> Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I'd rather live in an engineered society with engineered people.

If you are looking for bang for the buck in raising the average IQ across the whole population, then there are serious quick wins in eliminating things that drag it down. For instance, exposure to lead. And it's doable, hardly rocket science or genetic engineering.

If you're looking for a few very rich people to give their offspring another advantage over the rest, then genetic engineering becomes more pertinent.

Agreed. Wouldn't it be MUCH easier to, say, invest heavily in our early and middle education systems?

Much cheaper than eugenics.

why can't have both, "eliminating things that drag it down" + genetic engineering?

If we're going to act like we're a bunch of smarty-pants engineers here, it seems rational to start with the low hanging fruit: environmental toxins.

In addition to facing fewer ethical pitfalls, greatly reducing these environmental factors is well within our current means. It also universally beneficial, and not limited to those who can afford "Boutique" offspring.

You can have the first if you have a government with sufficient sense and compassion, it's been that way for a long time - and to be fair a lot of issues have been reduced or eliminated over the decades. e.g. Leaded vehicle fuel is a thing of the past.

You can have the second at some time in the future if the research works out and you can afford it.

The ladies who empty the trash here contribute more to society than I do. I just write throwaway apps for throwaway companies, they actually DO something.

But wait. If all they do is empty your trash, and you do nothing worthy of merit, then by extension, that tangible thing they do to support your work is equally meaningless.

If the world economy could eliminate your job without missing it, then you are no longer generating trash to clean up, and that job goes away too. The person who cleans up after someone genuinely productive therefore contributes more than someone who cleans up after someone useless.

This is, no doubt why we pretend with all the might of imagination that certain jobs are critical and vital to the economy. The idea that double-digit percentages of the whole world economy could actually just be wasted on useless navel-gazing nonsense is just too horrible to consider. It may be true, but if we believe it is true, that just means we're all wasting our lives on pointless bullshit. I'd rather lie to myself and be happy, regarding this particular point.

You're free to quit your job and go empty peoples' trash if you really find it so much more meaningful.

His lack of nobility does not invalidate his argument. Arguably, many of the most despised jobs are most important. None of the elite would or could do them, and without society would fall apart. On the other hand, a very large percentage of elite jobs could be eliminated without ill effect.

Our role as the elite is to elevate and recognize their worth, and not sink them to our moral level.

Then this is a poor example. I can certainly empty my own trash - I do that at home. It's far more efficient to have one person with no education or special skills come around and collect everyone's trash into a big container once per day than to have hundreds of skilled, expensive employees empty their own trash when it gets full.

It's as meaningful as it's thankless.

If you're getting paid it means what you're doing means something to someone, even if it doesn't mean anything to you.

But you can empty the trash and they can't build your apps.

Also, when thinking about creating value, you need to think about scale. They change your trash and are limited by their physical ability and time. Let's say they saved you 4 minutes and changed 400 trashes, saving 399 other people 4 minutes. They've created ~24 hours of value.

If your app helps people save 30 seconds a day and did that for 100k people, then you created about 12 days more value.

Your argument can easily go the other way. What if your app wastes 30 seconds a day for 100k people? By, say, building addictive mobile games, or a social network dedicated to watching food pictures, or gambling websites, or, like the parent comment said, throwaway apps.

If an app provides entertainment then it wastes time?

What app does save people 30 seconds? Perhaps they didn't use the app before, and now it's wasting the time of thousands?

At the very least the lady emptying the trash keeps the place hygienic, reducing the spread of diseases.

>The primary problem to solve is discrimination against non-engineered people.

You can't be naive enough to think that this problem wouldn't occur. On the contrary, if genetic engineering on such a level was realized (which would require a shift in our current biomedical ethics to begin with), discrimination against the less-optimized would be a foregone conclusion.

In such a scenario, we could only hope that everyone would be optimized equally and the suboptimal humans wouldn't be born into a world where they are second class citizens.

>As long as there are controls in place that make it difficult

Keeping people from discrimination may be about as difficult as perfecting genetic engineering.

> In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society

Do you have any data to back this up? Do you have a reliable measure of "contribution to society"?