 Okay. So here we are. Genetic technologies as a category, which I know a little bit about now, tomorrow and in the next centuries. So I really want to talk with everybody rather than just talking at you. So I'm going to try and get through this fast, but I'm not very good at that. Okay, so what are genes? Let's talk about what we're going to talk about. So genes are instructions and they tell the body, and I can't see you all, let me. Okay, now I can see you all, which will make me happier. Okay, so genes are instructions for making polypeptides, which are pretty much proteins with a little bit of extra stuff tacked on the gene sequence for an organism is basically unique. And they are essential properties of who you are if you had very different genes, you would be very different you'd be a tomato or something else not necessarily a tomato genes are not all expressed all the time all in the same way in every cell and every individual. And they're not even uniform throughout the organism your different cells have different DNA through mutations that just accumulate in different tissues you are multitudes, which is really cool genes are also not the only feature of who you are. Even biologically there's a lot more going on. Most importantly, this is a very common misinterpretation that we all fall into genes are not schematics genes do not have all of the information necessary to create an organism period. You could not just take DNA and 3D print an organism that is insufficient information. So that's genes what are genetic technologies. So genetic technologies are pretty diverse but their stuff we do with genes one category is looking at stuff and figuring out what it does personalized medicine could look at someone's genome and develop specific drugs or things for them, because of what how they respond to things. We can also observe the genetics of germ cells and decide which ones to develop into full organisms. We can also mess with things nowadays. So gene editing takes the form of somatic gene therapies or germ line germ line is taking a single cell changing its DNA and then building your whole organism out of it. Whereas somatic gene editing would be just taking a local region and somehow affecting this sub portion of the organism. So we can change how they're expressed without changing anything. And there's a lot of really crazy stuff that's cool and I'm just acknowledging it exists but I'm not going to talk about it. So present challenges GMOs are really interesting and very powerful and the root of a lot of the progress in agriculture. So, pretty much all of the economically important ones are owned by a very, very small set of organizations which I find extremely dangerous. Another difficulty with genetic technologies comes from genetic sequencing of individuals and the information that that can give them I have a friend who was diagnosed with Huntington's disease which completely changed their life and their expectations for their life and their decisions. And it's not clear to her or to other people in her circumstances that she's talked with, whether or not having that diagnosis improved her life. This is a pretty straightforward but surprising example of just because you can doesn't mean you should. Information is not always helpful or appreciated. So, genetic screening is the poor man super baby but actually only available to rich people really. You can just get a very, very large number of genetic possibilities pick the ones that are desirable and exclude potential persons from existing intentionally, instead of accidentally. Right so the near future this is what we're here for. De extinction is becoming possible we have genetic sequences of extinct creatures and we could try and recreate them. So, I said that DNA is not a schematic, just because we have DNA for the passenger pigeon doesn't mean that we can just create passenger pigeons with a 3D printer, but we have close relatives. And after some bootstrapping, based on these close relatives we could have a pigeon have a passenger pigeon DNA containing child, which would in great measure be a passenger pigeon, but would also bear some of the features of its parent because of the environment it developed in. For instance, you could not grow a passenger pigeon in the womb of an elephant. But that's really actually important. There are organisms that we could not bootstrap. If we got the full sequence of a velociraptor, we would have to start with chickens and there's probably just too large of a gap and so there'd be a very long process of slowly creating something like a velociraptor like anyway de extinction is actually possible. In the near future, ethical concerns with the extinction are where do we put them there's a reason we killed all the passenger pigeons and it may have been a dumb reason. But where do we put passenger pigeons now, and other creatures who are much less prevalent than they were or extinct will rhinos be killed off again. Are we mostly doing a service to poachers if we de extinct rhinos. This is connected to something important. I think target group of this idea of renewal and returning to a prior state is a prior state of the earth, valuable, inherently, do we have a responsibility to return things to a prior state. And what is the earth and is the past earth real in the same sense that the current earth is real and does it have rights to be restored. Okay, so GMOs and concentration of power to in the future, there may be a vast democratization process where people can start making particularly microbes on their kitchen table, potentially making their own insulin on their kitchen table from yeast, possibly creating a new variant of smallpox. Concentration of power is really, really hard, and I don't have good answers it's just really, really hard and important so I'd like to talk about that. Personalized medicine and your medical records and intelligence agencies and how they have access to whatever they want because they're defending their country and everyone just bends over to what they ask. If we can develop personalized medicine we can develop personalized pathogens, which is a potential tool that law enforcement will want. I'm just telling you scary things sorry, the write down topics that you think are really interesting and we'll talk about them. Again, gene therapy will become far more sophisticated, possibly creating real designer babies. That has huge implications for particularly for barriers to entry for those sorts of activities. And possible futures. Biodiversification is going to come up, I promise. Okay, so cloning is not that cool. It's pretty cool. It's not that cool. You're not going to run into your doppelganger because someone cloned you in a lab and accelerated your growth and implanted your memories except maybe in the really far future. But yeah. Okay, so corporate life. So if you think your boss is a problem now. What about if you were grown by your boss to be an experimental subject or just because they want slaves and like, you don't have parents they just created you our ethics are not prepared to deal with these sorts of challenges. We don't have categories to deal with these things about how when person and property start to get very, very similar and start to get entwined. And how much of the brain do we have to remove before they don't count as a legal person anymore and we can just do whatever we want to them. People are going to be asking these questions and they're very dangerous questions, possibly even to ask artificial biology is adding new new elements the genetic code changing how things are expressed, creating new substrates for life. So we really can't anticipate how far life is going to go and how much we'll be able to describe it is life but a lot of it will be relevant to biology. And again I bring this up because it will defy categories that we currently have ecology is definitely going to change in the distant future. So that yeah this is what you all came for probably I don't know if this is what you came for. But anyway, this is what I advertised by diversification. So we develop genetic technologies that are tremendously powerful we can start adding back diversity into populations that have been hunted or otherwise bottlenecked into having reduced genetic diversity. We can increase the rates of mutations we can do all sorts of manipulations we can de extinct entire ecosystems that didn't exist, or haven't exist for a long time and bring them back. So biodiversity can be a manufacturable resource in the future. An important feature of ecology of the future is that it really won't be ecology as we know it anymore. So ecology and other ethics that drive our approach to the sciences are in my estimation, value laden that ecology approaches questions with an assumption of what the right sorts of answers are going to look like. And with an I, most importantly, that's also not to imply that they're dishonest scientists. Because engineers go about doing their work with the intention to make things that do things that are valuable, according to their value system. Ecology approaches these questions with some assumptions about what humanity's place is in solving these problems as a guardian as a protector as someone who should shove off. But ecology is approaching these questions largely from an ethical standpoint about what we ought to be doing and how we ought to be preserving these things and that we ought to be preserving these things there aren't ecologists that advocate for getting rid of large types of wildlife. There's the concept of regulation but they're very, very few ecologists that would call for bringing any species to extinction. There are a few. There's lots and lots and lots of feeling that we need to not have invasive species, because they do things that we inherently see as damaging. So a lot of the categories for describing things invasive species extinction are value laden concepts invasive species are just bad. So we need an ethics of the future inspired by the fact that as our powers increase we may need to rethink what we considered good. This is where I think nationalism can provide important insights because of this feature that we have at where informed by faith traditions and faith traditions, especially Mormon faith traditions. Consider the ethics of vastly powerful beings that are human. Our God is essentially a human God like us and human like our future and we need to be thinking about these ethics that we would be abiding by and that's resulted in some interesting thought. When we're trying to figure out what our faith traditions say about the ethics of gods that we're going to have to start worrying about as our power extends to rewriting ecologies, and vastly modifying organisms possibly removing their capacity for suffering changing what they rely on nutritionally. We need to figure out what our traditions that we're drawing on are saying and should be understood to be saying. Typical ethics of faith could be loosely drawn into commandments that you've been told to do things and those are the things that are right that's very deontological do this don't do that you get a New Testament enhancements and refocussings that I really like but there's still commandments there's still two great commandments and so forth. It's pretty straightforward to say yeah these ethics ought to apply to us we ought to be considering these things. It may not be trivial to update them. A category that the MTA is very fond of believing in is aspirational ethics that oh there's a prophecy we should go do that. And that's that's actually very challenging to to interpret that. Oh yeah prophecies were given by God to tell us what to do in the distant future. There are folks that hold this position. And I think pretty much appropriately. These good prophecies that we like are stating that there are things that are good that God would do and that we therefore ought to do. Should that become possible and there are also folks that are horrified by this and would ask that we stop playing at being gods. And I tell them to pay a little more attention in Sunday school but their point is is well taken. You know the S traditions. Well the Mormon traditions. As I've explained before have a lot to say about this idea of just it's our job to create worlds and so should we start creating more as soon as we can. All right there we go so how much time we have left. Let's talk a little bit. Richard can you hear me. I can now Ben. So we it's time for a break now but it's lunch break so people want to they can if they want to hang in here and ask questions that's totally appropriate also. I'll just formally kind of close this and thank Richard for a great presentation. And everyone is welcome to stick around here and ask questions and then we'll be reconvening in about 20 minutes in the main hall. So, right. Thank you Richard. All right Jesus amen. Thanks Ben. Okay. Yeah so we've got questions. So people really mind if mosquitoes went extinct. It's a huge thing for ecology there's this mindset that we need to be really really careful about what chunks of our system we just punch out because they're really inconvenient and they don't achieve values that we like. And we should probably remember that cows would probably like to just kick out humans because what any cow really mind if all humans went extinct. So, Robotnist. Thank you Sage mosquitoes are important. A question, could we modify mosquitoes to be less harmful to things that we value. And as David Pierce briefly asked in his slides is a lion a lion, if it's not just totally wrecking things all over the place. And is a mosquito mosquito if it's not sucking human blood and passing disease. And as an alternative definition of mosquito as something that does all that but doesn't pass disease or irritate my skin. A fair thing for us to impose. So yeah but malaria kills a lot of us and I value human life a lot. So, yeah. We have lots of discussion on mosquitoes and cows. Very good. If anyone wants to wave at me or unmute and just ask a question or got I proposed a billion topics so let's look at genetic technologies and appropriate use of genetic technologies, rather than necessarily, de-extinctioning things. Talk about de-extinctioning things. Do we need saber tooth cats? Well, no we need all the suffering that they would ask. This has got to happen eventually. Yeah, prophecy. But no, there are plenty of amazing things we can do with it. I actually think de-extinctioning is one of the less interesting ones honestly. There's a lot of information about species that went before but what we can do with biotechnologies that goes along, especially in terms of things like industry and developing life to produce all the things that we're currently having to do with our complex and difficult to reproduce machines is going to be exceptionally valuable. We've already begun to see it with microorganisms which we can get to produce things like artificial oil. Suppose the use of other organisms as instruments for achieving our objectives is kind of hard for a human to avoid doing. That's a lot of stuff that we do is just oriented around making things that we like happen and depending on how cynical and reductionist you want to be you can even say like oh yeah we bring animals into our home so we can love them which is just this purely instrumental use like love is just an object that we're trying to maximize and cats or dogs help us maximize our love expression value. Should we be looking at life as a tool and as a machine. I would argue that yes it's a specialized machine I mean right down to the human body which we should certainly assign high value to as a complex machine that can do things and has a special place among the hierarchy. Ultimately it's a bunch of chemistry doing very specific tasks and coming together to achieve. We don't understand necessarily how all of it works but otherwise far as we do continue to understand more and more of it. It all comes back to that same basic. And you could easily demonstrate this with any particular cell. We have cells and they do things like kill themselves off and build this structure do that they have very specific programming in the DNA points further to this idea. I think I would categorize that as the argument that well biology is machines and so it would just be responsible to see it as what it is. It's a fair capture of a short version. Sure, makes sense. Does anyone want to pretend to be someone who disagrees that biology is a machine that in the same way that we think of machines. I think that's useful in certain circumstances but in the wider ecology I think that'd be so tough to manage because like there's so many influences on any ecosystem that you know if we do you know make some kind of machine like it killing off all the other things that we need to eat or breathe or whatever you know could be pretty devastating I don't see how, especially at least here on earth. We could engineer everything. I don't know, maybe that could be possible at some point, but at least right now. I don't think we even have close enough to an understanding to pull that off. I represent three time periods in my slides to capture that idea that in the very distant future, we may be able to start considering ecologies as machines that are internally managed that we can understand and really deeply manipulate but we. That's certainly not even in the near term, except perhaps in highly controlled ecologies so in your desktop bioreactor where you're producing insulin and 510 years. So artificial ecologies. More naturally match this model of machine, I think. That is more or less for my particular interest focus is trying to get entire artificial ecologies to function. Maybe that colors my thinking somewhat I don't know on the. But it seems that, especially since these ecologies are made up more than anything by single cell organisms. That the most basic machinery sense would make particular sense, because cells really are just responding to the most basic of signals and they are very fundamental in their components. Yeah, I would agree fundamental in terms of scale. And we've managed to find their fundamental fund the components of these fundamental components. But there is metabolism still are mind boggling complicated to me. That's only a 20 stop. Yeah. Alright, another thing. Let's just random categories in here. Oh, John. Yeah, so about the whether or not we can serve life to be the equivalent of something machine or at least machinic. Do you think the distinction between viruses which are often presented as non living entities. I guess, all other forms of life. Can that be an intellectual tool we could use to go and think about when we're dealing with something that's truly mechanical when we're dealing with something that might have some kind of logical difference. Therefore, maybe some kind of different ethical responsibility towards. I feel like that's a really good extension of Ben's talk. The what. Sorry, but he's got a run. No, but can you repeat the question I missed it. John, can you use that direction, looking at multiple categories of life, not just like the animal life and consciousness and experience but even categorizing viruses as life or non life. And right, we look a lot more machine like and do we have this continuum of machine like to creature like. We use like sharp links, sharp breaks we could go in and identify, like the virus cell division. Right. So, yeah, I've, I've put some thought into this. So, Descartes thought that animals are, you know, just machines and then, you know, few centuries later we've realized okay maybe he wasn't quite right about that. I think we should have an open mind about whether viruses can feel. So yeah, I was just wondering. We're working on the consciousness survey project at canonizer building consensus around the best theories of consciousness. And there's an emerging camp now being called representational quality theory. Basically, it's just the general idea that everyone pretty much is unanimous agreement even then it's predictive Bayesian coding theories are supporting sub camp of that but basically it has the idea that when you look out in the world and you perceive the world there's like a diorama of knowledge in your brain. And half of that diorama is in your left hemisphere. And the other half of that diorama is in your right hemisphere so if you have a knowledge of red strawberry in your right hemisphere, and a green leaf in your left hemisphere the corpus class on is binding those together. So you can be aware of both the redness and greenness in both hemispheres and vs Ramachandran was the first one proposed using corpus class some like bundle of neurons to connect multiple brains together. And this was portrayed in the movie avatar where they had the neural ponytails where you could connect it together which would enable the computational binding of consciousness so basically if you're hugging your loved one, you can only feel half of the sensations. But if you could have a computational binding there, then instead of just two bound hemispheres you could have four bound hemispheres, and you could feel all of the experiences as you hugged your loved one instead of just half. And if they have inverted red green qualia, you would quickly notice that oh your redness is like my greenness but anyway, I wonder if you guys had any thoughts along that kind of stuff. And along with genetic technologies, particularly. Yeah. Engineering, such an organ is probably really hard. But genetics would probably be the level you'd want to. Maybe that would be a level you'd want to go in. I think I would initially prefer to use an electronic interface but that's my field of research. So what do you think about. Oh, good. Yeah, so, in other words, you say electronic. So a key part of that is the binding, the computational binding if something is computationally bound into your conscious awareness, you are aware of it and so. In other words, the binding problem that's the hardest part. And so, so it sounds like you're saying that that electronics could achieve that kind of binding, rather than some. Yeah, if we, I tend to look at the body of the machine, I fall into the machine camp very squarely. And it's magic is that the brain is aware of the stuff in it, that's in it. And if you can tell the brain that it's two brains, it'll be aware of the stuff that are in both brains. That would be my guess. I want to, because we're really close to the end of our break, I want to talk a little bit about what ecologies should exist, because this is a question that it becomes possible to ask and it's important to diversification is an ideal ecology one with radical diversity and radical mutation rates. Is it an ecology that serves some aesthetic purpose to the highest conscious beings that exist obviously us and mosquitoes. What ecologies should we have and what ecologies are bad and shouldn't exist and shouldn't have lions killing other stuff. If we get to start making choices. What is a worthy ecology. I'm pretty resistant against the possibility of modifying ecology in a way, in any way, like in any substantial way in terms of like, you know, modifying the actual genetics of organisms. Before we actually understand what the mental states of those organisms are like, so unless we understand what suffering is for them, unless we have like very high confidence that we understand that I would say that I'd be pretty resistance towards, you know, like modifying animals and mass or completely radically changing ecology. And so I would I would tend towards being like a proponent of inertia and that like we should try to avoid changing ecology, as much as possible from like it's evolutionary basis. No, for example, by reducing pollution and climate change. And we can eventually maybe modify ecology dramatically to improve the mental states of animals, only once we have a confidence that we actually understand those mental states. We've got a mean question for you. So, so future ecologies don't exist yet. Unless you take a really weird view of history. Future ecologies don't exist and we get to influence how they happen is humans butt out stop interfering with stuff let evolution happen. Reverse climate change are ecologies that spontaneously develop in in some circumstance or another superior. If there isn't one that is. This is the one where humans weren't involved. This is the one where humans are involved. Are there any ecologies that are superior to other ecologies, particularly based on their evolutionary history. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not sure how that's mean. Oh yeah. I just wanted to mention that like humans are part of nature like we like to think we're some separate entity, but like we are part of that ecosystem. And so like, you know, it. I don't think we're doing any favors by saying oh like, you know, humans are making unnatural decisions like we are by definition part of nature. Yeah, yeah, that's the hard bit is a global warmed globe. Better or worse is the tremendous loss of diversity, actually loss of diversity. Or just a different diversity. I mean I do think that like it is extremely bad like. Yeah, we are like, morally obligated to do something about it. Climate change. Yeah, like, yes. But like, I also agree with that Jeremy was saying like, like we only have started to understand a lot of these systems that have been in motion for millions, not billions of years. But like, we should be very careful, especially when it comes to the genetics. Like, we might think oh there's a gene for switching off pain or intelligence but like there might be side effects for that it's not like there's one to one mappings between a gene and a phenotype so like we should be really careful. I like David Pierce's timeline of like 1000 years for some of these things. And in the near term like, I think if we do understand the science well enough for climate change for example which we do. Yeah, at least I think we do. And we decide we want to do something about that, like, yeah I'd be much more inclined to do to take action there in the near term. Yeah, and the stability bias for the near term. Yeah, humans really like the status quo is not terribly surprising it's what we came into and it's certainly how we tend to operate it best. But there's something to be said for the earth and being in a constant state of change. It always has been. In fact we wouldn't even be doing what we're doing right now but hadn't been basically warming somewhat on its own since the last age. Or if that Ice Age hadn't come and forced us into a different position or if life itself hadn't made huge alterations to the climate throughout Earth's history, which allowed life as it currently exists to be. So, you know, we can make certain an argument that this may be an ideal situation if that's what humans want to stick with but we can also look at potential benefits coming out of it or the fact that the climate is not necessarily to keep life and ecology and everything else going in a positive direction. Right, I think with if we look at the two different futures for the end of the century. See like, oh, one where it's gone up four degrees Celsius and air pollution is terrible like, versus, we've kept it relatively the same. I think you could make an argument that there'd be less suffering and more happiness in that second scenario. But like you said like, you know, there are other parameters that we could we should keep in mind. And like if I guess not just about temperature. Well, and sometimes, you know, suffering is a necessary part of these things. We have mass die ops and immediately after we have huge new changes in biodiversity life going in whole different directions, dealing with these new scenarios and opportunities that it has. And that has resulted in all kinds of advances I guess you call them in life and approaches. So, is it right of us then to shut that down permanently. Or are we now the cause of it because we're doing what we want to do we are, you know, the drivers of a new shift in the next step I guess in evolution or ecology. Thanks everyone for a great, for a great session. Thanks again ready. Yeah. Thanks for sure. Thanks all.