Philosopher Sam Kerstein on the Morality of Genome Engineering, Inequality, and Star Trek – Episode #9

Corey and Steve speak with Samuel Kerstein, Professor of Philosophy and expert in Medical Ethics at the University of Maryland. They discuss the ethics of genome engineering and preimplantation embryo selection, and the inequality and narrowing of human diversity that might result from widespread adoption of these technologies. Among the topics covered: Why genome engineering at this time is immoral. Should we always pick the healthiest embryo? In the future will parents have a moral obligation to engineer their children? Will there be an arms race between countries to engineer their populations? Is Star Trek’s Khan a more advanced person (Steve) or just another smart psychopath (Sam) or both?ResourcesSamuel J. KersteinHow to Treat Persons by Samuel J. KersteinCRISPR Babies – Episode #1Transcript Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.