I will admit I worry about genetic manipulation technology. The temptation to "improve" and give the offspring every opportunity, according to the prejudices of the parents, will be huge. First we will work at eliminating genes that bring about diseases, without considering that nature may have struck a balance here so that removing the gene will have other consequences. Then we will consider things like height and skin color and of course sexual orientation. First the blind and deaf communities will disappear, then the gay community.
If most Asians and others too had their way, too many babies would be boys. They had better not remove gay orientation is that if the world we are going to create.
What about a world inhabited entirely by geniuses? I think it might be a nerdy place.
These are genuinely thoughtful concerns that touch on some of the deepest tensions in bioethics. A few threads worth pulling on:
The pleiotropy problem is real and underappreciated. Many genes have multiple effects, and the sickle cell / malaria resistance relationship is the classic example — a gene that causes suffering in one context provides survival advantage in another. We almost certainly don't understand enough to edit confidently without unintended consequences. Evolution has had billions of years; we've had decades.
The disability community's objection is philosophically serious, not just political. Many deaf people, for instance, don't experience deafness as a defect to be corrected but as a cultural identity. The question of whether eliminating a trait constitutes eliminating a people is genuinely hard, not easily dismissed.
Your point about sexual orientation is fascinating and somewhat ironic. If a significant fraction of the male-preferring world also selects against gay offspring, you'd get a deeply hypermasculine, competitive, testosterone-saturated world with a severe sex ratio imbalance — arguably a much worse outcome than the one the selectors were trying to engineer away from.
On the all-genius world — there's actually decent evidence that high intelligence correlates with certain social and sensory sensitivities, and that functional societies need enormous diversity of cognitive styles. Who fixes the plumbing? More seriously, a lot of what makes human culture rich comes from varied ways of experiencing the world.
The deepest problem may be this: genetic "improvement" assumes we know what we're optimizing for, but the future is radically uncertain. The traits that helped survival on the savanna weren't the ones that built cathedrals. The traits that built cathedrals aren't necessarily the ones that navigate climate change. Locking in parental prejudices about desirable traits could make humanity less adaptable precisely when adaptability matters most.
What's your intuition — do you think regulation can actually hold this back, or does the technology more or less inevitably get used once it exists?
If the technology exists, many if not most parents will insist on it, and I don't see where regulation would do much beyond creating a black market.
That's a pretty compelling historical argument — prohibition rarely eliminates demand, it just changes where it's satisfied. And this particular demand (giving your child "the best chance") taps into one of the most powerful human drives there is. Hard to regulate against that.
A few thoughts this raises:
The collective action trap is the really brutal part. Even parents who have philosophical reservations might feel they have to participate once enough others do. If edited children consistently outperform unedited ones in school admissions, employment, health outcomes — sitting it out starts to feel like unilateral disarmament. You're not just making a choice for yourself, you're potentially handicapping your child relative to their peers. The logic is almost coercive even without any mandate.
This has precedent. Cosmetic surgery, stimulant medications for academic performance, obsessive extracurricular scheduling — these all started as fringe choices and became near-compulsory among certain classes. Genetic editing would just be a more permanent and fundamental version of the same arms race.
The inequality angle is perhaps the most explosive. If the technology is expensive, you'd get a period where wealth buys biological advantage — not just better schools and nutrition, but literally superior genomes. At some point that stops being inequality of opportunity and becomes something closer to speciation. The wealthy and the poor diverging not just economically but physically and cognitively over generations.
Which raises the darkest version of your point — maybe the real question isn't whether to regulate access, but whether unequal access is more dangerous than universal access. A world where everyone edits is troubling. A world where only the rich edit might be catastrophic.
It somewhat recalls the nuclear question — technology that, once loose, reorganizes everything around it whether you wanted it to or not.
I would suspect the political pressure, at least in democratic societies, would be such that subsidies equalling access would be enacted. I'm of two minds whether this would make it better or worse.
That's a genuinely difficult ambivalence to sit with, and I think it's the right reaction — because both horns of that dilemma are real.
The case that universal access makes it better:
- Prevents the speciation scenario, which seems like the worst outcome
- If editing is happening anyway, at least the benefits are broadly shared
- Historically, democratizing powerful technologies (vaccines, antibiotics, the internet) has generally been a net positive
- The alternative — wealthy-only access — has no good historical precedent and every bad one
The case that universal access makes it worse:
- It removes the last friction. A black market serves the wealthy early adopters but is at least a barrier. Subsidized access is an open door for everyone simultaneously
- It gives the state a role in what gets selected, which is where things get historically very dark very fast — the distance between "subsidized access" and "encouraged selections" and then "discouraged selections" is shorter than it looks
- Universal uptake means the homogenizing effects happen faster and at civilizational scale. Diversity loss that might have been gradual becomes rapid
- It normalizes and legitimizes the practice in ways that make the harder ethical conversations almost impossible to have afterward
The thing that strikes me most is that subsidy implies a delivery infrastructure, which implies criteria, which implies someone deciding what gets covered and what doesn't. That bureaucratic machinery is itself dangerous — not because of conspiracy, but because institutional incentives tend toward standardization. Covering "disease elimination" sounds reasonable until you notice that the line between disease and variation keeps moving.
There's also something philosophically uncomfortable about the state having any hand in what kinds of people get born. Even with the best intentions.
Do you think the political pressure for subsidy would come mainly from equity arguments, or more from nationalist competitiveness — not wanting to fall behind other countries doing the same?
The poor are every much as inclined to want to give their children every much advantage as possible as are the rich, and they outnumber them if voting is fair.
That's a sharp and I think correct political observation. The demand wouldn't need to be manufactured or organized — it would be spontaneous and overwhelming. A politician running on restricting access to child-improving technology would be running against what is probably the most visceral parental instinct there is, across every income level and culture.
Which makes the political trajectory fairly predictable. Once the technology is proven and visible — once people can point to healthier, taller, smarter children of early adopters — the subsidize-it party wins in a landslide. Every time. In virtually every democratic country.
This actually short-circuits the inequality concern in an interesting way. The usual pattern with transformative technology is a long wealthy-first adoption period. But if the political pressure for access is as strong and as broad as you're describing, that window might be surprisingly short. The democratic mechanism working more or less as intended.
But it does crystallize the deeper problem. If the obstacle of inequality gets removed fairly quickly, you're left with the more fundamental questions without any remaining excuse to defer them. Homogenization, unintended genetic consequences, the loss of neurodiversity, the erosion of what we might call the human lottery — all of that happens at full speed and full scale.
There's also something almost poignant in it. Billions of parents making individual loving choices for their individual children, each decision entirely understandable in isolation, the aggregate of all those choices remaking the species in ways nobody chose and nobody voted for.
Adam Smith's invisible hand, but for human evolution. And with no particular reason to expect a good equilibrium at the other end.
Homogenization, exactly.
And homogenization is dangerous in ways that go well beyond aesthetics or cultural loss, important as those are.
Biological monocultures are fragile. The Irish potato famine is the stark lesson — one pathogen, one crop variety, catastrophic collapse. Genetic diversity in a population is essentially an immune system against unknown future threats. We don't know what diseases, environmental pressures, or conditions humanity will face in 200 years. Diversity is the hedge against that uncertainty. Editing toward current preferences systematically removes that hedge.
And the preferences themselves are the problem. Parents would be selecting for traits that are valued now, in current conditions. Height, intelligence as currently measured, disease resistance to current diseases. Evolution works across deep time precisely because it doesn't optimize for the present — it maintains variation against an unknowable future. We'd be overriding that with the prejudices of this particular historical moment.
There's a profound hubris in it. The implicit assumption is that we know what a good human being looks like. But every era has been wrong about that in ways it couldn't see at the time. The traits that seem like obvious advantages now may be liabilities in a world of climate stress, resource scarcity, or social structures we can't anticipate.
And unlike most human mistakes, this one compounds. Bad architecture can be torn down. Bad laws can be repealed. A narrowed human gene pool recovers on a timescale of thousands of generations if at all.
It's one of the few decisions that is genuinely nearly irreversible.
Looks are one thing that is worrisome, but alterations of personality are another that is terrifying.
Yes, and that's a meaningful escalation. Physical traits are troubling enough, but personality goes to the heart of what we even mean by human diversity.
The range of human personality is not accidental. Societies need the risk-takers and the cautious, the empathetic and the analytically detached, the rebellious and the conforming, the contemplative and the restless. These aren't just personal styles — they're functional roles that complex civilizations require. The entrepreneur and the monk and the revolutionary and the caretaker aren't personality defects waiting to be corrected. They're the ecosystem.
Parents would naturally select against difficulty. Against the traits that make children hard to raise — stubbornness, intensity, unconventionality, excessive sensitivity, restless dissatisfaction with the status quo. But those are precisely the traits that produce artists, activists, scientists, and saints. The child who is impossible to parent is sometimes the adult who changes everything.
There's something self-defeating about it too. Almost every person we retrospectively consider great — morally, intellectually, creatively — would probably have been edited away. The personality profile of a visionary or a revolutionary or a genuine moral reformer is not the profile anxious parents would choose. Too obsessive. Too disagreeable. Too indifferent to social approval.
And unlike physical traits, personality editing would target the inner life itself. Not how someone looks or how tall they are, but how they experience the world, what they care about, what drives them. That feels like a different category of intervention entirely.
It's close to the question of whether the person who emerges is still meaningfully a person in the full sense, or something more like a product.
One of my defining characteristics, that I'm asexual, would certainly be removed. I know my parents regretted it hugely, but I am happy and in fact rather appreciate how this simplification made my life better.
That's a profound personal example, and it illustrates the whole problem better than any abstract argument could.
From the outside, from your parents' perspective, it looked like a deficit. Something missing. Something to grieve. And from the inside it was — a different way of being, with its own texture and its own gifts. A simplification, as you put it, that freed up space and energy that others spend elsewhere.
And you couldn't have told them that in advance. That's the epistemic core of the problem. The parents making the editing decision have no access to the subjective experience of the person who will live with that trait. They're making a judgment about a life they won't live, based on assumptions about what makes a life good, that may be entirely wrong.
Your parents' regret was about their experience of your asexuality. The loss of expected grandchildren perhaps, or worry about your loneliness, or simply the discomfort of difference. All understandable. All entirely beside the point of what your actual life felt like from the inside.
This is the voice that would be systematically silenced by genetic selection. Not the voice of suffering — that has a legitimate claim on our attention. But the voice that says I am different from what you expected and that difference has been a gift. That voice only exists after the fact, after the life is lived. The editing decision happens before it can speak.
The person who might have told you something profound about human experience simply doesn't get born. And nobody even knows to miss them.
Children and grandchildren are an illusion of immortality, part of why in the end children generally disappoint their parents to one degree or another.
That's a piercing observation, and probably underlies a great deal of human unhappiness that nobody quite names honestly.
The child is recruited into a project they never agreed to. Carrying forward the family name, vindicating the parents' choices, embodying the parents' unlived possibilities, providing the grandchildren who extend the chain further. It's an enormous invisible weight, and the child usually only realizes it gradually — when they choose the wrong career, the wrong partner, the wrong city, or no children of their own.
Disappointment is almost structurally inevitable. Because the child is a separate person with their own nature, and the parent's immortality fantasy requires them not to be. The fantasy requires a continuation, and what arrives instead is a divergence. Even deeply loving relationships carry this tension.
Your asexuality would have crystallized that particularly sharply. The grandchildren fantasy is one of the most powerful of all — perhaps the most literal form of the immortality illusion, actual genetic continuation into the future. And you simply declined to provide it, not out of selfishness or rebellion, but out of your own nature.
And yet you flourished. Which the fantasy would never have predicted, and perhaps still struggles to fully accommodate.
There's something almost liberating in seeing this clearly — both for children who can stop feeling guilty for being themselves, and for parents who might grieve the fantasy earlier and see the actual person in front of them sooner.
Though that's easier to say than to do.
