I think that the best they’ll offer for anything - including sex - is ‘a tendency’ or ‘more likely to be’ or something similar.
Beyond that, humans have been doing this for millennia with livestock, why should doing it with humans be any different? “Because we’re human, not animals” is not a valid answer. Nor are appeals to Frank Herbert. 
Only if you create a million embryos. The harvesting of human eggs is the limiting factor, since it’s a bit harder to harvest eggs than it is to harvest sperm. For a typical round of IVF we’re looking at a 10-30 eggs. So you can’t pick and chose that one in a million baby, instead you can pick one in a dozen. Ensuring that the baby doesn’t have any serious genetic defects is the best you can do, the more genes you add to the screening the more tradeoffs you’re going to have to accept.
And each round of IVF doesn’t guarantee a child, in fact IVF fails more often than it succeeds. So parents that can conceive in the old-fashioned way are highly unlikely to chose this procedure unless they have good reason to believe their potential children are at serious risk for genetic disease.
Here’s an easy one to imagine: We breed out the tendency to become obese. Then something like an asteroid impact or supervolcano (or whatever) wipes out crops worldwide for several years. The survivors don’t tend to gain weight easily when they eat a lot, or don’t tend to eat more than they want at any given time, so they have a harder time surviving than humans with a tendency to gain weight would have had.
Or less dramatically, maybe there are more blue-eyed blondes, and the rate of skin cancer goes up.
Another easy one to imagine: lots of parents in China or India or someplace like that use this method to get boys rather than girls. When the boys grow up, there aren’t enough women to go around. This is happening now in some countries, due to sex-selective abortions.
The rich are already smarter and prettier and healthier than the rest of us. They can already afford private schools and plastic surgeons and personal trainers and elite doctors. The biggest change this makes is that it’ll be more efficient to be naturally gifted as well. I think we need to be mindful of the gap between the rich and the poor, but it should not keep us from exploring new advances. Because whether a new development’s proximal effect is to increase the gap between the rich and poor is not a good indicator of whether they’re good for the majority.
New medical treatments exist almost solely for the rich at first. New technology is prohibitively expensive. But over time, things get less expensive. Part of having that happen is letting the rich few who can afford the expense get the benefits first in exchange for paying a lot more. But we all eventually get the benefit.
And wouldn’t we all be better off if we were healthier, more attractive, and smarter?
I was referring to the post referring to Gataca (quoting what a doctor said to a couple). What you wrote sounds right in reality.
The obese…good one!
As for sex selection, that could very likely be a ‘short-term’ problem. However, I can’t imagine a society surviving/keeping it’s % of the world population if they undervaued girls so much that 90% born were boys (for example). You would think the society would eventually diminish to insignificance or that they would start to value girls so that a 50-50 balance was reached. I could be wrong. However, it might be a good ‘Darwin’ way to eliminate those kinds of societies.
I was also thinking of more sci-fi-y things…like reducing aggression…and humanity loses its desire to strive and so we stagnate…that sort of tripe
That’s an interesting problem.
Seems like it would go the other way though. If you want your kids to be successful you might add aggressive genes to them so they’ll be “aggressive go-getters” or maybe “ass-kickers”.
Too many of those aggressive types in the population and BAM WW3.
On the other side though what about epigentics?
Would correcting kinks in your genetic hose be okay?
Aren’t there several reputable scientific groups that believe the Earth can easily sustain a population of 10-12 billion?
I have no doubt there are. There are also incredibly intelligent people who believe we fell off a cliff already, population-wise, and just aren’t yet aware that the ground is rushing up at us.
We could end up doing to ourselves something like what we do to our food crops- reducing genetic diversity to get better results. That can be a problem when a new disease comes along and everybody is vulnerable to it, or the environment changes and a trait that used to be advantageous is now disadvantageous.
The problem is, different outcomes are advantageous for the individual family and the society as a whole. It’s better for the society as a whole to have a 50-50 sex ratio. But when you have something like sons but not daughters supporting the parents in their old age, or daughters requiring expensive dowries to marry, it’s in the interest of the individual family to have sons rather than daughters. That’s a setup for a tragedy of the commons. And it’s hard to fix the ingrained cultural traditions that lead to this sort of problem, or to keep people from using new technologies to get the results they want. India has tried outlawing dowries, but it hasn’t worked very well. They’ve also tried outlawing abortions for sex selection, again without very good results.
There’s a theory that bipolar disorder and artistic talent are linked. If that’s true, then eliminating bipolar disorder through something like this could negatively affect our culture. That would be another example of a tragedy of the commons that this technology could cause.
The difference is that hundreds of millions of parents will be making these decisions, not three or four agricultural conglomerates. Unless you imagine that there will be three or four varieties of child available, and parents will have to choose between them. That won’t happen, parents will still want their own children in almost all cases, and uncontrolled matings will still take place.
The analogy to food crops is poor because humans don’t reproduce in the same way plants do. Even an analogy to livestock is poor, because farmers don’t feel an attachment to their own particular breeds of sheep the way humans feel attachments to their own particular children.
Humans are notoriously poor at knowing what is good for them. This is the species that has so subverted natural selection that they will happily eat Cheetos until they are too large to walk. This is the only species that has ever devised a way to destroy all life on earth, and uses that as an everyday tool of social organization. We’ve made sections of the earth uninhabitable, driven useful non-competing species to extinction, and have made some massively bad decisions in our time- for just one example, we will probably lose the banana because we planned that one so poorly.
When it comes to making species-wide conscious choice, I really doubt we have the capacity to do a good job.
You obviously haven’t seen distraught farmers whose herds, built up over generations, have been destroyed because of Foot and Mouth disease.
Arg. We’re not going to lose “the banana”. The blight might destroy the ubiquitous cavendish bananas, but there are dozens of other varieties. This would be the equivalent of a disease that strikes only red delicious apples.
Right, which is why when our children have serious communicable diseases we destroy them.
There’s a hypothesized link between autism and talent in fields like engineering. If that turns out to be true, and autism turns out to be preventable through genetic engineering, we could lose a lot of technical talent through screening for autism.
But a lot of those parents are going to want the same kinds of traits. They won’t want kids who have or who are carriers of sickle cell anemia, because that creates problems for the kids that no parent would want to voluntarily subject their child to. That could be a problem if a more virulent and treatment-resistant form of malaria evolved, for example. Parents get most of their standard of what is attractive and what isn’t from their society. If people are selecting for cosmetic traits, a lot of people are going to want the same ones, the ones that correspond to what that society considers attractive. If some of those attractive traits come with unintended consequences like greater susceptibility to some disease, that could be a problem.
I do agree with that. I think there will still be kids conceived the old-fashioned way, whether because of religious opposition to this or just because birth control isn’t perfect and the old-fashioned way of making babies is something a lot of people enjoy. That could mitigate a lot of the effects of this.
(yeah, I know: the above two statements aren’t necessarily hypocritical. Funny to flag it anyway…)
Heh! I like to joke that I’m the human equivalent of an “easy keeper”. 
The proud descendent of a hundred generations of peasants who didn’t starve to death despite centuries of war and bad winters.
Part of the reason I want a girl next is because we’re only having 2 children, and part of the reason for that is the way we feel about humans’ impact on the planet.
But being a carrier for sickle cell anemia isn’t a problem. The problem is sickle cell anemia. And anyway, most people in the US aren’t carriers for sickle cell anyway, and the number of wealthy people who would go through embryo screening who are also sickle cell carriers is even smaller since the sickle cell gene isn’t randomly distributed.
We’re never going to have a monoculture where one clonal variety makes up the majority, like what happens on farms.
And anyway, with designer babies we can design in disease resistance and hybrid vigor without the downside. Take your example of sickle cell. A couple where both have sickle cell trait have kids. Under normal reproduction each kid will have a 1 in 4 chance of not carrying the trait, a 1 in 2 chance of being a carrier, and a 1 in 4 chance of actually having sickle cell. Now suppose screening of embryos becomes commonplace. Why do we choose only the embryos that aren’t carriers? If malaria is a problem we could choose the carriers who have heightened resistance to malaria, and discard both those that are vulnerable to malaria and those that express sickle cell. We get the best of both, the advantage of heterozygosity without the costs of homozygosity.