So let’s say baby Sophie has a state-of-the-art gene job: her parents paid for the proteins discovered by, say, 2005 that, on average, yielded 10 extra IQ points. By the time Sophie is five, though, scientists will doubtless have discovered ten more genes linked to intelligence. Now anyone with a platinum card can get 20 IQ points, not to mention a memory boost and a permanent wrinkle-free brow. So by the time Sophie is twenty-five and in the job market, she’s already more or less obsolete—the kids coming out of college just plain have better hardware….
It’s not [, Gregory Stock adds,] “so different from upgraded software. You’ll want the new release.” The vision of one’s child as a nearly worthless copy of Windows 95 should make parents fight like hell to make sure we never get started down this path. But the vision gets lost easily in the gushing excitement about “improving” the opportunities for our kids.
–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 34-35
as quoted on Fire & Knowledge
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