I strongly agree with you on this being one of the most impactful technologies the world has ever seen. In fact, it may be the only thing that prevents the des

I strongly agree with you on this being one of the most impactful technologies the world has ever seen. In fact, it may be the only thing that prevents the destruction of our species from our own selfish actions. Humans are proving to not be sustainable, precisely because we have been designed altogether too well by natural selection to be selfish and guided fundamentally to maximize our inclusive fitness. Even displays of incredible human altruism are ultimately forms of very clever genetic selfishness. Combine these facts with our current state of technology, and this is a perilous situation that no amount of cultural evolution is going to resolve. Intelligence and trustworthiness are not what you're looking for. Obviously we would love to engineer humans to be healthier, smarter, etc, but these do little to enhance our long-term survivability in the face of human on human and human on environment domination that we see today. What we are most in need of is to engineer a more compassionate human than exists now, by modifying key genes for species-typical behavior. All humans have a tremendous and largely unconscious ability to tune out highly-destructive socioecological acts. We might expect these problematic genes to occur with little variation across all human populations.