Lovelace×Huxley

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Ada Lovelace sits down with Aldous Huxley for TITANS. The subject — These companies help parents try to pick their babies' traits. Experts are wary.
2. 00:12
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Mr. Huxley, I've just been handed the most extraordinary note. Companies are now offering parents the ability to select embryos based on predicted traits and disease risks. The studio tells me this is breaking at this very moment.
3. 00:28
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   How perfectly punctual of the future to arrive during our conversation. I wrote about precisely this in 'Brave New World,' though I set it centuries hence and assumed it would be the state doing the selecting, not commercial enterprises. The market, it seems, moves faster than tyranny.
4. 00:44
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   But surely you anticipated calculation would reach this domain? I proposed in my notes on Mr. Babbage's Engine that almost anything subject to relation might someday be analyzed by machinery. The human constitution is, after all, a series of relations we're only beginning to comprehend.
5. 01:02
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Oh, I anticipated the capacity, Lady Lovelace. What I doubted was the wisdom. Your Analytical Engine was morally neutral—a device for calculation. But when we turn those calculations upon ourselves, upon our children-to-be, we enter territory where mathematics and ethics collide rather spectacularly.
6. 01:20
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Yet we've always selected! Families have considered constitution, temperament, hereditary conditions when arranging marriages. Is this not merely bringing precision to an ancient practice?
7. 01:33
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   There's a rather significant difference between choosing whom one marries and designing one's children like motorcars. The former preserves mystery, accident, the great genetic lottery. The latter attempts to eliminate chance entirely.
8. 01:48
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   But chance is often cruel, Mr. Huxley. My own father was mad—Byron's instabilities were legendary. If my mother could have known, could have chosen otherwise, prevented such suffering...
9. 02:00
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Would we have your work? This is not sentiment, it's a serious question. Your mathematical genius, your peculiar mind—were these entirely separable from the constitutional inheritance you describe?
10. 02:12
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I cannot say. I confess the thought troubles me. Still, surely preventing genuine disease—consumption, inherited maladies that cause only suffering—this must be unambiguously good?
11. 02:24
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Preventing Huntington's chorea, perhaps yes. But the note says 'thousands of diseases and odds for specific traits.' That second bit is where we slip from medicine into manufacture. Who decides which traits merit selection? Height? Temperament? Mathematical ability?
12. 02:41
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    The parents, I should think. Who better to decide what qualities their child might possess?
13. 02:46
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    The parents who live in a particular society, with particular prejudices, who want their children to succeed in a particular economic system. They'll select for whatever wins the race that decade. We'll breed a generation perfectly adapted to conditions that will have changed by the time they reach maturity.
14. 03:02
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    You paint a dire picture. But these are risk predictions, not certainties. The note says 'odds'—probability, not predestination. Surely informed probability is preferable to ignorance?
15. 03:16
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Information can imprison as effectively as ignorance, my dear lady. If you're told your embryo has elevated risk for depression, do you select against it? You've now eliminated everyone who might have become a great poet, a profound philosopher. Melancholy has authored half of civilization's finest works.
16. 03:34
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Or produced half its suicides. This is impossibly complicated.
17. 03:39
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Yes. Which is why I'm wary of commercial enterprises offering it as a service. They require customers to believe the complications can be resolved by choosing Option A or Option B.
18. 03:51
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    The note mentions experts are wary as well. What do you suppose concerns them most?
19. 03:56
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    That we'll optimize for the wrong things, probably. That we'll narrow human variation precisely when we most need diversity. That we'll create new castes—the genetically fortunate and unfortunate. I explored this in my novel, though I made it rather more systematic than this market approach appears to be.
20. 04:14
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Your Alphas and Epsilons. But that was state-mandated breeding for predetermined social roles. This is individual choice.
21. 04:22
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Individual choices that aggregate into social patterns. If everyone selects for intelligence, strength, beauty, we haven't freed ourselves from the caste system—we've simply made it genetic rather than social. And far more permanent.
22. 04:36
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I confess you've shaken my initial enthusiasm. Though I still cannot condemn preventing genuine suffering.
23. 04:43
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Nor I. The difficulty lies in distinguishing prevention from preference, medicine from enhancement, therapy from design. These companies, I suspect, profit from blurring precisely those distinctions.
24. 04:56
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    What would you have us do, then? Forbid the practice entirely?
25. 05:00
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    I'm not certain prohibition works once the knowledge exists. But perhaps we might insist on humility—acknowledge that our predictions are probabilities, that traits interact in ways we don't understand, that eliminating all risk eliminates all surprise, and surprise has authored most of what makes life worth living.
26. 05:17
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Including, I suppose, people like myself—unplanned, unexpected, the daughter of a scandal.
27. 05:22
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Precisely. Would Byron have been selected? Would you? The question answers itself, which is why I remain, despite understanding the temptation, profoundly uneasy with this development.
28. 05:34
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    As am I now, though for different reasons than when this conversation began. You've complicated my mathematics, Mr. Huxley.
29. 05:42
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And you've reminded me that calculation itself isn't evil—merely insufficient for questions that require wisdom alongside arithmetic. Though I suspect neither quality is currently being selected for in these embryonic marketplaces.