alt Hacker News> The issue is where do you draw the line with 2)? What does "improve the genetic characteristics of your children" mean in practice?
That should be entirely down to the parents.
Someone having a genetically engineered baby doesn't affect anyone else.
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> That should be entirely down to the parents.
When making decisions that will affect (in planned and unpredictable ways) the phenotype of a person over their entire life course - society / medical experts and researchers etc necessarily need to have a say.
We can't beat or euthanise our children, neither should we have carte blanche over their genetic makeup.
Note - I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't employ gene modification to ameliorate health issues or even to improve other metrics. However this is absolutely not just 'down to the parents'.
But there's still some really major issues with 2).
Do you think it would be fair to have the children of billionares to be much much more intelligent than normal people, let along the children of poor people? I'm not sure what the answer is, but its very worth thinking about. If you could grow an Einstein in a lab, imagine if all the Einsteins that were grown ended up being biased to Musk-adjacent worldviews.
This is really not simple