Gattaca here we come!
There is a strong hunger for Gattaca.
Heck, if parents could provide a trust fund for their kids in a way that their kids couldn't piss it away, they'd be all over it. (I'm sure this exists to varying degrees.)
Look at what wealthy parents already do to get their kids into colleges or out of jail. I think it's ridiculously naive to think that we parents wouldn't jump at the chance to write generational wealth into our kids' genes.
(This is not an argument that developing this capability is a bad thing and should be stopped.)
One can not simply raise valid concerns about gene editing technologies in the hands of the entities that don't hesitate sending people en masse to kill and die and otherwise manifest their fascist cravings in the open, here on HN and walk away undownvoted
Science fiction pattern matching is a problem nobody talks about. People see something that vaguely resembles a movie that they saw and act like that movie is reality now.
Another problem nobody talks about is the cognitive dissonance of living in the world today but dismissing all matching patterns as science fiction or conspiracy theories. Maybe narrow focus and short attention span are to blame
When someone tells you they know how the future plays out because they saw it in fiction, oh boy you better be skeptical.
Maybe they are actually saying "we should take steps to avoid possible futures that we've already established would be bad in our works of art". You can't just hand wave away the idea that some technology could allow for greater invasion of privacy and worse social stratification when we still live in a world where invasion of privacy and social stratification actively occur.
Fertility care often already included testing for common genetic disorders, and parents with a history of severe disease would often make the hard choice to try again. Due to recent Theocratic political shifts, it means more families will face the worst possible life for their children.
Gattaca was a film years ahead of its time, and raises the question of what happens when people try to "fix" human beings beyond disease prevention. A subtle, but important ethical difference. =3
I'd say Gattaca touches on how easy it is to edge a little over the line of what is a "disease". For example this scene touches on "prejudicial conditions" like baldness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCN5QG8Jtwg
Disease is fuzzy word, it basically means below some made up bar for healthiness. Take dyslexia as a simple example. That disease can by definition not exist in an illiterate population. We have raised the bar and now they are diseased in need for a cure.
The more we things we cure the higher we will reach and the higher we reach the higher we will raise the bar. I don't think that's a bad thing, but its worth bearing in mind.
Various learning challenges would fall outside a lifetime of suffering, and often such kids have statistically higher IQ. ;)
I think it is more likely people will create synthetic diseases by experimenting on human beings with unique unpredictable gene expression.
He Jiankui already crossed the ethical boundary in 2018... only to discover his best intentions were still nonsense. The GMO kids he helped edit will have a lifetime to figure out if that alteration negatively affected them, and as adults consider how their own children may change.
People may cross the "Primum non nocere" line, but it can never ethically be justified =3