News on China's scientific and technological development.

Overbom said:

The Americans are welcome to try to do that. Indeed, they are welcome to try that and unintentionally create a whole population of cripples.

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This is my fear as well; whilst i would love nothing more than an Ubermensch race of Chinese colonising the stars, there's still so much we don't know about gene editing, what downstream effects this could have; hell, we still don't yet know the full impact of the survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their descendants on the germline.

Secondly, and given the nature of the internet and western society, why do ppl assume a western capitalist society is going to push for six feet tall, blonde haired, blue eyed supermodel geniuses when the more gritty reality is furries and body modification.

Overbom said:

The Americans are welcome to try to do that. Indeed, they are welcome to try that and unintentionally create a whole population of cripples.

The science on this is too new for any country to adopt such measures. Dunno, maybe in 15-20 years it could be done

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I have seen so many smart kids take wrong turns(meet wrong friends, discovered alcohol and drugs and parties), but if you can afford designer babies the parents have money so the kid wont fail in life because he or her has a life jacket of money protecting their life.

Still its not like smarter people are creating more children with designer babies it will cost more to create a baby so even less babies are born. It would mean like they need to give each American couple the funding to pre screen 3 children for like decades if not centuries before it pays out.

Re designer babies, i'm reminded of colleagues and acquaintances who spent tens of thousands of dollars on IVF only to give their baby to a nanny and daycare and even send them off to boarding school. These are the types of people who will gene edit their baby, not be around for their kids and/or be a poor parent and then complain to the gene editors why their kid turned out to be a psychopath.

Overbom said:

The Americans are welcome to try to do that. Indeed, they are welcome to try that and unintentionally create a whole population of cripples.

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Lol this is really silly, I am a geneticist and there is 0 risk that embryo selection will create millions of cripples. This has nothing to do with editing the genome.

edit: I see you replied specifically to my scenario of Americans creating super-geniuses so disregard the above.

But selecting for IQ with the method in the article is still very easy and will be done in the next few years. If Americans do decide to ignore their wokeism and go full-strength in this China will be incapable of competing in the slightest of ways.

j17wang said:

Robot for robot sake... LOL. This wont save any time but should be a tourist attraction in every major chinese city.

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Nio has robots changing batteries for their EV. Why would you need robots for pumping gas, when you are moving to EVs?

Tyler said:

Nio has robots changing batteries for their EV. Why would you need robots for pumping gas, when you are moving to EVs?

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Because something like 70% at least of Chinese cars are ICE rather than NEV. That might be a low number of ICE cars compared to most nations but it's still a whopping majority of cars that require petroleum. How long do you think it takes until 0% of Chinese cars on the road are ICE and 100% are NEV? Certainly not long enough for some petrol stations to not use innovation and introduce novelty to attract customers.

sinophilia said:

Lol this is really silly, I am a geneticist and there is 0 risk that embryo selection will create millions of cripples. This has nothing to do with editing the genome.

edit: I see you replied specifically to my scenario of Americans creating super-geniuses so disregard the above.

But selecting for IQ with the method in the article is still very easy and will be done in the next few years. If Americans do decide to ignore their wokeism and go full-strength in this China will be incapable of competing in the slightest of ways.

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But for this to work don't both parents need to actually have high iq genes. Filtering in garbage still gives you slightly cleaner garbage.

It's comes really close to eugenics.

I was teaching bioethics early this year, and told my students the fear over germline editing ‘contaminating’ the human gene pool was greatly overblown given all major industrialised societies had birth rates below replacement level. There ain’t many good arguments against genetic therapy and only good arguments against genetic enhancement are social-economic.

BlackWindMnt said:

But for this to work don't both parents need to actually have high iq genes. Filtering in garbage still gives you slightly cleaner garbage.

It's comes really close to eugenics.

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It takes a village to raise a child, it doesn’t always just boil down to genes and even genes can change due to environmental factors, look at epigenetics.

If it were solely down to genes, why do third generation Chinese Americans not perform as well compared to their Chinese counterparts, in academia and other metrics? Notwithstanding the anglosphere’s “all of society” race war against Asians.

BlackWindMnt said:

But for this to work don't both parents need to actually have high iq genes. Filtering in garbage still gives you slightly cleaner garbage.

It's comes really close to eugenics.

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There is no threshold before it starts working. It’ll work on people of all IQs. Improvement is the goal, not a certain arbitrary number. Hell improving your dumbest people to being smarter than another country’s average would be beneficial too.

Also, this isn’t about changing who they are really. Geneticallly it’ll still be the descendants of those parents and the gene variants will all have been possibilities that existed within them.

There are dumb or average parents who occasionally produce a very bright child, violent ones who produce pacifists, and so on. This is just about picking the best parts of the parents instead of introducing the children to a random draw selection of the gene variants they could get.

So you aren’t introducing any new traits. It’s perfectly reasonable. No Chinese will suddenly be getting blonde hair if that’s not a possibility that the parents have in their genetics for example.

There are east ways of doing this of course (eye color especially is trivial) but that’s not what we’re talking about.