From Gene Editing to A.I., How Will Technology Transform Humanity?

That could be the setup for a very bad joke -- or a tremendously fascinating conversation. Fortunately for us, it was the latter. On a blustery evening in late September, in a private room at a bar near Times Square, the magazine gathered five brilliant scientists and thinkers around a table for a three-hour dinner. In the (edited) transcript below -- moderated by Mark Jannot, a story editor at the magazine and a former editor in chief of Popular Science -- you can see what they had to say about the future of medicine, health care and humanity. MARK JANNOT: For years, many pregnant women have undergone amniocentesis to test for rare metabolic disorders and other fetal issues. And couples who use in vitro fertilization can screen the embryos for genetic abnormalities. What sorts of advances in genetic screening and manipulation are coming, and where do you see that taking us? CATHERINE MOHR: When I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband and I were joking, "Well, if she gets the best of both of us, she'll be a superhero, and if she gets the worst of both of us, she's not going to make it out of first grade." And so we were rolling the genetic dice, which you do when you choose to have a child. It's not totally random, of course; there's all kinds of great things about your mate -- that's why you chose them -- and hopefully there's some pretty good things about you, too. But the temptation to engineer what you think of as the best combination, as we become more capable of doing it, I think it's going to be irresistible for a lot of people. You're investing so much of your life into this little being, and you're going to love this child, and you want to give them every advantage in life. We are already screening for diseases to avoid passing on our "bad" genes, but this same technology will let us start screening for our "best" genes -- the ones we really want to pass on. As screening becomes cheaper, easier and more reliable, and more people are using assisted-reproductive technologies, I see us, as a society, sliding down that slippery slope pretty far, one couple at a time, each trying to do what's best for the child they are hoping to bring into the world.