When I see these kinds of articles making big predictions but with moderately far-off timeframes, I'm reminded of this comment by Gary Marcus in an Econtalk epi

When I see these kinds of articles making big predictions but with moderately far-off timeframes, I'm reminded of this comment by Gary Marcus in an Econtalk episode back in 2014 [1]. He was talking about AI, but I think the same concept applies to this kind of genetic engineering: “..there's this very interesting data gathered by a place called MIRI in Berkeley, MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute). And what they found is that they traced people's prediction of how far away AI is. And the first thing to know is what they found is, the central prediction, I believe it was the modal prediction, close to the median prediction, was 20 years away. But what's really interesting is that they then went back and divided the data by year, and it turns out that people have always been saying it's 20 years away. And they were saying it was 20 years away in 1955 and they're saying it now. And so people always think it's just around the corner. The joke in the field is that if you say it's 20 years away, you can get a grant to do it. If you said it was 5 years away, you'd have to deliver it; and if 100 years, nobody's going to talk to you.” [1] https://www.econtalk.org/gary-marcus-on-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-and-the-brain/ https://www.econtalk.org/gary-marcus-on-the-future-of-artifi...