AI is a prevalent but often foreboding topic given its tendency to spark contentious debate. In recent years, AI on the whole has received its fair share of condemnation and praise as it expands to provide virtual companionship and therapy in addition to various tactical tools such as summarizing and calculating.
But this is common knowledge. What many people don’t know is that AI is also the catalyst for a new endeavour to screen for IQ in embryos in order to maximize the next generation’s intelligence. This future generation’s assignment? To rescue the rest of humanity from the AI their parents and grandparents created and indulged.
Pioneering this effort is nonprofit Berkeley Genomics Project and startups Nucleus Genomics and Herasight, among others. Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, founder of the Berkeley Genomics Project, is a big name in this fledgling industry. A renowned mathematician, he devoted years of his earlier career to conducting research in an effort to discover what, if anything, could keep AI in check as it continues its rapid development. His conclusion was that curbing AI’s power and scope was simply not possible. Since then, he’s directed his efforts toward making IQ screening more effective and widespread so that 20 years down the line, we can pass the buck on to the next generation.
The concept of breeding children to optimize IQ is still foreign to many. What does it really involve? Firstly, it’s important to note that the process of screening for IQ, or any other genetic factor, is only possible in cases of in vitro fertilization. IVF is the process of removing an egg from a uterus and fertilizing it with sperm in a lab before implanting it back in the uterus to continue developing (in Latin, “in vitro” translates to “in glass”; hence, the embryo is fertilized in a petri dish rather than within the body). This is a common, although sometimes controversial practice among couples struggling with infertility due to health issues, biology, or age and it often involves the purchase of third-party sperm or eggs, and/or the hiring of a surrogate.
After the embryo is formed, the new technology allows prospective parents to “dig deep into the full genetic blueprint of their embryos before choosing which one to implant,” in the words of the New York Post. These screenings yield information about the embryos’ hair and eye color, their potential mental and physical health conditions, and estimated IQ, all of which is summarized in a “polygenic score.” This process is repeated on approximately 10-20 embryos for each IVF cycle.
With this new information, prospective parents then weigh the subjective pros and cons of each embryo in a given cycle, choosing one or two who fulfill their ideal qualities to actually implant. The remaining embryos are either frozen (often for decades), given up for adoption to a different couple, donated to scientific research and experimentation, or destroyed.
The hub of such startups is Silicon Valley, where technical advancements are often met with more acceptance than other less savvy locales and where the median household income is approximately $138,000, way exceeding the national average which sits at $83,730. This is significant, since companies like Herasight can charge up to $50,000 for these screenings. Nucleus Genomics charges a modest $6,000 starting price.
Tilsen asserts that the mainstream use of genetic engineering technology will result in exciting benefits: “Our children will be long-lived, will have strong and diverse capacities, and will be halfway to the end of all illness.” The founder of Nucleus Genomics, Kian Sadeghi, stands by his company’s mission, saying his ultimate hope is to “‘[empower] people with information that they can use to give their child the best start in life,’” according to CBS Morning News.
Critics, bioethicists among them, raise concerns about the ethics of such invasive screening, saying it shares eerie similarities with eugenics ideology. Some posit that the cost alone could naturally result in a disproportionate “elite” class of wealthy, intelligent babies. Still others have qualms about its entanglement with IVF.
But is IQ screening even reliable? Shai Carmi, an associate professor for Statistical and Medical Genetics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a developer for the prediction models themselves, conducted data-driven simulations to ascertain if the IQ predictions given by the models was indicative of real-life outcomes. He determined that the reliability of IQ screening, at the moment, is questionable. One Hearsight customer, Simone Collins, reinforces the desire for a higher level of certainty in embryo testing, saying, “If grit and ambition and curiosity—if we had polygenic scores for those things we’d be much more interested.’
Genetic screening has been around since the 1950s, but the introduction of IQ screenings and genetic modification technology into the mix has people asking questions. Tilsen emphasizes that for IQ screening and genetic modification in embryos to take off, it must be “a world that is beneficial, or at least acceptable, to a great majority of people.” Only time will tell whether salvation from AI will prove a strong enough incentive for humanity to normalize this scientific venture.
