Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.)

The same Silicon Valley billionaires who bankrolled the AI revolution—including Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Vitalik Buterin—are investing in the next tech obsession: genetically optimizing human embryos, in part to produce children brilliant enough to outsmart the super-intelligent machines they’re building. In this story, part of a Mother Jones package on America’s AI oligarchy, Abby Vesoulis reports on the booming and loosely regulated industry of embryo-editing startups, from Preventive and Nucleus (whose subway ads invite New Yorkers to “have your best baby”), to more secretive ventures racing to edit embryos for complex traits like intelligence—a goal that scientists say is currently not possible to do accurately and safely. Vesoulis also writes about the ideologies driving the movement: a transhumanist rejection of human limitation, a fixation on IQ, and eugenics, which even Elon Musk once acknowledged as “the Hitler problem.” Vesoulis weaves a deeply reported, unsettling portrait of a small group of powerful elites who are simultaneously building a threat and selling its cure, with little concern for who gets left out.

When I spoke with 26-year-old Nucleus founder Kian Sadeghi in February, his demeanor was gentler than his company’s brash marketing tactics suggest. ­Sadeghi, who dropped out of college before launching his startup, explained that a family tragedy had propelled his interest in genetic optimization: His cousin died in her sleep at age 15 from complications that doctors suspected were related to long QT syndrome, a serious but generally treatable heart disorder nobody knew she had. “How does this happen?” Sadeghi, then a second grader, recalls asking. “Bad genetics,” answered his dad, a physician.

Tweaking a single well-known gene is one thing. But trying to edit an ­embryo for more complex traits or ­conditions would mean meddling with dozens to thousands of sequences ­scattered widely throughout our chromosomes. It’s a bit like playing with the dials on an unlabeled control panel, a level of unknown that gives many scientists and bioethicists pause.