CRISPR and other tools aren’t science fiction anymore. If the wealthy get there first, what happens to everyone else?
I wouldn’t worry about it … evolution is all about the survival of the luckiest and most fortunate
Sure it is survival of the fittest, strongest and most capable … but often through earth’s history … survival is more often left to the survivors, the lucky few who were just fortunate to survive.
“Fittest” never meant “best”, just “most capable of effective adaptation”, FWIW.
Its the ones that adapt the fastest
Planet of the Rich, where the apes are billionaires and everyone else is… pretty much the same.
The plot of the film Gattaca explores this, the idea of what society looks like when there’s a class of genetically engineered, “superior” people, vs. the naturally born, “inferior” class.
That movie is 9/10. The ending is absolutely beautiful.
Spoilers!
Is that the movie about (sorry for the bad synopsis) Where the guy vacuums his work desk because he wants to go to space?
That is correct
Thank you. I just wanted to make sure I remembered the right movie.
I now challenge anyone who haven’t seen it to deduce the rest of the plot, based only on my description.
Jude Law, something something treadmill
Gigolo Joe?
Washing yourself in the shower, difficulty level “going to space”
Great movie, excellent performances
Okay, but the moral of the story was that “superior” people weren’t actually superior. They were just racist.
The protagonist outwits and outperforms them all.
Same for Jules Vernes - The Time Machine book in the part where the traveler meets the Morlocks and the Eloi.
Tbh, I think GATTACA barely touched the topic. It focussed so much on the brothers’ rivalry that you could strip out the genetic engineering part and it’d barely change the movie
Yeah it’s a cool movie but the message of systemic disadvantages don’t matter if you try hard enough is a little questionable at best.
The issue wasn’t “try hard enough”. It was how systematic disenfranchisement hobbles people far more than their genetics.
Once you brand someone as “lesser”, their actual capacity is irrelevant. They won’t be given the opportunity to succeed (much less to fail and try again) while the presumed-superior cohort is offered advantage after advantage in order to prove they are better.
I think it’s trying to show we are more than just our genetics, there’s a lot of nurture/environment/action that affects outcomes. The protagonist had drive, determination, exercised and worked for the dream. Most eugenic people didn’t have the same drive and took life for granted, so he could outperform them.
For the kinds of class based gene editing we are likely to see, it kinda isn’t. More attractive, bigger boobs, better predisposition to fitness, etc. That is all surmountable.
Where it falls apart are “goofy” looking people likely Michael Phelps who are straight up genetic freaks. But those aren’t the kinds of genes the rich want… For themselves.
I really can’t imagine what China is doing…
Trump is directly undermining national safety by abandoning higher education, college visas for foreigners, scientific studies etc.
15 years ago we knew exactly what China was doing. Now? Good luck
He is in many many ways. Thats what i mean with China.
…did you respond to the wrong comment?
I mean with CRISPR…
Chinese researchers publish in the same international journals everyone does, I don’t think they are using CRISPR any differently than anyone this side of the pacific is.
The verdict said the three defendants had not obtained qualification as doctors, pursued fame and profits, deliberately violated Chinese regulations on scientific research, and crossed an ethical line in both scientific research and medicine, according to Xinhua. It also said they had fabricated ethical review documents.
It’s illegal.
They follow the law?
I doubt any more or less than people here do
Yes.
But it’s already here. Education is already doing what you’re fearing. Rich people tend to have access to better education and thus having access to better salaries, positions, etc.
That’s been SOP since… checks human history Oh. Forever? Hunh.
Yep. Learned behavior is where human evolution actually happens; it’s our specialization, our niche as big brained, highly social, linguistic apes. Don’t gotta wait for random genetic changes that happen to encode useful new instincts. We just learn them from one another. Significantly speedier.
If rich people go mucking about with their genomes, it’s much more likely to backfire in unforeseen ways than to actually instill any sort of advantage. Genes are a messy, messy, messy means of encoding things.
Not just education, but what really matters- social connections. The wealthy only want to socialize with other wealthy people, so when their kids begin entering adulthood they’ll give them a leg up. Wealthy people control access to many high-paying jobs; the classic example is wall st, where unless you’re a rocket scientist your daddy has to know someone to get an internship.
Lets hope they dont weed out empathy.
True but this will accelerate it i guess.
I do wonder what traits the wealthy would tend to select for.
I don’t think rich people want their kids bashing their brains in playing football. They want to watch the lower classes play in their gladiator battles for the wealthy’s entertainment. So if selecting for physical attributes, I see it being more around aesthetics than athletics.
And they can select for intelligence, but they’d have to figure out how to not increase mental issues that correlate with intelligence. It’s a pretty complicated relationship. And intelligence + education opportunities only gets so far without personality and random chance. Heck, I could point to some rich people who don’t seem to value intelligence at all.
If I could select for one thing, I would select for a strong immune system. Make a solid physical foundation for a person to build on and make their life of their own decisions.
You have played CK3?
ha, dude this already exists. you can almost reliably determine success by zip code, because poor people dont deserve healthcare or education or to do anything but work their fingers to the bone to stay alive.
the whole genetic piece is just the final chapter
makes you wonder
That’s a worry, but also there’s still a lot of stuff we don’t understand about genetics, and a bunch of grifters who’ll fleece the super wealthy
Can’t wait for them to make their kids super smart and then their kids call them idiots.
I’m thinking there are dominant and latent effects to any development, natural or engineered. This tech could have latent effects similar to uhh pedigreeing.
Because they will be smarter haha
Here’s a scarier thought, if they can fine tune this shit enough they’ll probably just clone themselves and pull a ship of Theseus on themselves. Removing the only remaining equalizer between them and the rest of humanity.
The rich fucks at the top want to become gods. They won’t call it that but that’s the end game for the ones with the most hand on the wheel.
The House of the Scorpion explores this further.
That is just having heirs with more steps.
and an even greater dependency on industrial processes
I’ll be dead, humanity is fucked as i see it but things could change i guess.
Back-alley gene editors and ripperdocs. You wanna be competitive? Can’t afford legit implants or gene therapy? Take a chance on DIY cybernetics and methlab gene splicing drugs!
Cyberpunk?
Life eventually imitates art.
Eventually?? Black Mirror and the Handmaid’s Tale aren’t really all that old, and look at us right now! It’s like it’s a how-to-guide for these fascists…
We don’t have back-alley gene editors yet 🤷♂️
Future Man, anyone? This is Biotic shit.
Once again reference to a book?
Nah, a pretty silly comedy tv show. It explores this exact thing. Natural born people are forced to live in the sewers and survive on rats while the Biotics scour all time and space to destroy them.
… or they’re just crazy people who chose to live in the tunnels and have an irrational hatred of hospitals. The biotics only traveled through time to stop them from changing the time line.
Excerpt from the book Accelerando
Free Chromosome Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all commonly defective exons.
If you would like to read more…
Accelerando is a great sci-fi novel from Charles Stross, touching upon the theme of technological singularity. It is available as a free ebook, under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License!
Thus, I can legally reproduce parts of it here. This is the collected chronology of the future, found throughout the book (minus spoilers):
I wish I could read books. Only read like 5 books as an adult.
The only way to develop a new habit is to start doing the thing!
It’ll be even worse when they gene edit other people to be their slaves and/or personal armies.
That will apply in certain countries.
Let them pick their own damned cotton.
Once rich people gain any power or advantage they use it for themselves, often at the expense of others. Survival of the fittest. Another question is if they can effectively clone and gene edit themselves, will they have children with others at all or just make variants of themselves trying for perfection? If life extension technologies become viable, will they bother ,having kids or cloning themselves? These people are completely devoted to the satisfaction of their own egos, which controls them and they will redirect all resources toward their own interests. They are the absolute manifestation of selfishness and are the cautionary tale for why narcissism and egotism are a mental health disorder and not things we should let people run around with. Put them all in a psych ward.
If I’m thinking like them with a huge ego I think they will go and make variants of themselves trying for perfection. Just a guess.
If they live forever, they would likely prefer to reshape the world to fit the parts of themselves they can’t change, rather than passing the opportunity to gratify themselves forever, to someone else, even their own children. Rich and powerful people are absolutely terrible parents. I think their egos are big enough that children are just the best solution when they can’t live forever.
I dont think people will live forever. 300 years yea but not forever. Unless you are talking about replacing everything that fails with something new, then how much of you is the original person?
