And frankly I am not sure which is more dystopian: a future where none of the kids are born with genetic diseases, predisposition to be obese, or simply stupid or ugly, vs the present where a kid has to live with those things he can do nothing about.
But we're all defective today, one way or another. It's incredibly rare for someone to be "perfect" genetically speaking, and a lot of those people will have a bad upbringing or something else to hold them back. It's true that being beautiful and above average smart will get you through life so much easier though.
Anyway, have you seem Gattaca? It shows how this can become dystopian very quickly.
Also, if we weed out "bad genes", we might get a surprise down the line, where those gene were actually essential for out survival as a species, and we might be wiped out by a pandemic or something similar.
Yeah, I dunno, eugenics is hard, ethically speaking. Yes, I would have liked to be beautiful...who wouldn't ?
its actually impossible because the only objective measure of gene quality is the performance of the organism and the performance of the organism depends on the environment.
The main problem in Gattaca wasn't that some people were genetically superior, it was that they were marked as superior and others were discriminated against.
However, one objective fault I see in the movie (from what I remember, it's been many years) is that their "valids/invalids" system assumes that non-GE people are automatically inferior, which may not be the case (and also depends on the task/role). Even today, some people obviously won the "genetic lottery" (like Michael Phelps, who's obviously genetically optimized for swimming compared to most humans, though this doesn't make him good at other things), while others clearly lost.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I'm sure Phelps could lift more and cycle faster/further than most people on earth.
If anything, the fact he's good at swimming means it's likely that he's also really good at other sports - just like someone good at one sort of cognitive task is probably good at most.
I can cycle faster and farther than most people on Earth too. That doesn't mean I can compete at a pro level, or worse an Olympic level. I'm nowhere near that level of performance; the bar for "most people on Earth" just isn't very high for most sports, in fact it's pathetically low. Most people are laughably bad at any sport.
Historically eugenics has included some mistreatment of those with undesired traits, upto and including genocide.
Eugenics… well, we can see the theoretical benefits of things like ending sickle cell anaemia outside malarial regions, but we're starting from really huge negative points because it turned out that racist people found it to be a really convenient justification for genocide, and sadly genocides get attempted so often[0] that it's probably not going to be possible to dissociate the two.