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

For Mother Jones, Abby Vesoulis reports on the wave of embryo-editing startups, backed by a small group of extraordinarily powerful Silicon Valley billionaires—including Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Vitalik Buterin—who are also bankrolling the AI revolution. A primary goal for genetic optimization is to revolutionize disease prevention. But the dream, at least for some investors? To engineer children who are brilliant enough to outsmart the superintelligent machines they are building.

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.