It was announced on Nov. 8 by the WSJ that some of the most powerful tech titans have decided to play god and pursue the creation of a genetically engineered baby. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, along with his husband, Oliver Mulherin, partnered with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong to fund Preventive, a startup company pursuing CRISPR-based embryo gene editing. The goal is marketed as a noble effort to put an end to hereditary genetic diseases. But beneath this language of moral progress lurks the possibility for a future in which commercially designing babies is acceptable. To be able to walk into an office and choose the preferred IQ and eye color of one’s own child.

The creation of genetically edited humans is no news to the world. The first scientist to do it was globally condemned and imprisoned for three years in 2019, after he tried to experiment on human embryos and give them protection against HIV. At the time, the consequences of gene-edited babies were unclear, but a ban from many countries, including the U.S.A, was quick to follow. In recent months, the executives at Preventive have identified a couple with a genetic disease who are interested in participating in their gene editing study. Now, the executives of the Silicon Valley-based startup are looking for locations where their science is allowed and can be practiced on embryos, including the UAE.

The WSJ reports that Armstrong has been holding occasional private gatherings with some of Silicon Valley’s elites and other experts on gene-editing. The cryptocurrency billionaire dreams of a future where humans are less prone to heart diseases, have lower cholesterol, and stronger bones. By pushing the boundaries of fertility and nature, they might even commercialize reproductive genetic technologies and give parents the ability to select which embryos have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color. How could this work? Parents might be able to log on to portals and see charts and graphs that show their embryos stacking up genetically, with various tests showing an embryo projecting to have an IQ of 140, and lower chances of developing schizophrenia, anxiety, ADHD, and male-pattern baldness.

A narrative like this one sounds no different than science fiction. The uneasiness was first rehearsed when Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein, and the anxiety has since been readapted and retold in cultural media in endless adaptations like films and absurdist fable novels like Frankenstein in Baghdad. Over the past few decades, the story of the mad scientist and his creation has seen countless film versions, with two in the past few years (Lisa Frankenstein in 2024, and Poor Things in 2023), and most recently, Del Toro’s version with Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. But the theme that the artists of these films were articulating over the years relates closely to what Sam Altman and his fellow billionaires are doing when they decide to play God.

Written in 1818, Frankenstein anticipated the postmodern way of thinking about technology and raised the suspicion that science is not the only perspective to see the world through; that the supremacy of human reason over all other considerations is false. Because relying only on modern scientific thought and reducing the means of knowledge to science alone, paradoxically, limits us to methods that have once led to humanitarian and ecological crises.

Those sciences that are used to explore our existence in the universe are the same ones behind the geometry and physics of the guillotine, the instrument that was once intended to make human death swift, but instead accelerated the rate of death in the times of the French Revolution. The same modern spirit and rationalism behind the panopticon during the prison reforms, as an alternative to cell imprisonment, gave way to new methods of total surveillance in which we now live with Facebook and Meta. Every piece of technology that we recognize today shares in some way the connective tissue that originated from the science and the making of the atomic bomb. The bomb that fundamentally changed our reality, and makes us live in a paranoia induced rollercoaster, fearing when the world might end.

The story of Frankenstein has always held up a mirror cautioning us about resurrecting the dead, but today its warning extends to the commodification of life itself. When wealthy parents can choose what traits they want for their child, the failed experiments are quietly discarded. And while Victor Frankenstein became the monster instead of the stitched up corpse in the 19th century mind of Mary Shelly, today’s monsters are not those who are product of science, genetic modification, and venture capital, but the ones who still decide to play god, convinced they can improve upon life, without any consequences germinating in the world due to unethical science and technological advancements. There will not be any scar tissue built up on the babies (at least none that we know of yet), since the true horror lies in the controlling of their bodies by the same men who now control our attention spans with their AI models.

We seem to be closer than ever to the moment when the same mechanisms that optimize our feeds and curate our knowledge begin to optimize human life at the embryonic level, turning traits like intelligence, height, or eye color into items on a shopping list rather than parts of a shared and messy human inheritance. And this is where the new noble language of “improvement” around genes and IQ starts to rhyme closely with the history of eugenics and scientific racism. To use it as an “objective” measure of intelligence and make the difference clear, so some groups are seen as naturally superior and others as disposable. The risk is not just a world where everyone is smart, but a narrow world where the elite vision of smartness becomes the standard, rewiring existing hierarchies of race, class, and ability into the bodies of future children.

When Altman and his friends select for higher and better traits, they are not transcending the history of eugenics, they are automating it. This reaches beyond the paranoia of being constantly watched or having our data harvested. It is about power over life reaching the moment of conception and the management of biological existence. A kind of existential fear that echoes the fate of Frankenstein’s creation: brought into life without consent and forced to endure an existence shaped entirely by others. This is where humanity seems to be going. A future where a small circle of tech capital decides which kinds of minds and bodies are worth bringing into the world, and which will never be allowed to exist.

In a world where we rarely get a say in what kind of future we want to have and what kind of job we want to work, choosing who we want to be is one of the last areas of freedom we get. To present ourselves in a certain way, modify it as we desire, and negotiate what we want to look like is increasingly threatened to be taken away by scientific hubris.