Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…CRISPR is a new technology that has made significant progress lately. Maybe it will never allow us to deliberately engineer the entire human or the entire human baby, but it seems plausible to believe it could lead to some kind of slow genetic drift, in a way that would be in some manner planned or programmed by human beings. For you, is this a kind of nightmare, or does this possibly have an upside or even a utopian side? I’m skeptical of its utopian side. I don’t think it has to be a nightmare, but I think that there has to be . . . I think that there is a deep aversion, particularly in the United States but elsewhere as well, to exercising political control over technologies. And I think the challenge of the next 100 to 500 years of human history is getting better at exerting political control over technologies and preventing actual nightmare scenarios. And I feel this in certain ways with computers, the internet, virtual reality, and so on. I think that we’re — that to me is a more immediate source of anxiety than genetic engineering. I think that we’re going to wake up in 20 or 30 years and be — well, we may not wake up, but I would like to think that we’ll wake up in 20 or 30 years and say — “Why were we putting all of our children in front of these screens for so much of their childhood and shouldn’t this be something that we had exerted actual control over instead of just leaving it to some combination of experiment and market forces and governments wanting to be hip and cool and buying a lot of Chromebooks that Microsoft wanted to unload,” and so on. And so I could see something similar happening with genetic technology, but I think bringing technology under control so that the more radical genetic experiments are limited and happening in, happening at the margins, basically, that should be the goal. I think it doesn’t mean that we could actually succeed, but I think it’s a reasonable goal to set. What do you think we’ll see as the main cost 30 years from now from letting our children sit behind screens for so many hours a day?…

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