AI vs CRISPR
by John Lawrence
On CBS' 60 Minutes, April 16, 2023, there was a discussion about the revolution that AI will bring about. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, spoke glowingly about all the good that AI would bring about for society while speaking hesitantly about the ethics involved. What he failed to mention was that the biggest customer for AI will probably be the military. They will use AI to develop even more lethal weapons including robots that will carry out dangerous missions instead of live human soldiers. Of course there was no mention of that. Only that robots would be able to carry out more dangerous missions in mining and search and rescue. So far every technological development has had military implications, usually not mentioned by the technocrats who are just interested in making billions from the latest developments. Similar negative consequences are just now being realized for social media whose inventors had only positive things initially to say about this money maker. On the other hand a truly revolutionary invention which has implications for ridding mankind of genetic diseases is CRISPR. The work has been documented in a book about biochemist Jennifer Doudna and others with the title, "The Codebreaker" by Walter Isaacson. This truly revolutionary development has gotten little attention by the media which has always been more fascinated by the latest technological gadget. Technologists have never been known to be concerned about the ethical implications of their work. They pretty much are just concerned about the money they'll make from it. On the other hand Jennifer Doudna is very concerned about the possible negative implications of CRISPR.
CRISPR is a method for gene editing. That means that it can accurately cut out a mutated gene that causes a human disease and replace it with a corrected one. For instance in the case of sickle cell disease, there is one letter of one gene that is incorrect. This gene can be spliced and the correct letter inserted at the precise location. It is the Holy Grail of genomics and Jennifer Doudna and a female colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel prize for discovering it. The ethical and moral aspects of CRISPR have to do with eugenics, the much discredited pseudo science, that was developed in America and used by the Nazis as a way to weed out inferior human beings and develop a master race. Ethicists are concerned that CRISPR could be used to develop designer babies wherein parents could decide which traits their children should inherit. Since this would probably devolve to the betterment of mainly rich families, it could bring about even more inequality in the human race than now exists. However, the promise of CRISPR for curing human diseases, especially the genetically transmitted ones such as sickle cell anemia, is a truly revolutionary development.
The Harvard Gazette reports:
For decades, artificial intelligence, or AI, was the engine of high-level STEM research. Most consumers became aware of the technology’s power and potential through internet platforms like Google and Facebook, and retailer Amazon. Today, AI is essential across a vast array of industries, including health care, banking, retail, and manufacturing.
But its game-changing promise to do things like improve efficiency, bring down costs, and accelerate research and development has been tempered of late with worries that these complex, opaque systems may do more societal harm than economic good. With virtually no U.S. government oversight, private companies use AI software to make determinations about health and medicine, employment, creditworthiness, and even criminal justice without having to answer for how they’re ensuring that programs aren’t encoded, consciously or unconsciously, with structural biases.
Scientists generally agree that CRISPR-Cas9 should be allowed for use in the creation of human disease models, and in understanding the development and molecular mechanisms of diseases; however, it should be prohibited for the purposes of eugenics or enhancement. The paper, Bioethical issues in genome editing by CRISPR-Cas9 technology, we find:
Genome editing technologies have led to fundamental changes in genetic science. Among them, CRISPR-Cas9 technology particularly stands out due to its advantages such as easy handling, high accuracy, and low cost. It has made a quick introduction in fields related to humans, animals, and the environment, while raising difficult questions, applications, concerns, and bioethical issues to be discussed. Most concerns stem from the use of CRISPR-Cas9 to genetically alter human germline cells and embryos (called germline genome editing). Germline genome editing leads to serial bioethical issues, such as the occurrence of undesirable changes in the genome, from whom and how informed consent is obtained, and the breeding of the human species (eugenics). However, the bioethical issues that CRISPR-Cas9 technology could cause in the environment, agriculture and livestock should also not be forgotten.
Technology is not an unmitigated good, and ethicists are relegated to a position far behind the people who are only concerned about advancing the technology and about making money. The implications for society and the human race are faced, if they are faced at all, only later. Case in point: the internet and social media. As it turns out, the algorithms used in social media are designed only to increase profits. If they were changed to be better for society, they would result in decreased profits. Who knew?
