Odd way to learn altman is gay.
Kinda shocked I’ve never seen a “worlds richest gay man!” Headline. That feels like low hanging fru-
Gay is only bad if the poors do it, of course /s
Honestly I don’t think it’s any of our business. Even rich assholes are allowed to have a private life. Although with some (Musk, Trump) that private life is so fucked up it’s impossible to ignore, but generally I’m totally fine with not knowing who they fuck.
Does Thiel not have more money?
Another one I didn’t know is gay.
Props to msm for not making it a big deal
Thiel killed the outlet that outed him.
ah, ok, so GATTACA is up next. got it.
The same guy who admitted he couldn’t raise his child without ChatGPT btw.
So we’re skipping the Bell Riots and straight into Eugenics War?
Give me Butlerian jihad or give me death!
No thank you, I like Computers
The ability to reduce diseases and disorders in newborns sounds wonderful, until you find out which techno-fascist is behind the movement.
The other issue I have is that this is an example of a recurring issue in which the tech obsessed ultra wealthy declare their plan to solve a problem for which a very straightforward policy solution already exists.
We don’t need tech to extend lives or feed the hungry. We just need to remove the paywalls to existing resources.
Oh come on.
This guy couldn’t even get a train to run on time.
I mean, the original flavor didn’t either
Not for a lack of trying
TIL Sam is gay
further proof their homophobia is performative to have the peasants infighting about trans people they probably never met in their life.
The trans people they never knew they met.
I’ve been an androgynous (cis gay) man most of my life, and when I was young I was mistaken for a girl a lot. Hell I even had my own doubts for a while.
There’s lots of people out there that think that they can tell if someone is trans or not. Hell I have met LGBTQ+ people that think they can just tell. The truth is, they can’t.
You will have met trans people that you didn’t know are trans, and if you go around making assumptions, you’ll meet cis people you think are trans, but aren’t.
A couple of months ago I found out that this person I’ve been casually following on YouTube for almost a decade is a trans woman.
Like the absolutely easiest, most accurate way to tell if someone is trans is to just ask the person in question.
Like the absolutely easiest, most accurate way to tell if someone is trans is to just ask the person in question.
So, are you one of them Trans gingers or what?
Like that?
Yes. Throw respect out the window and enquire directly about the status of their genitals too.
the headline misspelled eugenics.
In before this turns into “I want my baby to have blue eyes and 150 IQ”
It’s an interesting ethical debate.
I have a hereditary condition which passes only by the X chromosome, so should I, as a man, abort a daughter? Because now the risk is too high and I’ve elected to simply not have children. It would be great if I could fix the single swapped base pair that would otherwise cause disfigurement and life-long health problems.
This is why billionaires should be kept away from sciences and tech but unfortunately they are all over it. The fact that these require lot of funding does not help.
Yeah I’m always conflicted. Like eugenics is the end goal for these fascists but also… We should try to prevent hereditary defects rtct
They do realize that this is how most zombie apocalypse movies start. Genetic tapering to stop diseases.
Yeah that’s fiction for a reason
I mean the zombie part, sure.
Do you really think in the hands of Silicon Valley techbros this ain’t gonna get ugly?
I mean I can certainly imagine all sorts of crazy shit but I don’t think it’ll be any kind of outbreak that kills the species, call me optimistic
I’m actually pro genetic engineering for this usecase. By expanding our medicine, we created an evolutionary problem: Carriers of genetic diseases keep passing their genes, passing the defects further. This will result in more and more health issues unless faulty genes themselves are fixed
There are more capable, actual medical professionals that can advance this field in a non-wallstreet all eggs in one basket kind of way.
Rich asshole says he’ll invent something good but very expensive and so only available to the elite. People ITT: “Good things are bad!”
Yeah so, good for Altman, best idea he’s had probably. Spend the money before the bubble pops my dude.
This guy can.
You know, everybody makes a idiot of himself as best as he can, and this guy can.
I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?
“What’s bad with eugenics for the rich?”
He’s a bad person and he’s always lying.
It’ll only be available for the super rich, will expand to other augmentations/engineering, and will result in further reinforcing social mobility boundaries.
The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.
If you can’t share basic healthcare with everyone, you’re not going to share genetic healthcare, either.
The government shouldn’t subsidize the development of super-healthcare (or pass conveniently targeted policies that enable its development at the expense of citizens) when all the non-billionaires get nothing but promises of I’ll-totally-share-it-you-guys from the same guy who says we’re-almost-at-AGI-we-just-need-another-trillion-dollars-I-swear.
The solution to billionaires having “ill-gotten gains” isn’t “well, let’s make sure he spends it responsibly”. It’s give the damn money back.
You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.
I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism.
I don’t know about what other people see, but I see negatives because it’s associated with a billionaire.
If Taylor Swift put her name on it, my opinion would not change.
Billionaires don’t build, they finance machines that extract value from human beings.
Actual scientists have been working on using CRISPR to fight hereditary disease in the US and around the world.
This money should have gone to them instead of into yet another billionaire’s pet designer baby startup.
Generally speaking (by theory subscription), moral evaluations of an action consider the state of the agent.
“Is this a good technology?” And “Is Sam Altman doing good?” Are two radically different questions with radically different answers.
Right. Currently the ways we avoid genetic disease are screening partners, screening IVF embryos, and in utero testing + abortion.
Is that his motivation though? Wanna make a bet that this does or doesn’t end as he says at face value?
Because the US health care system already serves the wealthy and abandons the poor, any expensive treatments are seen as just further steps into a Gattaca future of even more dystopian disparity, especially when driven by a rich asshole personally.
Universal negativity is also kind of the norm around here. A lot of folks on Lemmy believe we are slaves sucking Satan’s cock for breakfast, and anything that isn’t a complete burn down of our system and way of life is a negative.
Bruh. I wish I was sucking Satan’s cock for breakfast. That at least implies some kind of reward coming down the line.
There’s nothing uncontroversial about human genetic modification.
It’s a pandora’s box that just shouldn’t be opened.There’s nothing uncontroversial about human genetic modification.
It’s a pandora’s box that just shouldn’t be opened.writes the person who isn’t suffering because of a genetic disorder or met anybody suffering from a genetic disorder
wrong
That’s kind of a bold claim to make about someone you don’t know.
I can believe that there are good motivations for this kind of thing, and possibly even good applications, but you have to ask who gets to make the decisions on what to remove and what to leave, and what impact will it have?
Could we solve lots of problems? Absolutely. But is it the right tool for the problem? That’s a bit more nuanced. Sure, if we could edit out Alzheimers, or hereditary cancers, I’m sure most anyone would be on board with that idea, in a vacuum at least. But what about when the goals shift? Should we edit out autism? What about homosexuality? Hell, if we homogenise humanity and edit out racial differences, we could solve racism as well.
That’s obviously a bit extreme, but take blindness for example. I’m sure most sighted people would prefer to not be blind, and even among people born blind you’ll find supporters, but there’s also entire cultures and languages that have come about because of people being blind. Who gets to decide if that’s worth keeping or not?
That’s just one example, but you could replace blindness with deafness, or dwarfism, or any number of things.
Then there’s the question of what it’d mean for people who can’t access that kind of technology. What kind of future would this sort of thing create?
this sounds more interesting ☞ https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2025/may/22/the-extraordinary-promise-of-gene-editing-podcast
Doctors in the US have become the first to treat a baby with a customised gene-editing therapy after diagnosing the child with a severe genetic disorder that kills about half of those affected in early infancy. Ian Sample explains to Madeleine Finlay how this new therapy works and how it paves the way for even more complex gene editing techniques. David Liu, a professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the inventor of these therapies, also describes the barriers that could prevent them reaching patients, and how he thinks they can be overcome.
This isn’t really an answer to the ‘universal negativity’, but for a somewhat reasonable analysis of the pros and (surprisingly high number of) cons as well as some interesting grey areas, there’s an old LWT episode on this topic: https://youtu.be/AJm8PeWkiEU
Please review the glimpse into our future titled “Gattaca” to see why people might be concerned.
It’s fiction.
You can find actual discrimination based on genetics or wealth or class into the present and past of the real world.
You entirely missed the point of the movie if you think it’s only about genetic discrimination. It’s about creating a permanent underclass of people who weren’t wealthy enough to have had their parents make them genetically perfect. Exactly like what will happen once the rich have the ability to make themselves into the ‘ubermensch’ that they’ve been telling themselves they are for centuries.
This really reminds me of “Brave New World”, kind of scary actually.
Shit, thanks for reminding me I’m scrolling instead of reading the copy in my bag.
And everyone already has the ability to pick their Soma
Engineer some humans who can survive in zero gravity without peeing out their bone minerals. Humans who can survive hard radiation in space without having their cells crippled from destroyed DNA.
Maybe start with simple organisms. Like algae. :)
I’d just like to have to trim my nails less frequently
I’d just like to have to trim my nails less frequently
i used to think like you, then i started (ab)using my hands for activities that wear them out. Now i’m glad that they’re growing sufficiently fast to replace/renew
I see you’ve also purchased a new scratching post
Dude. How fast are your fingernails growing that it’s a problem?
If it works as good as AI, people will be chronic liars, have multiple fingers, and be annoying attention whores always asking if they can “help” you.
