Sam Altman and husband reportedly working to genetically engineer babies from having hereditary disease

Pretty sure he and others like him are not gay; If they want to engineer babies, it's for a reason...

Does Thiel not have more money?

Gay is only bad if the poors do it, of course /s

Honestly I don't think it's any of our business. Even rich assholes are allowed to have a private life. Although with some (Musk, Trump) that private life is so fucked up it's impossible to ignore, but generally I'm totally fine with not knowing who they fuck.

I worry more about that he is a full blown psycho.

The other issue I have is that this is an example of a recurring issue in which the tech obsessed ultra wealthy declare their plan to solve a problem for which a very straightforward policy solution already exists.

We don't need tech to extend lives or feed the hungry. We just need to remove the paywalls to existing resources.

Oh come on.

This guy couldn't even get a train to run on time.

Ah yes, please give me more of that sickle cell anemia.

It's an interesting ethical debate.

I have a hereditary condition which passes only by the X chromosome, so should I, as a man, abort a daughter? Because now the risk is too high and I've elected to simply not have children. It would be great if I could fix the single swapped base pair that would otherwise cause disfigurement and life-long health problems.

High IQ would be sure nice, but has a large number of genes involved. Not that you need a high IQ as a farmer in a low technology future.

Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel.

We have enough data points to suggest that being gay doesn't insulate you from being greedy and corrupt.

That's important, too.

I thought this was a commonly known fact. He wasn't hiding it.

I am surprised the American government is even backing them.

Yeah that's fiction for a reason

This is a very good reminder - thank you.

And everyone already has the ability to pick their Soma

Shit, thanks for reminding me I'm scrolling instead of reading the copy in my bag.

Neoliberal utopia. The wealthy elite destroying the world and forcing eugenics on the masses fly a rainbow flag

Give me Butlerian jihad or give me death!

He's a bad person and he's always lying.

It'll only be available for the super rich, will expand to other augmentations/engineering, and will result in further reinforcing social mobility boundaries.

"What's bad with eugenics for the rich?"

Right. Currently the ways we avoid genetic disease are screening partners, screening IVF embryos, and in utero testing + abortion.

There's nothing uncontroversial about human genetic modification.
It's a pandora's box that just shouldn't be opened.

Is that his motivation though? Wanna make a bet that this does or doesn't end as he says at face value?

Because the US health care system already serves the wealthy and abandons the poor, any expensive treatments are seen as just further steps into a Gattaca future of even more dystopian disparity, especially when driven by a rich asshole personally.

Universal negativity is also kind of the norm around here. A lot of folks on Lemmy believe we are slaves sucking Satan’s cock for breakfast, and anything that isn’t a complete burn down of our system and way of life is a negative.

Please review the glimpse into our future titled "Gattaca" to see why people might be concerned.

This isn't really an answer to the 'universal negativity', but for a somewhat reasonable analysis of the pros and (surprisingly high number of) cons as well as some interesting grey areas, there's an old LWT episode on this topic: https://youtu.be/AJm8PeWkiEU

I’d just like to have to trim my nails less frequently

get outright scared

Doesn't help.

There are more capable, actual medical professionals that can advance this field in a non-wallstreet all eggs in one basket kind of way.

Rich asshole says he'll invent something good but very expensive and so only available to the elite. People ITT: "Good things are bad!"

Yeah so, good for Altman, best idea he's had probably. Spend the money before the bubble pops my dude.

Altman finds a way...

No no. Do it with dinos!

If that were the case, wouldn’t the ones who didn’t get the genetic engineering be far more likely to reproduce and stride along with natural selection? I have a hard time seeing that event ever happening, short of the human population en mass deciding to engineer every baby on the planet before a single generation of which could have lived life and been studied for its effects.

What I think is more likely as a great filter is humans eventually settling on the idea that organic matter is really terrible medium for life. So, something with much more longevity, strength, efficiency, and brain power gets synthesized and we move in. At a certain point, wouldn’t biological life die off because life tends to yield to its more evolved forms? If us meat bags had to compete, how could we?

and I think there are more interesting answers to the Fermi Paradox than the Great Filter. For example, the expansion of space not being something we can overcome in travel. Or, maybe the way we perceive space is just so anthropic—we’re making poor assumptions about other beings.