Designer babies is the start. Like I already believe if you're "selecting" something like your baby's gender, you're fuckin Hitler. But then, my roommate was all, "Well what if you could remove the trait for Huntington's that runs in the family?"
So there's clearly a spectrum of ways that genetic engineering could go.
The most interesting case to me is of He Jianku, who reportedly began studying and modifying human embryos. CIA fear disinfo, or Chinese scientists just marching ahead and setting the new standards of the 21st century?
Crazy thought: what if liberals start editing their kids to be more genetically similar to American Indians or something. Like the opposite of genocide but still clearly kind of fucked up.
I dunno I feel like on the one hand kids should have a right not to be born with genetic diseases but on the other hand of course what does and does not count as a genetic disease is going to be insanely political. If they figure out how to select for autism, even if it's looked down on in polite society, what will end up happening is that wealthy people will do it 100% of the time and all remaining nuerodivergent people will end up in the lower economic class, further exacerbating the social ills that follow those groups around.
But just because it will disproportionately help the wealthy and by exclusion harm the poor doesn't mean it would be a net negative for society. Running water at one point in time was exclusively the domain of the wealthy, and look at us now. Definitely don't do it.
that's actually impossible due to the way ancestry works. gene editing will target a few or at best a few dozen SNPs.
Ancestral genetic differences are in the tens of millions.
You can definitely edit a child to be white, or light hair/eyed, or Black etc, because these things are determined by a tiny handful of genes. But you absolutely can't edit a child to be more European or more African, that's physically impossible unless we gain the ability to change MILLIONS of letters of code in a human very precisely with zero off target effects.
Also daily reminder that genetic Europeans went extinct during the bronze age, and what you see now are essentially Middle Eastern Mestizos.