there will always be people who have an advantage over others, the majority simply comes from where you were born followed to whom to you were born too.
The real fear is likely that some will make choices that are not politically correct, it is certain this would happen in non Western countries.
Consider the ethical implications of the job they pay you to do. Always. Who will be benefiting from my work? Who might be harmed by it? Can I trust my employer to protect--or even just accurately represent--my own interests?
Do not take jobs that grant more power to the powerful at the expense of the weak.
My litmus test for human gene-mod technology will be whether I will ever be able to repair my phi-GULO pseudogene, to restore the mammalian ability to synthesize ascorbates (vitamin C) in the liver, without needing to get permission from anyone to do it, and without paying more than a year's salary or using more than one garage of space on the equipment. If I can do that, this particular genie cannot be re-bottled.
And you can bet I'd be selling CKGGRAKDC-GG-D(KLAKLAK)2 under the table, too.
If a girl has 1000s of male suitors perhaps they would need to start paying a dowry...
Not that I agree with choosing the sex of your child for non medical reasons.
It destroys our existing concept of the human experience. Is it silly to want to live among "natural" children? Then explain me why it's not silly to want to continue the species at all?
Just like we look down at the people who fought against the smallpox vaccine because it was unnatural.
What does this phrase mean?
As I was trying to express above, it seems strange to me to imply somebody is irrational for wanting "natural" kids, but not likewise call someone out for caring about creating "their" progeny at all.
What I'm trying to do is get you to consider the full implications of not caring about whether things are "natural". What if we not only swapped around genes, but edited genes directly to cure things? What if we added enhancements? What if we completely genetically engineered babies from scratch and called them "our children", would that be okay with you? What if we made AI enabled robots and called them "our children"? Why not... just not have children at all anyway? At what point do you draw the line, and by what principle? To say that "natural" humans doesn't matter raises the question of why "humans" matter at all in the first place.
I raise the issue of the "human experience" because that's the paradigm I live in, and I wonder what I'm going to do without it. I suspect that anybody who cares about "the next generation" but doesn't care if babies are "natural" also thinks they're living within the "human experience" but they haven't thought it through. I think that if you don't care about "natural" babies, you might as well go all the way and be an anti-natalist. I'm actually quite open to that as well, at least it's consistent.
BTW one way of avoiding genetic diseases without genetic engineering would be genetic screening. Such things exist as I understand, I met a guy who said he worked for a company that did this sort of thing. Certain couples just avoid having children. Maybe they can adopt. Is that unfair to them that they don't get to have "their" children? Again, why does that even matter if you don't care about things being "natural"?
Thank you for continuing this conversation so late after the article was posted, btw. Now that I've laid it all out I wonder what ideas you have in response.
All of these things will happen in the (potentially near) future. The world will be much weirder, but also better.
I mean you can argue that people shouldn't reproduce at all, but good luck convincing everyone of that any time soon. A significant percentage of people believe even having such a view is horribly immoral (it's associated with eugenics and other bad things) and that reproduction is a basic human right.
So if we are going to be reproducing, there is nothing wrong with removing genetic diseases.
I wonder why people's willingness to accept is your standard for what is acceptable. I would think convincing people of having designer babies, while less extreme, has the same hurdle.
> we are going to be reproducing
And again, "we ... reproducing" seems a little strange here if you're willing to accept a future with robotic "offspring" as an extension of your view. It's more like "we are creating new life and bestowing our culture onto it". Is that what people really want? Is there any point to it?
Monsanto are an awful company, and a very large part of that is down to their maximalism, rather than the GMO part.
Continuing to conflate the two issues just does one's own argument a disservice (it's a strawman) while also reinforcing the maximalists' position that GMOs have to be patentable.
I think it would be cool if you could clean up your DNA removing all the nasty genetic diseases you could pass on to your children.
I wouldn't really change the appearance of my child though.
Plus I would keep most of the original genetic material just fix the bits that are detrimental to a long and healthy life.