The techno-utopian credos known as “effective altruism” and “longtermism” have recently gained wide notice, judging by Google searches, news articles, and personal experience. Far less attention has been paid to “hipster eugenics,” a term that brutally but accurately sums up the alarming trend previously known by the perhaps more anodyne “designer babies.” All are closely related.
“What we advocate for is fairly vanilla—if aggressive—transhumanism: Improving and transforming the human condition with technology. Be against transhumanism all you want, but don’t call it eugenics,” [said pronatalist Simone Collins.]
Unfortunately for her, that ship has long since sailed.
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In May, the Collinses claimed that their approach was not to make designer babies, citing the movie Gattaca. But the movie was not about editing genes, it was about selection based on analysis of an individual’s genome. That is exactly what they did with their third child, described in November as a newborn female called Titan Invictus. The embryo they selected was said to have “an unusually good chance of avoiding heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and schizophrenia.” They decided not to take into account risk scores for autism, for which Simone has been diagnosed; she admits to struggling with some real-world situations but they both insist that she can “dramatically outcompete other people.”
