Yeah.... again, anyone treating this dumb crap as some novel idea needs to read up on the ideas of eugenicists since the time of the long 19th century. The sci-fi stuff was often inspired by those dystopian ideas - it wasn't supposed to be a blueprint, but morons like Yarvin and Musk are too brain-dead to understand the nuance.
The series Altered Carbon from Netflix touches on some of this, and while obviously it has its more fantastical elements, the general theme of rich people literally living forever and essentially becoming untouchable rulers of society, with the ability to enhance their bodies at will, is 100% the direction we're heading in, and I don't think people are prepared for what that kind of society we will eventually evolve into without radical changes. Even if we're unlikely to experience the entire problem ourselves, it doesn't make it any less serious.
We can't even get a modicum of safeguards mandated for AI in this country, and that's happening
right now. Eventually throwing ridiculously powerful gene editing technology into the existing world's already unfair social hierarchy is going to supercharge inequality and class strife.
So yes. There’s definitely a need for a lot of research to go into this field, but we don’t want people trying to clone themselves or think that they can “live forever”. Or whatever weird sh**t they try to do to make the needs of people who aren’t like them irrelevant to them.
That's the sad part. Technology can do so much good for society and its people, but it can also completely wreck it. And the people who would be most likely to wreck it also happen to be the most powerful.
