When rich people can edit their kids DNA won't that just lock everyone else out and create a new class?
CRISPR and other tools arenโt science fiction anymore. If the wealthy get there first, what happens to everyone else?
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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.
Is that the movie where (sorry for the bad synopsis) 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.
Washing yourself in the shower, difficulty level "going to space"
Jude Law, something something treadmill
Gigolo Joe?
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 itโs a cool movie but the message of systemic disadvantages donโt matter if you try hard enough is a little questionable at best.
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.
Its complicated in its portrayal, for sure. It comes off at a glance like "just signam grindset bro," but really the protagonist had to lie, cheat and steal his way to his dream, while also being an absolute fatalist while pushing his body near to death. Even then, he still needed to convince a doctor to fake his results at the end. That's not a pro "grindset" or "you can overcome" message really. It shows how absolutely fucked you are if you aren't born into advantage, how weighted everything is against you.
The movie would have hit harder if he got to the end and got caught and denied his dream. Just end with him in prison, staring out a window up at the stars.
Agree but people only want to watch happy endings.
... did you watch Gattaca? Also it was kind of a flop so... you are in large company.
Spoilers for a movie that is almost 30 years old I guess
::: spoiler spoiler Vincent's brother is more or less mentally broken and likely to face career problems if people ever investigate what actually happened with the investigation... possibly because the astronaut died en route to Jupiter or whatever. Vincent himself is likely on a suicide trip. Jude Law's character ACTUALLY commits suicide.
Gattaca's ending is not a happy one. It is exactly what was said during the swimming scene. It is about putting your everything into an endeavor with no care for self preservation or "the swim back". Which... very questionable understanding of genetics aside (very clear they were on the same sauce that Kojima was...), kind of is the "bootstraps" mentality distilled to a suicide run. Some people can succeed just by virtue of their birth and upbringing. Others more or less need to kill themselves to even have a chance. And... a lot of those people never even make it to the chance, let alone have a way to appreciate it. :::
I've seen it but i don't remember any of it except the swimming scene. lol
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 mean... It was showing the extreme lengths he had to go through, the risks he has to take, just to compete for the same opportunities.
At the end it came down to him going for the launch despite knowing he'd likely get caught and the doctor letting him through despite knowing who he is, because his son was also not engineered, I think the message was people of the under class coming together to fight the system rather than just working hard
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 mean, I would expect the first thing they would want to edit would be things like intelligence, level of optimisim/happiness, ability to be a social butterfly, ability to delay gratification and stick to long term goals, etc. In addition to being smokin' hot, of course.
I don't think that was the message at all.
The end message is that the doctor knew all along, and was helping him from the beginning. It didn't matter how much work he put in, how hard he tried. How much he lied or cheated or "overcame his limitation", at the end of the day he would have never succeeded without help from a fellow human.
Doing it all himself had started to make him prideful to some degree. And realizing that, in the background, he didn't do it all himself was a last kick of humility to (ironically) ground the character before he leaves the ground forever.
He knew all along? I guess I didnโt pick up on that. I thought it was just at the very end.
I can see how that might change the message of the film somewhat.
It's not expressly said. But that's my take on it from a few different clues. For starters, he wasnt' surprised by the invalid reading. Also the story that he tells about his son not being "all that was promised" came early in the film, with the doctor saying "who knows what he can achieve" like a wink or a nudge almost.
Whaaat? You mean you can't overcome a heart defect with a bit more grit?
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.
Plus; https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/chinese-scientist-linked-to-gene-edited-babies-sentenced-to-prison
It's illegal.
They follow the law?
I doubt any more or less than people here do
That movie is 9/10. The ending is absolutely beautiful.
Spoilers!
I HAVE SPOILED NOTHING.
If you insist:
::: spoiler spoiler Jude Law is in it :::
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.
Seems like a pretty bad execution of the concept, then.
That's the joke tbh.
In some cases there were absolute superior though. Like the pianist with 12 fingers.
The actual moral of the story was that it's not worth it. Being a bit better at some random shit like swimming, playing piano or piloting a rocket is not good enough to sacrifice the rest.
Having twelve fingers isn't what makes you good at playing the piano.
There's an underlying question in the story that amounts to "if you've made Earth such a great place, why is everyone trying to leave?"
The plan to colonize Titan is, at its root, a eugenics fantasy.
The movie literally says that the piece cannot be played without 12 fingers.
the movie doesn't say anything about "colonizing titan", in fact the mission doesn't even state what's the purpose other than to get to titan which has never been done before - it symbolizes ultimate frontier that in the eyes of eugenicists would require a perfect human to be achieved and yet the guy that ends up outcompeting everyone is a not genetically modified and achieves this through sheer skill and determination.
You're misinterpreting the ending. Vincent always felt rejected by the world for being a natural but ends up feeling bittersweet for leaving as he found Irene and Jerome who proved to him that earth is very much capable of loving him. Not "everyone is trying to leave earth", just Vincent really and even then he heavily diminishes his desire.
I love Gattaca and really don't understand your beef with it. It's a beautiful story but awfully insightful too that aged perfectly even to this day! In fact, I'll watch it again tonight :)
Not seen Gattaca, but a multi-tier, genetically structured society is the basis of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which is well worth a read.
Worth noting, it's a pretty short book so don't sleep on it.
Same for H. G. Wells- The Time Machine book in the part where the traveler meets the Morlocks and the Eloi.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine
EDIT: Got my authors mixed up, it wasn't Jules Verne.
H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, not Verne.
My bad, dunno how I could confuse my authors
Both are very early science fiction pioneers, I can see how they could get mixed up. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
The Beggars Trilogy by Nancy Kress touches on this as well, but is more focused on the issues with superintelligence rather than just gene alteration, although, because people are vain, the preference for things like hair, skin and symmetry also exist in the story's world. Oh yeah, and the coolest concept from this trilogy is a thing called "sleeplessness", where people can alter there genes to remove the biological need to sleep, allowing people to be able to be productive for as many hours as they desire.
came to say this is basically the premise of gattaca.
Great movie, excellent performances
Yes.
But itโs already here. Education is already doing what youโre fearing. Rich people tend to have access to better education and thus having access to better salaries, positions, etc.
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.
This really resonates with me. No person is that smart or has the level of foresight required to make those kinds of changes effectively (at very least in the long term).
From time to time i think of an author i had enjoyed years ago named Robert Anton Wilson. He was a warped sonofabitch, a Yund i can't really claim to fully understand his philosophy, but even just as recently as this past week i found myself thinking about a concept he'd discussed at length: the idea that when one is very young, there are "imprints" impressed on your brain that really determine how you think/act/are. He had written a series about attempting to erase ones imprints and replace them with more advantageous ones.
He had spent just as much time warning about the dangers of attempting to do such a thing though. As much as anybody may like to think they know what's best for themselves or anyone else, it's astounding now frequently we can be wrong due to lack of information, bad judgement, bias, etc.
The genetic decisions one may choose to make for their offspring may have little/no relevance by the time those offspring arrive. I feel like it could be so much worse though. I imagine this is more like tweaking assembly code, but on an even more complex system that we don't even fully understand yet. The most hubristic will convince themselves they know best, but i have to imagine reality will prove them wrong every time.
Gonna have to read those, thanks!
Geez, i forgot the title of the series: The Cosmic Trigger. The guy is a nut but a very interesting writer with some out-there ideas.
Yes. People fight for the $50K to $100K jobs, missing the boat on the $250K jobs.
Lets hope they dont weed out empathy.
Yep, they'll act like they care, think that they care, but put the mildest of obstacles in front of them and they'll throw a poor person into a meat grinder to avoid it. People who grew up with money have no character or idea how to weather any kind of hardship
True but this will accelerate it i guess.
That's been SOP since... checks human history
Oh. Forever? Hunh.
There is already a separate class of rich people
The thing you are afraid of is already happening
Rich people and their kids get world class health care, including helicopter flights to hospitals for life saving surgery. The rest of us die in the waiting room.
Rich people and their kids never have to work a day in their lives. We all have to work until we die.
Rich people and their kids get to enjoy luxury, fulfillment, gratification and a style of living that we cannot possibly imagine. We have to pirate movies because we can't afford to see them in theaters.
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
As someone suffering from a terrible genetic disease that will kill me soon, any amount of preventing these diseases under any circumstances gets a thumbs up from me.
Sadly, the most probable cloning related future would be Gattaca
^(edit typo)
Yeah, I think we should probably allow the technology that will prevent people being born with these diseases first, and then worry about how we're going to deal with the other stuff. This technology isn't going to be possible to hold back indefinitely anyway.
As others have said, go see Gattaca. It's completely about this topic and very interesting.
Awesome movie.
::: spoiler spoiler :::
An incredibly powerful scene. I still think about it regularly when thinking about human limitations.
They don't need genetic engineering to have advantage over everyone else tbf.
They might not need financial advantage, but they could surely do things to their physicality (birthing tall children), or to their anatomy (no more lactose intolerance).
I did mean as in physical advantage.
Eat nutritious food and go to the schools with best learning conditions and never stress about anything from birth and you too can be an athletic engineer with 90+ years life-expectancy.
Tho yeah allergies and all would still depend.
Ooor they'll turn their kids into "pugs" that are ultra-cute and good at passing certain tests but otherwise useless and unhealthy.
I'd definitely prefer we didn't go down that path, but do consider the endpoint might be more The Time Traveler than Gattaca, because rich people aren't exempt from being dumb.
If the 'rich' are anything about choosing genes as they have been about choosing plastic surgery, we know that most of them will make a complete hack of it and their offspring will suffer for it.
Exactly what I mean! Every time we've gotten real, subjective choices about the design of an organism we've ended up with something that's paradoxically kinda bad by anyone's judgement.
I do wish the ultra wealthy would just become morlocks and go underground forever.
The wealthy became the Eloi in that story, haha. You're supposed to want to eat them.
You're right, huge brain fart.... I still wish they would all leave us alone forever, analogy or not
Hate to tell you but the morlocks weren't the rich in that story.
It's been a while since I read it, and now I'm ashamed because it's one of my favorite books ๐
Hereโs a scarier thought, if they can fine tune this shit enough theyโll 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 wonโt call it that but thatโs the end game for the ones with the most hand on the wheel.
That is just having heirs with more steps.
and an even greater dependency on industrial processes
The House of the Scorpion explores this further.
I'll be dead, humanity is fucked as i see it but things could change i guess.
Humanity has been fucked many times before. Humans migrated out of Africa TWICE. We have been nearly wiped out several times. Maybe this will be the last time. Maybe Humans will migrate out of Africa a third time....
Reference provided, but not read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations
This happens in a smaller way with access to prenatal testing and abortions. Parents with access to those things are at least able to detect and avoid the more debilitating birth defect, while parents without access are more likely to have a child with a severe birth defect. If they're already struggling materially, that can sometimes guarantee that both the parents and child will have no upward mobility.
gattaca, and the cloning show with arnold in
"Your child will still be yours. Simply the best of you."
the 6th day
This has been a thing for at least a few years. Luckily last I checked (pre pandemic) it hasn't taken off bc
So probably too dangerous to actually take off any time soon. Iirc a Chinese scientist tried it and got sent to jail, seems to be a pretty universal thing
I wonder how that kid is doing. I would love to hear an update. It was bad and all but I am still curious.
It's twins actually, Lulu and Nana. The gene editing might have increased their cognitive function.
I don't know why, but I cannot bring myself to condemn the editing.
Despite being nearly 100 years old, Brave New World (1931), written by Aldous Huxley, covers the idea of class-based genetic engineering and genetics based class definition, as one of its core themes.
This already happens with social factors that affect physical development like access to nutrition and a permanent place to live.
Canโt 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
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress. A scifi that deals with the creation of classes based on whether you can afford to buy your children good genes. Politicians are charismatic, ruthless and good looking, because they are bred for politics. In this world people without genemods are sorta out of luck, without any of the tools or enhancements rich genemod people have.
Or, check out GATTACA, good movie.
I'm compelled to mention every time GATTACA is mentioned, that the title is made up of the amino acids* that comprise our DNA: A,T,C,G
*nucleic acids
I've never studied anything about genetics or DNA, but I didn't know that until the first time I showed my then girlfriend (now wife). Once the general premise became clear, she said something like "I should have guessed, since the title is made with A,T,C,G."
Nucleic acids
Damn, u right.
You know I never noticed that but that's a nice subtle reference.
Wish they had a blooper reel called TATTACA.
(That was all five of you biochemists out there)
Nature takes its course.
Remember the rich tried to keep their genes separate from the masses by inbreeding. Look at where that got them.
Ah the Habsburgs... Not so much a family tree as a family broom handle.
a family wreath
That won't work anymore if they can just edit their genes
But let's look at anything that's had their genes edited, bananas for example. They can't breed and need to be cloned. One single disease will wipe out that genetically modified banana into extinction.
Same goes for humans. You edit something that's not tried and tested against the very environment that you live in, you're instantly vulnerable. Viruses and bacterium evolve much more quickly than we do and you just can't edit genes fast enough to account for that.
So, on the bright side, the rich who will edit their genes to favour human traits will ultimately suffer the consequences of nature. Was brilliantly covered in War of the Worlds, the novel.
Just keep editing until you beat nature.
We cannot keep depending on that chaos bitch.
Er... Not possible.
Not with that attitude
Editing a gene is not like editing code. But I'll let the rich folks experience the wonders of body-horror.
Who am I to deny them this nightmare๐
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.
We don't have back-alley gene editors yet ๐คทโโ๏ธ
DM me, I'll figure it out.
Technology is (at least for now) not exclusive to the rich. There can be billionaires' secret labs and underground diy labs. Since few science fictions pop up in the topic and CRISPER is mentioned, I am going to leave CRISPER cookbook and Chapter 2 which was written in response to Roe vs Wade.
Planet of the Rich, where the apes are billionaires and everyone else is... pretty much the same.
We're getting the movie Gattaca IRL before Half-Life 3 and GTA 6 smdh
everytime i see "smdh" i think "shake my dick hard" for some reason.
Can't unsee now, thanks
Libertarians not even building Rapture yet and they're going full Gattaca? How gauche.
We're still overdue for a eugenics war and WW3 before Star Trek timeline.
Are you just now discovering that eugenics is bad?
The tech in itself isn't inherently bad, it could solve a lot of issues for a lot of people. The problem is in equal access.
Which is generally the problem with eugenics. No one is arguing that avoiding downs syndrome is a bad thing.
And even then, editing out unwanted mutations can still stifle society as a whole and may be morally the wrong choice. For example, what about eradicating autism due to the immense pain these individuals receive due to our society? Is it better to change our society to accommodate people afflicted with it or wipe out the genes responsible for it if it is easier? And if we choose the latter, where is the cutoff point? Can we even tell when we crossed that line, where our drive to improve ourselves ended being done out of mercy and began to be about creating the model citizen?
In Echopraxia, the transhuman pilot repeatedly calls the old guy a "roach".
โIโve told you before, Daniel: roach isnโt an insult. Weโre the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, weโre the ones with the stripped-down OSโs so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. Weโre the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.โ
โ Peter Watts, Echopraxia
And one of my favorite Heinlein quotes:
โA human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.โ
โ Robert A. Heinlein
Ah once again i wish i read books.. I think if I was to pick up a book it would be the novels behind the show The Expanse. I feel like they left a lot out of the show that was in the books.
We did the audiobooks of the expanse and loved them!
Definitely worth the read. The show was a great adaptation with some necessary compromises for a TV adaptation, but also, you have 3 (4) more books beyond season 6.
Aw man really? If there is an incentive to read that's it.
Absolutely. Time jump + story in the evolved situation for mankind. Final book is a collection of all the short novels, some of which were integrated into the show ("Drive", "Strange Dogs"), or alluded to (" The Churn"). But others are new reading material. I recommend reading the novels & main books in chronological order.
What change would a person who thinks they're already perfect make?
Can never have too big of a dick. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
When the kid grows up "my dick is too big, I'm transitioning to get rid of it" ๐
Don't worry, they're absolutely stupid enough to practice CRISPR to the point where their kids are inbreeding within a generation because their CRISPR fixed genetics made them all too biologically similar to create effectively genetically diverse offspring.
Techno fuedalism is still fuedalism. So that means idiots all at the top.
Wonder what the new Hapsburg chin will be.
When?
Why do you think so many use surrogates now?
They're 100% at least doing illegal selections, but I would be shocked if none of them are doing out right editing.
It already exists im sure, but I guess they take the risks for long-term consequences.
Huh. I guess I didn't really never thought of it that way
We need to make CRISPR as easy as 3D printing. Open source genetic modification.
Sure, we'll get lunatics making doomsday viruses in their basement, but also other lunatics designing vaccines for them you can make with your own desktop bioreactor.
More importantly, we'll also get people turning themselves into catgirls.
Screw cyberpunk; biopunk's where it's at.
Naw I think its wetware.
I think we all end up like the Asgards from SG-1 without the ability to transfer our consciousness to a new body.
Extinct via hubris. Obviously this assumes we do something about runaway global heating.
Excerpt from the book Accelerando
If you would like to read more...
https://prokonsul.blogspot.com/2008/12/accelerando.html?m=1
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!
Yes, we will end up with Eloi and Morlocs
For those not yet genetically engineered to have awareness of literature...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eloi
Clicked the link to see how many references to Gattaca there would be. Was not disappointed
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
Thatโs what I think will maybe even the playing field; while itโs expensive itโs not well understood; a few mistakes and theyโll be more cautious. By the time it becomes more popular again itโll be cheap. Optimistic thought at least.
Don't worry. The poor will just become extinct like the other hominids that are no longer with us.
It shouldn't be anything too bad.
Nothing of value was lost /s
But seriously, what a fucking bleak endgame
Nothing lasts forever. Homo sapiens was bound to be replaced by another hominid at some point.
"homo techno" according to grymes, lmao.
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?
Nope, no idea what that acronym means.
Its a game called Crusader Kings 3. its about picking traits for offspring for your successors but so much more than that.
If a dude in his garage could do it, it's not gonna be locked away. See: The Thought Emporium
Well, yes, but no.
SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GIMME ECHOLOCATION ALREADY
Just grab the installer, bro.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation
That's already happened. It happened a long time ago.
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.
Itโll be even worse when they gene edit other people to be their slaves and/or personal armies.
That will apply in certain countries.
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?
Whether we can or not, the point was what people might do if.
The will find a way to be even more inbred than they already are
Yes
The questions reminds me of Brave New World.
We still don't know what all the Dna and RNA does. So the rich would just be testing with their own kids.
Well exactly they are going to take the first risks.
I don't think it's the eugenic stuff that's gonna take off, but fixing future developmental problems.
It's a new class of DARWIN humans, since such manipulated beings usually have shorter life expectation.
I still need to read Red Rising.
Yeah it will be new class of morons that will buy out all the water and energy to feed their shiny computers so you can live in dark and starve to death.
Pharonic rule 2.0? Are you talking like Egypt?
Shhh!
You're not supposed to say the quiet part out loud!
Just keep pretending our societies are equitable.
No, your assumption is that there is an ideal DNA code when there isn't. They will still just be people like everyone else.
Want to alsonadd (because for some reason I can no longer edit my own comments on any instance) that the wealthy have been stealing the poor's DNA for millenia and they still look like, well, Mark Davis.
That's why they love gold diggers, love strippers, athletes (see Serena Williams who is married to a billionare), actresses, etc - they've BEEN trying to do this the whole time.
If anything eventually it'll be like gardening seeds. Where yeah, there's a lot of hybrid seeds that might be good for certain traits, but what a bunch of gardeners really want are heirloom varieties that are more naturally-selected and therefore more reliable over multiple generations.
No, not really that either. That is also advocating for eugenics.
We know there are diseases like cystic fibrosis that would benefit from gene editing. That is not an issue to treat.
It's just that humans need genetic variety or we will go the route of the Gros Michel banana when a disease hits. There are people immune to HIV for instance - that is good for them for some things, but it is likely that means they have other trade offs for this trait. Gene editing everyone to have it could theoretically mean a different disease like giardia or cholera or whatever could be easier to contract and more deadly.
The advantage of humans is adaptability. We need genetic variety to be adaptable. We cannot all be the same. There is no perfect genetic code or perfect "Adam DNA," (conservatives believe there is an original DNA code that God gave Adam and if they can access it, they will live hundreds of years like the Bible said people did). They think this because they don't believe in evolution.
Recommend the book "Half Earth" by E.O. Wilson to better understand why genetic diversity is important. It isn't long at all.
Style and fashion will narrow down the field.
Gattaca offered the hopeful promise of profit maximization through mass production of genetic engineering, though it's unclear if government subsidies helped with the profit maximization.
Time will certainly create political pressure to make the bestest babies for the races who deserve the bestest babies. Maybe that does mean no medicaid coverage.
The strongest case for only ultra rich having access, is that it's just a status symbol. AI and robotics will do all the work, so why be smart or fit? How smart do you need to be to just support fascist genocide? Being smart is only a path to considering human needs above fascist supremacist needs as a path to sustainability, with sustainability considered of value. Stupidity far more useful to near term "theft profitability with no consequences" of fascism.
They have bigger problems
There already is that class but theyโll just look more like designer dogs and social media filters. Then middle class will be able to afford it and weโll all be the same.
https://y.yarn.co/c778925d-9d6f-4021-964e-80701ea4c901_text.gif
My answer is this: sooner than I'd like, it will be possible to create custom nano 'devices'. They won't call it what it is, but the gist will be that we can manufacture cellular level machines that target incredibly specific genes as well as strands and sequences of very specific variations and mutations of the human genome.
yes, always expect the 'wealthy' to continue to use the power of their birthright to further elevate themselves above the people 'below' them.
At the same time, they'll probably end up leaving tell tale changes in their genetic code that can/will be targeted.
The ultimate irony is that without genetic changes, there is no evolution.
The rich and powerful will homogenize themselves into obsolescence
Nano devices will be called medication. explain the tale tale changes in thier genetic code that will be targeted.
At least we will have better rich people to look at. The current oligarchy in the US looks like deep fried dog shit. Imbred looking ass...
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.
"Luck" meaning, having a lucky mutation that's beneficial to reproducing in the current ecosystem.
Luck as in 'lucky enough to have your entire species wiped out by a single unforeseen catastrophic event or climatic change'
Dinosaurs would have evolved into more exotic forms if they hadn't been wiped out by an asteroid
We might unfortunately end ourselves through our own actions in a similar way
Its the ones that adapt the fastest
I read that as "It's the ones that adapt the fascist" :(
Let them pick their own damned cotton.
The rest will argue amongst themselves about why gamma always gets the laurel
Don't get that reference...
Red rising
I envy you people who read books. I only read maybe 5 books in my adult life. Never liked reading.
Have you tried different formats? Some like physical books best, others prefer e-readers, some swear by audiobooks...?
Oh don't worry, we'll all die to global warming within one, maybe two, generations of that starting
Eh. Climate Change is gonna ruin those plans anyways.
Or nuclear war or the ozone layer.
Human caused Ozone depletion has been recovering again from what I've read, unless you mean the Sun getting more active than predicted.
Nukes yeah :(
Unless genetic engineering has always been accessible to the ruling class and we cant comprehend the true mechanisms that keep us oppressed.
Imagine, its completely feasible to use a space craft or time dilation to travel forward in time. People could exsist on an entire plane of existence within our plane of existence.
Global warming?
No big deal, jump forward a few millennia and see how things developed. Still unliveable? Jump forward again.
Sure its risky and hard to imagine but its not impossible.