The World in 2030

308 The World in 2030
the 70 year-olds of 2030 look like 30 year-olds and, with a
much-extended life expectancy. And with medical advances
already allowing mothers to give birth in their sixties, 535 how
many older couples will start to plan new families?
At first prospective parents will have their embryos
screened to weed out any which carry genes predictive of
future disease and they will almost certainly select the sex of
their unborn child in this way. The ethicist and philosopher
Nick Bostrom considered this matter in his 2006 paper
‘Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory
Challenges,’:
Some enhancements do not increase the capacity
of any existing being but rather cause a new person
to come into existence with greater capacities than
some other possible person would have had who
could have come into existence instead. This is what
happens in embryo selection. At present, preimplantation
genetic diagnosis is used mainly to select out
embryos with genetic disease, and occasionally for
the purpose of sex selection. In the future, however,
it might become possible to test for a variety of genes
known to correlate with desirable attributes, including
cognitive capacity. Genetic engineering might
also be used to remove or insert genes into a zygote
or an early embryo. In some cases, it might be unclear
whether the outcome is a new individual or the
same individual with a genetic modification. 536
The problem comes when medicine starts to offer the
possibility of genetic manipulation to make the prospective