I feel enraged that option NOT to enhance humanity is even in the picture.
I guess that's the inevitable part of any new medical advance, be it vaccines, anaesthesia or even washing hands when dealing the pregnant women after working with corpses.
I guess that's the inevitable part of any new medical advance, be it vaccines, anaesthesia or even washing hands when dealing the pregnant women after working with corpses.
Real social, economic and political factors are going to come into play here. As the author concludes: "Gene editing raises the spectre of parents making choices that are not obviously in the best interests of their children. Deaf parents may prefer their offspring to be deaf too, say; pushy parents might want to boost their children’s intelligence at all costs, even if doing so affects their personalities in other ways. And if it becomes possible to tweak genes to make children smarter, should that option really be limited to the rich?"
Maybe very intelligent deaf humans would outcompete the rest of mankind in a few generations? You may not like that, but why exactly should I care?
Parents do have the best interest of their children in mind. Let them be free of making the best choices instead of government imposed ones.
Moloch[1] may demand sacrifice.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I think it vastly more likely that (lets call them East German) government agents would be impersonally having children edited, so that their country would win more medals at the olympics. These supposed government agents wouldn't care that these adults would burn out and die of terrible diseases in their mid-lives. They wouldn't care that there might only be a 5% success rate, and that the other 95% had terrible lives.
Thats why the option to NOT edit the human race is on the menu, but I am confident that that option won't be taken, except officially by the nations which are bothered by ethics. We as a race will tinker.