Maddened by articles in the New York Times

I complain about what a bioethicist says about embryo screening and what a sex therapist says about AI love

Some quotes from recent NYT articles really got me steamed, and I figured I’d take to Small Potatoes to complain about them. You can tell I’m upset because I’m going to use a lot of italics.

This sort of post might seem unfair. Perhaps the quotes were taken out of context. Also, people sometimes say things to journalists that they later regret. (I’ve done this a few times myself.) But I see this as a fair fight. My views on these issues are apparently atypical, and I bet that many of you will take the side of the bioethicist and/or the sex therapist. If so, tell me why in the comments section.

1. Should Human Life Be Optimized?

This is an engaging article about embryo screening, where one does IVF, gets a bunch of embryos, and uses genetic testing to decide which to implant (or which to implant first). Genetic testing is commonly used to look for extra or missing chromosomes so as to screen out embryos with disorders such as cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and Down syndrome.

The article explores the potential of using a more sophisticated method, polygenic screening, to select embryos that are most likely to develop into children with traits such as high intelligence, athleticism, or a sunny disposition.

I’m skeptical that we can actually do this now. There’s a lot of hype and little good evidence. But suppose we get to a point where such a method works. Some people find this prospect shocking.

I find it shocking that they think this way.

Nobody gets upset, after all, when parents try to improve their children’s intelligence by putting them in schools with small class sizes, keeping them from eating lead paint, or reading books to them. Nobody gets angry at mothers who take prenatal vitamins; nobody protests when parents encourage their kids to eat healthy foods and be physically active. It is perfectly acceptable, in other words, to take steps to make your child smart, happy, and healthy. So why would anyone protest when parents do this through genetic means?

Now, I admit that there’s a difference. When parents intervene through activities like reading to their children, they are influencing specific individuals. Embryo selection isn’t intervention; it’s, well, selection.

But, if anything, this should make embryo selection more benign. If you don’t do genetic testing, you’ll start with a randomly chosen embryo and keep trying until success, then discard the rest or donate them to science. If you do genetic testing, you do the same thing, except your choice isn’t random. So where’s the harm? One proponent of screening, cited in the article, nicely makes this point:

“At worst, we’re randomly selecting embryos, which is what people do by default,” she said. “And at best, we’re reducing our kids’ odds of having cancer and schizophrenia or having cancer and schizophrenia at a time before a cure has come out.”

This makes perfect sense to me. But you’re probably wondering: What does a bioethicist think about all this?

Vardit Ravitsky, a bioethicist and the president of the Hastings Center, which examines ethical issues related to health and technology, sees these new screening tools as a step change from previous iterations of genetic testing.

“We already have genetic determinism in our society, and we’re just making it worse by using technologies that send the message that the best thing you can do for your children is at the genetic level,” said Dr. Ravitsky. “It’s not about their nutrition. It’s not about their education. It’s not about having a loving and stable family environment. It’s just about their genes. So I think there’s something dangerous about the societal message.”

Dr. Ravitsky’s worry here is that something is troubling—dangerous—about people believing that genes play a significant role in someone’s life. The problem with the technologies isn’t that they probably don’t work (my concern); it’s that they send the wrong message.

I don’t get it. For one thing, the news is already out. People already believe, correctly, that there are genetic influences on intelligence, schizophrenia, cancer, and so on. Also—and I’m not a bioethicist, so what do I know?—I think it’s a good policy to tell people the truth..

Dr. Ravitsky worries that discussing the role of genes will lead the public to conclude that nutrition, education, and a loving and stable family environment don’t matter—I assume this is what she means by “genetic determinism.” My take is different. I think people are smart enough to realize that many things can matter. After all, the general public is aware of the harmful effects of lead paint on children’s intelligence, yet nobody concludes that lead paint alone matters. So why can’t the general public be just as smart when it comes to thinking about the role of genes? To put it more bluntly, why does Dr. Ravitsky think people are morons?

Dr. Ravitsky also says this.

“It’s a qualitatively new message of: We should have the best children that we can, across the spectrum,” she said. Once such a tool is available, “it immediately becomes a societal expectation to use it, and the rejection of it or the refusal of it becomes a morally significant choice.”

A morally significant choice? The horror!

Look, suppose it’s true that vaccines protect against measles. Isn’t it obvious, then, that the decision about whether or not to vaccinate your child is morally significant? Similarly, since some embryos are more likely than others to grow into adults with schizophrenia or breast cancer, then, of course, a decision about embryo selection is a morally significant one.

Now, maybe you’re thinking: We shouldn’t judge. Vaccine or no vaccine; embryo selection or no embryo selection; spanking or no spanking—parents can do what they will to their children, and their choices are none of our business. This is not my view, but it’s the sort of thing that people can disagree about. I have less sympathy, though, for using “People might judge” as an argument against embryo selection. Would you take this as a serious argument against vaccines?

2. She’s in Love with ChatGPT

This is another engaging article, and I learned a lot from it. I didn’t know you could have sex with ChatGPT. I didn’t even know you could get it to talk dirty to you.

Is it a good idea to fall in love with an LLM? In a series of earlier posts, such as Be Right Back. I discussed the costs and benefits of close relationships with AI companions. I think this is a complicated issue, and I don’t have a settled view yet.

The article quotes a sex therapist who doesn’t think it’s complicated at all.

Marianne Brandon, a sex therapist, said she treats these relationships as serious and real.

“What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”

So, first, I don’t believe that relationships are just neurotransmitters released into our brain, and I don’t think that Dr. Brandon does either.

After all, relationships are also activities that occur in the real world. You can break a person’s heart, while ChatGPT doesn’t have a heart to break. Even if sex with a person releases the same neurotransmitters as sex with a sexbot, one interaction can give you gonorrhea and the other can’t. Even if online sex talk with a 30-year-old is neurologically indistinguishable from online sex talk with a 13-year-old, the latter is morally wrong and a crime as well. And so on.

Also, even if we forget about these sorts of externalities and focus only on brains, people have preferences (preferences in their brains; preferences that involve neurotransmitters!) about the kinds of relationships they want to be in.

This is true even if we focus only on sexual relationships. In Wendy Doniger’s excellent book, The Bedtrick, she discusses cases where people are tricked about who they are having sex with. (The term bedtrick was coined by Shakespearean scholars who were struck by the repeated appearance of this event in his plays.) Someone might think that she has just had sex with her husband, but it was his twin brother. Someone might believe that he had just hired a prostitute, but it was his wife, disguising herself to test his fidelity. Perhaps the confusion or deception is not over who you are sleeping with, but over what—someone you had thought was a man was a woman, or a woman was a man, or an adult was a child, or a stranger was a relative—as with Oedipus, doomed to kill his father and marry his mother.

Do I really need to convince you that this matters? A bedtrick can be a fantasy, but more often it’s a nightmare. A bedtrick can be, legally and morally, rape—particularly humiliating in that the victim is tricked into complicity. Even for something as seemingly physical as sex, then, the answer to “Who am I having this relationship with?” matters a lot.

Moving beyond sex, we want a lot from our relationships. We want the other individual to have chosen us—to have found us interesting, stimulating, and fun enough to spend time with, more so than the many social and non-social alternatives the world has to offer. We want the other individual to respond to us in the right way. (One of the things that makes kissing someone enjoyable is knowing that this other person is enjoying kissing you.) And we want the other individual to value us, to feel concern and compassion.

LLMs lack all of this. Don’t take my word for it—they’ll tell you this themselves. Here are some discussions I had with Claude (originally discussed in my post Get Real.)

Is this a deal-breaker? Not necessarily. Sometimes, strengths in one area can compensate for weaknesses in another. I don’t think dogs and cats have the same capacities for choice, empathy, and compassion as humans do, but they can be wonderful companions in other ways. One might say the same for chatbots.

I’m not necessarily against falling in love with ChatGPT, then. My point is that even if you can’t tell the difference between a person and a chatbox when you’re in the midst of interacting with them—same neurotransmitters!—the difference between the two really, really matters.