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Essays reveal Stephen Hawking predicted race of 'superhumans'
The late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children's DNA. Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays.
[...] In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking's final thoughts on the universe, the physicist suggested wealthy people would soon be able to choose to edit genetic makeup to create superhumans with enhanced memory, disease resistance, intelligence and longevity. Hawking raised the prospect that breakthroughs in genetics will make it attractive for people to try to improve themselves, with implications for "unimproved humans". "Once such superhumans appear, there will be significant political problems with unimproved humans, who won't be able to compete," he wrote. "Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving at an ever-increasing rate."
Stephen Hawking's last paper on black holes is now online
Stephen Hawking never stopped trying to unravel the mysteries surrounding black holes -- in fact, he was still working to solve one of them shortly before his death. Now, his last research paper on the subject is finally available online through pre-publication website arXiv, thanks to his co-authors from Cambridge and Harvard. It's entitled Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair, and it tackles the black hole paradox. According to Hawking's co-author Malcolm Perry, the paradox "is perhaps the most puzzling problem in fundamental theoretical physics today" and was the center of the late physicist's life for decades.
Black Holes and Soft Hair: why Stephen Hawking's Final Work is Important:
[Black holes] have a temperature and produce thermal radiation. The formula for this temperature, universally known as the Hawking temperature, is inscribed on the memorial to Stephen's life in Westminster Abbey. Any object that has a temperature also has an entropy. The entropy is a measure of how many different ways an object could be made from its microscopic ingredients and still look the same. So, for a particular piece of red hot metal, it would be the number of ways the atoms that make it up could be arranged so as to look like the lump of metal you were observing. Stephen's formula for the temperature of a black hole allowed him to find the entropy of a black hole.
The problem then was: how did this entropy arise? Since all black holes appear to be the same, the origin of the entropy was at the centre of the information paradox.
What we have done recently is to discover a gap in the mathematics that led to the idea that black holes are totally bald. In 2016, Stephen, Andy and I found that black holes have an infinite collection of what we call "soft hair". This discovery allows us to question the idea that black holes lead to a breakdown in the laws of physics.
Stephen kept working with us up to the end of his life, and we have now published a paper that describes our current thoughts on the matter. In this paper, we describe a way of calculating the entropy of black holes. The entropy is basically a quantitative measure of what one knows about a black hole apart from its mass or spin.
So if black holes have soft hair, is it possible to give them a hair cut?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @02:23AM (9 children)
This is a perfect example of why expertise in one field, in his case Astrophysics, does not translate to expertise in another field, specifically biology and genetics.
I'm going to sound like a troll, I'm going to sound racist. I am neither.
So before anyone gets triggered, consider this from a purely "objectively moral" standpoint.
By objectively moral, I mean "doing that which you believe is best for the success of your own offspring" because in the end this is the only true objective morality.
We already "edit our genes", but the process is random.
Visit any country where people are predominately brown, such as Mexico and ask what they think of "marrying into whiteness".
This is in fact racist, but it is also a fact is that skin color is a trait, one which is easily modified by a few generations of selective breeding and one which partners do select for in their offspring by way of choosing a mate. The mate selection process is how we edit our children's genome, otherwise they would all be clones of us.
Women seeking to reproduce, tend to favor men who are the same color, thereby ensuring the offspring will fit in well with her desired caste, whereas men tend to favor mates who appear "exotic", in order to ensure the health of their offspring by reducing the odds of a recessive trait manifested due to inbreeding in close knit communities.
There are exceptions of course, but the general rule tends to hold except in countries where your skin color translates into job opportunities and perception of wealth.
At that point there is a conscious effort to bring offspring as far away from "bad skin color", just like we naturally reject a mate with other bad skin such as severe acne or warts or cancer.
Skin color here is as relevant as other signs of ability or disability we select for in mates where consciously or unconsciously.
There is no difference between editing after the fact and editing before the fact, either way you've had your genes edited you're no longer pure.
Does it matter if it's a cure for MD in old age, or a cure for Spinal Bifida or Cystic Fibrosis or even diabetes in youth?
For that matter does it matter that it was your genes which were edited?
How is it different that my genes are edited vs getting a nose job, or laser surgery on my eyes?
I've been edited, you've been edited none of us are pure anymore.
All doing it at a genetic level does is to ensure the maltrait does not appear in our offspring.
The argument that the rich will have it and exclude the poor is as valid as the rich have reproductive and other opportunities that are denied to the poor.
The poor are already denied many opportunities for reproduction, for example poor girls who are trying to climb socially will generally reject poor boys with little or no prospects. Yet inspite of that, the poor vastly outnumber the wealthy and their birthrates are much higher. Wouldn't you prefer these offspring be able to be productive members of society rather than collect disability their entire lives?
If we can control it, sure it will go to the wealthiest first, but the fact is this information is out there in the open and anyone with the right tools and training (and at the moment, lack of ethics), can take advantage of it.
Yes superhumans will rise, yes the current crop of humans are destined to die out.
However allow me to point you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal [wikipedia.org] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan, [wikipedia.org] both of whom lived with modern humans until recently, and interbred with us, neither of which are around today, but their DNA lives on in at least some of us.
I would like to posit an alternative narrative to "superhumans are bad".
How about, "if you have the ability to bred superhuman offspring and you fail to do so, then you are objectively a bad person".
Denying your child necessary medical attention and or correction for a malformity hoping it will "build character", is borderline child abuse from where I stand.
Why condemn your child to a life of struggle, when for less than the cost of a new home you have them edited to completely remove their infirmities and to increase the chances of their success and their offspring's success ad infinitum?
Just imagine the amount of money we would save simply by editing out undesirable traits as soon as they are detected, and splicing in newer and better traits.
There is of course the moral counter argument of "unforseen side effects", but the counter, counter is that once the side effect is known, you edit it again.
I say make a certain level of editing, mandatory for poor and rich alike.
Really do we want to breed troglodytes? Do we want the troglodytes to breed?
We need to fix it, just like we need to solve other aspects of poverty, but we don't do so by denying opportunity to those who can afford it first.
Here is where programmers are in my mind superior to all others in morality.
You've written a program before haven't you?
The first version was buggy as hell wasn't it?
Over time you fix the bugs and then you fix the bugs that the bug fixes introduced.
Years later you still cringe when you look at the first 1.0 version, despite the nostalgia.
If you're doing it right you maintain strong source control via a revision control system, i.e. you have backups in case you make a mistake.
Your body is just a machine, running a program that makes you believe you're not just a cloud of atoms.
Every cell in your body is a computer and DNA is nothing but code.
Release the best programs you can write and maintain strict version control so you can fix bugs later, but damnit let's have fun with genomics.
Imagine being able to download an app to your body as easily as you download an app to your phone?
10% increase to fat burning, 20% increase to muscle mass. Ooops that increased caloric intake by 70%, and now my heart is overworked, let's uninstall!
Today I want blue eyes, tomorrow let's go with brown, oh cool this app changes my eye color to match my mood and this one changes my skin color to match my eye color.
The future is limitless as long as the troglodytes don't keep us living in caves cowering in fear at the shadows cast on the wall.
We have the opportunity to make the future as superior to what we have now, as we are from those people died out because they couldn't compete with modern humans.
I want to survive, I want my genome to improve and propagate until the last star burns out in the sky so sign me up!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @05:32AM
You won't. You don't have enough money and your level of intelligence shows nothing remarkable.
As a result: your genome will stay unimproved and is destined to become soylent green in a few generation.
(Score: 1, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday October 17 2018, @05:48AM
Ohhh! That sounds so much more sophisticated than "I'm not a racist, but. . . ".
Nice one, you inferior racist, misogynist, alt-right-sympathizing, neo-nazi, neo-confederate, neo-liberal, oathkeeping, proud boy, Fox-News watcher, eugeneticist!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @07:31AM (2 children)
You had a nice start, but
> I say make a certain level of editing, mandatory for poor and rich alike.
And which traits are gonna be undesirable to the party in power? Think a little bit about it.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday October 17 2018, @12:06PM (1 child)
You seem to have inserted "Traits" where most conversation about editing has been about "Diseases".
Are you concerned that 2 superwealthy people will choose to modify the ethnicity of their offspring? Or that once a society hits a level where it is capable of rolling out compulsory gene modifying to every member of the population, they'll do it first to make them ethnically homogenous? Walk me through the timeline here. Do you think if suddenly, overnight the US government had the ability to do this, that it would be able to decree and enforce a mandatory whitening/blackening/insert colour here of all the populace?
This is such a common mistake of badly thought out SCI-FI. They think that a society capable of these amazing feats still has hang ups over something they MUST have grown out of before they reach those levels. A society that understands genetic to such an extent that they can selectively remove negative traits will have along the way come up with absolute proof that ethnicity, no matter which, is not a negative trait.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @11:05AM
Have you never heard of bait-and-switch or even just scope creep if you wish to give them the benefit of doubt... And where did you get ethnicity into the discussion?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @11:49AM
That's as far as I bothered reading.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 17 2018, @06:05PM
By objectively moral, I mean "doing that which you believe is best for the success of your own offspring" because in the end this is the only true objective morality.
Not in a communal species it isn't.
That huge brain on your offspring requires a 9-month gestation period making the individual's survival more risky. By your definition the very adaptation that makes our (communal) species successful is objectively immoral.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday October 17 2018, @11:27PM (1 child)
That is patently false because it's your own offspring and hence, is a highly subjective morality. What happens when there is a conflict between the interests of your offspring and those of someone else's? We end up with two different "moral" answers depending on which point of view one chooses to acknowledge. Having said that, an objective morality would acknowledge that conflict exists and seek a resolution that is invariant (by definition of objectivity) of point of view.
Here, there isn't much of a conflict. You might have some competitive disadvantage due to the in group effect of "superhumans" looking out for each other. But not enough to ban genetic modification.
As to the discussion of DNA as code, sure you can revert and such. But lot's of harm from bad changes can't be so reverted. For example, if a tweak results in people born with permanent brain damage, reverting their DNA isn't going to help with that.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:22AM
!!! KHAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Spock: "Curious, his maneuvers suggest 2-dimensional thinking."
(Translation: arrogant genetically modified super human not too bright. Word to the wise.)