The Dull and Unpleasant 2020 Ethics of AI-enabled Science

In the 1997 movie Gattica, Ethan Hawke displayed the brute-force determination of the human spirit in an hypothetical, transitional to full CRISPR, gene-editing future that 23 years later we are now in, where all parents who wanted their children to succeed were forced to make a hard choice. To edit, to give you children the'best' of your genes, or let mother nature randomly recombine them to produce an'uncertain' outcome. Ethan succeeded in all mental and physical tasks to become an astronaut in that fictional world populated by supposed physically perfect geniuses, but, setting aside exactly how the Gattica scientists determined the criteria for'the best genes', the reality we are facing in 2020 is an interesting one that has some of the features of this movie. While the Chinese geneticist He Jiankui is now missing, he may historically be the person credited with making a Gattica future real. Every parent with the financial means may decide to travel to countries with less strict gene control laws and decide to do this, either on in utero children or on themselves.