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Designer babies. Self-improving AI. Are we ready for either?

Two new breakthroughs show how hard it is to know when the world has changed.

How do we know when the world has changed?

On June 1, a team of scientists published a preprint scientific paper claiming they had edited human embryonic DNA with more precision than any previous attempt. As a technical achievement, the work is undoubtedly impressive, largely avoiding the errors that had accompanied earlier efforts to gene edit embryos. With further development, such embryonic editing could free future children from fatal or debilitating genetic diseases, but as the veteran science writer Carl Zimmer reported in the New York Times later that week, the real headline news was that the work “could open the way to babies engineered with particular characteristics” — designer children, in other words.

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The same day the Times piece published, the AI company Anthropic published a post asserting that AI was already accelerating AI development, which the authors argue may represent an early step toward recursive self-improvement (RSI) — AI systems that design and build their own successors, faster and faster. Already most of the code that runs Anthropic’s Claude was written by Claude itself, which has helped the company’s engineers ship eight times as much code as they were two years ago. While more is not automatically better, and Claude is still far from being able to guide itself, the possibility of self-improving AI is on the horizon — and “it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for,” as Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and Anthropic Institute head Marina Favaro wrote.

The people who actually want AI to replace humanity

These two writings were published by academic biologists and the employees of an AI company, in two wildly disparate disciplines, but they nonetheless point to a possible near future that is fundamentally different from the world we live in now.

Both events are potential key steps toward unprecedented powers — not all of which we would have firm control over: newly designed intelligences and newly designed humans. What the two share is not just consequence, but bivalence — the possibility of both the miraculous and the catastrophic. The biological precision that could eradicate an inherited disease like Huntington’s could also pave the way to a genetic caste system. The AI capability that could accelerate decades of scientific progress could also utterly disempower its makers — us.

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