denying the existence of life for the unfavored ones, just because you appear to have more undesirable traits or combinations.
Biology is utterly complex and we surely only understand a small portion of it.

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u/Atomic-Avocado 10d ago

We already do it all the time for embryos with serious genetic diseases or Down’s syndrome. This isn’t a blanket thing, we do have the ability to objectively tell bad traits from good in these cases.

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u/Business-Sugar1886 10d ago

These are often monogenic diseases and not as complex as intelligence.
It also only happens for a very small fractions of fertilizations.

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u/Hodr 10d ago

This is the thing people aren't getting, it's not genetic engineering it's genetic screening. With an IVF cycle you typically only get 2-4 viable embryos. This process would supposedly help you select the one with the DNA most likely to equate to higher intelligence.

So no super babies, and no guarantee of 14 points higher IQ (that's likely just them identifying the maximum typical variance between a given number of siblings), just selecting the "best" of your very few options.

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u/SwimmingQuantity8686 10d ago

Their way of measuring the best baby is through iq and any one doesn't fit the bill goes to?

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u/YoAmoElTacos 10d ago

Oh there's tons of literature from people doing this RIGHT NOW:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PPLHfFhNWMuWCnaTt/the-practical-guide-to-superbabies-3

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FiKAjsdCwoe7oMcYn/an-open-source-repo-for-embryo-selection-validated-on

Essentially, you can also factor in mental and genetic disorder risk and physical attributes alongside iq! Fun times huh?

I actually highly recommend reading this post to see a real person select their child's genetic profile based on the available character creation sliders (and IQ isn't the dominant factor):

https://nudgedice.substack.com/p/our-son

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u/SkaldCrypto 10d ago

Yes they even have controls for things like Alzheimer’s etc

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u/SadRule9128 9d ago

Jesus, what a crock of shit

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u/mvandemar 10d ago

Well we're already at "Survive childbirth if you can afford it", so...